The U.S. Justice Department has issued an unusual call for public comment on proposed new affirmative action guidelines.
Issuing the request through the Federal Register, the department lays out three new principles of affirmative action that would govern government contracting if adopted. “We will take all the comments very seriously,” said Bill Yeomans, acting deputy attorney general for civil rights.
The new principles do not change any existing affirmative action policies but, if adopted,will be the basis for new rules for federal contracting. Public colleges and universities could be affected by these new guidelines, if adopted, in the way they award contracts to outside vendors.
This is part of the process President Bill Clinton called for when he said that affirmative action should be “mended,” but not ended. It is also, Yeomans said, the federal government’s response to the Supreme Court ruling in the case Adarand vs. Pena, which held that race-based affirmative action programs are subject to the constitutional standard of “strict scrutiny.”
