The Trump administration’s decision to rescind Obama-era affirmative action guidelines for schools last month reignited a decades-old debate on racial diversity. But a 2011 Obama initiative that remains in place – one requiring the executive branch to increase its “diversity and inclusion” efforts – raises questions about the effectiveness of such programs.

Since Obama issued that executive order, the federal government barely moved the needle on a key aspect of diversity: hiring more African-Americans and Hispanics.

The share of blacks and Hispanics working in the executive branch had risen less than 1 percent for each group by 2017, according to the Office of Personnel Management. Since 2011, in a workforce that had about 2.1 million employees, the total number of African-Americans increased by less than 11,000 and the total number of Hispanics increased by about 15,000.

While African-Americans comprised 18.16 percent of the executive branch workforce in 2017, that is not much higher than their total for 2007 (17.3 percent) and 1997 (16.65 percent). Hispanics have seen their share of jobs increase – to 8.75 percent of the total from 7.6 percent in 2007 and 6.25 percent in 1997 – but those numbers are far below of their share of the U.S. population, which was 17.8 percent last year according to the U.S. Census’ most recent estimate.

To complicate matters, blacks in the federal workforce have for years far exceeded their percentage of the general population – only 12.3 percent according to the most recent data.. This raises an often overlooked question of how to decide when a diversity program has reached its goal.

Marc Morial, National Urban League: "What have you been doing?"

Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, a civil rights organization, said the numbers’ paltry improvement since 2011 was unsatisfactory. "Did they take the president's executive order seriously?" he asked. "I think that the Office of Personnel Management needs to be asked – what have you been doing?"

“Looking at the aggregate data, the gains may appear small,” said an OPM spokesperson. “However, there are places that have experienced significant improvement in these areas. Each department/agency is responsible for prioritizing their goals and making gains, and we offer them an overarching strategic plan, agency-specific guidance, and technical assistance to help them realize their goals.”

The government is not the only place where efforts to expand opportunities for minorities have fallen short. The New York Times reported last year that “even after decades of affirmative action, black and Hispanic students are more underrepresented at the nation’s top colleges and universities than they were 35 years ago.” A 2016 cover story in the Harvard Business Review was just as blunt: “Most diversity programs aren’t increasing diversity.”

The wider context suggests that after decades of wrestling with racial preferences, and Supreme Court rulings that have strictly limited the use of racial preferences, far more difficult questions remain about what the goals of those efforts should be and how to achieve them.

The executive branch’s latest hiring numbers stand out both because of the Obama administration’s stated deep commitment to the issue and the fact that there are fewer constraints on hiring in the federal government than in the past. There is no longer any government-wide civil service test, and some positions do not even require an associate degree. According to the Congressional Budget Office, between 2011 and 2015, 13 percent of federal workers had no more than a high school diploma. In the Department of Agriculture, for example, mechanics and field technicians may only need a high school degree, said a USDA spokesperson.

Still, the executive branch is limited by the Supreme Court in its ability to promote specific disadvantaged groups. The court held in Adarand Constructors v. Peña (1995) that racial preferences are illegal in the vast majority of circumstances, said George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin. Based on earlier rulings, quotas are even more likely to be held illegal.

Some experts fault the Obama directive for being vague. Executive Order 13583 charged the Office of Personnel Management, the Office of Management and Budget and other federal agencies with establishing a government-wide effort to "promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce" and to issue a diversity and inclusion plan every four years. All executive departments and agencies were to implement this plan. But the plan didn't actually define what "diversity" meant.

"How can you implement a plan for diversity when you don't define what it is? It seems a little goofy," said Gary L. Wolfram, a professor of economics at Hillsdale College, which declines federal funds and thus can avoid mandates attached to them.

Yet imprecision is a politically clever way to build support for diversity efforts, he said, because it gives many racial and ethnic groups as well as women the impression that a program benefits them. “We’ll all think: you’re gonna be helping us,” said Wolfram.

Hilary O. Shelton, director of the NAACP Washington Bureau and senior vice president for policy and advocacy, agreed that not defining who is meant by diversity makes it more difficult to apply and enforce a diversity policy. With a precise policy, he said, "you know exactly who you're trying to promote." Specifying who diversity refers to also helps make a diversity program accountable.

While it was not in the executive order, the Office of Personnel Management's 2016 plan did say that Hispanic underrepresentation was of particular interest. Since 2011, Hispanic representation in the executive branch has gone up by 0.9 percent.

Still, neither the OPM’s 2011 plan nor the 2016 plan provided any strategy for enforcement or accountability. While the 2011 plan had some actionable strategies for promoting diversity, including making sure that student internship programs have diverse pipelines, the 2016 plan offered few concrete strategies. Excluding the table of contents, the plan was seven pages long. It offered three abstract goals with rationales – goal No. 2 was "Include and engage everyone in the workplace" – but no specific plans for achieving them.

According to the Harvard Business Review, poorly thought-out programs are ineffective and are actually associated with decreases in minority representation. For example, over a period of five years, companies that implemented mandatory diversity training showed a more than 9 percent decrease in representation for black women.

In the private sector, diversity programs face challenges filling jobs that require college degrees, particularly among Hispanics. In 2014, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 37.7 percent of employed whites had bachelor’s degrees compared with 27.3 percent of employed blacks, and only 18.6 percent of employed Hispanics. That year, 27.7 percent of employed Hispanic adults did not have a high school diploma.

"The problem really is in the skill level in the folks that you're talking about," said Wolfram. In order to increase minority representation, minorities' skills and education must be increased.

“The most important sources of black-white inequality,” said University of Chicago economist Derek Neal, “are the skill deficits young blacks bring to adult life. For decades, too few black teenagers have entered young adulthood with the basic reading and math skills that modern universities and workplaces require.” Neal’s 2006 piece “Why Has Black-White Skill Convergence Stopped?” observed that blacks persist in receiving fewer average years of education than whites.

In the federal government, some executive agencies have posted big gains in racial representation. The Small Business Administration, according to two estimates independent of OPM, jumped from 26.62 percent African-Americans in 2014 to 30.82 percent in 2017, according to Carol Chastang, deputy press director for the SBA.

At the Commission on Civil Rights, black employment rose from 55.6 percent of the workforce in 2011 to 59.3 percent in 2014, the latest year for which data are available from OPM. Such a black majority raises the question of whether it is even fair to have a program aimed at promoting black employment at some places. When Obama put his executive order in place, African-Americans were already overrepresented in the executive branch.

Wolfram said the Obama program amounted to saying, “I want groups that are overrepresented in the executive branch to be even more overrepresented."

But Shelton believes it is important to maintain a diversity program even if African-Americans are overrepresented in the whole executive branch. Increasing representation is not just about hiring people, he said, it is about increasing their role in high-level decision making.

Another fundamental concern about the executive order is whether increasing diversity is actually beneficial. Frederick Lynch, an associate professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and author of the “Diversity Machine,” said that Obama's initiative shares with other diversity efforts a false premise: the notion that racial diversity makes an organization more productive. In his executive order, Obama wrote that the nation is at its best when it draws on the talents of all parts of society. "It sounds wonderful," said Lynch, but there "ain't no proof."

But as it stands, President Trump's administration has not touched Obama's executive order. The OMB could not be reached for comment as to whether the White House is reconsidering this program. The administration is still charged with promoting diversity and inclusion through the OPM. Both critics and supporters of Obama's policy believe that office has not succeeded in its mission.

"The federal government has simply got to do better," Morial of the Urban League said, "in hiring African-Americans and Latinos and moving them up the ladder."

When asked about its plans for the government-wide diversity plan due in 2020, an OPM spokesperson said that it will not be issued until 2021. "Therefore, the development for a new plan is still in its early stages."