While the world’s attention has been riveted on the Jan. 6 Capitol melee, the Trump administration in its waning days has continued to push through the social agenda of conservative evangelicals.
Despite pending litigation with the Supreme Court, the Department of Health and Human Services Jan. 7 issued a rule that strips protections against discrimination in some federally funded grant programs. And the State Department has made a last-minute rush to hire more graduates of a single evangelical college to work in a unit that determines U.S. response to war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
Foreign Policy magazine reported that “the State Department office that handles genocide and mass atrocity prevention has hired a slew of candidates, some with sparse qualifications and some of whom attended the same university as the head of the office.”
The Office of Global Criminal Justice has come under Congressional scrutiny for a perceived hiring spree as the Trump administration winds down. One congressional aide told the magazine, “State has been stonewalling on basic answers as to just how many people have been hired and on what authority for weeks.”
Morse Tan, a graduate of Wheaton College, was appointed ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice in December 2019. In the year since then, he has nearly doubled the size of the small office, “hiring at least nine staffers, some of them graduates of Wheaton College.”
There is a specific reason this matters, the magazine reported: “The broader hiring spree has had the effect of stacking an office that had traditionally focused on pursuing accountability for perpetrators of mass atrocities into a platform to defend religious minorities, with a particular focus on defense of Christians abroad.”
Some State Department officials see this as part of a larger pattern of the administration working overtime to place conservative evangelicals in all kinds of federal government jobs after Donald Trump lost his re-election bid.
It has been called an “eleventh-hour affirmative action program for candidates from evangelical universities, think tanks and advocacy groups.”
It has been called an “eleventh-hour affirmative action program for candidates from evangelical universities, think tanks and advocacy groups.”
Meanwhile, the day after the Trump-inspired Capitol riots, as calls intensified for the president to be removed from office, his Department of Health and Human Services issued a final rule allowing more discrimination based on religious belief, with a declaration that “this rule represents the Trump Administration’s strong commitment to the rule of law.”
The new regulations “require that the federal government not infringe on religious freedom in its operation of HHS grant programs, and that it address the impact of regulatory actions on small entities,” the department said.
Specifically, the rule allows faith-based organization to discriminate in the placement of children with foster and adoptive parents.
The Supreme Court late last year heard oral arguments in a high-profile case on this very question. That case, Fulton v. Philadelphia, concerns whether religious agencies receiving government funding may discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, marital status or sexual orientation. It specifically relates to foster care and adoption programs in Philadelphia but will have national ramifications once a ruling comes down.
In the meantime, the Trump administration issued its own rule, not waiting for the court.
“The federal government should protect our country’s most vulnerable people instead of issuing rules that license discrimination,” said Rachel Laser, president of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “People should never be turned away from the services they need. That is especially true for children in foster care and the families who want to provide them with loving, safe homes. Rather than prioritizing the best interests of children and families, the Trump administration’s new rule invites taxpayer-funded foster care agencies to discriminate against them.”
The incoming Biden administration may revoke the rule, but that process could take time. And ultimately, the Supreme Court ruling will influence the final outcome.
These religious liberty issues are among a large number of so-called “midnight regulations” being enacted by the administration on the way out the door. Other notable examples include environmental deregulation, the sell-off of public lands, solidifying foreign policy positions and naming political appointees to positions of power.