Aaron Sibarium writes for the Washington Free Beacon about one nonprofit group’s regrettable turn.
The Volcker Alliance, founded in 2013 by Ronald Reagan’s Federal Reserve chair Paul Volcker, describes itself as a “nonpartisan” organization “dedicated to empowering the public sector workforce.” The group appears to have another goal as well: promoting racial preferences in academia.
The alliance’s Future Leaders of Schools of Public Service initiative, launched in 2022, refers “BIPOC colleagues” to “academic leadership opportunities” and is overseen by the deans of major public policy schools. Another program, the Safety and Justice Challenge (SJC) Future Leaders Network, offers what appear to be race-based fellowships and internships to “underrepresented” groups, though the program description does not define that term. The Volcker Alliance did not respond to a request for comment about who was eligible for the program.
When the alliance was founded in 2013, it portrayed itself as a no-nonsense organization focused on the “nuts and bolts” of governance. More recently, it has become a vocal critic of what it describes as “the Trump administration’s unprecedented threat to our nation’s public service tradition,” issuing a statement in January that lambasted the administration’s efforts to strip job protections from federal workers.
“A nonpartisan, professional civil service, selected based on merit and retained based on performance, is a bedrock of our democracy,” the statement read.
But the alliance’s own programs suggest that it has abandoned, or at least redefined, the performance-based principles it claims Trump is jettisoning. The organization says it is “doubling down” on efforts to “propel diversity in government hiring” and runs a research project on how state governments can use behavioral science to attract “underrepresented applicants.” It has also enlisted the deans of more than 75 schools of public policy to increase the “socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic diversity of public service leadership,” an initiative known as the Dean’s Summit.
