Why Musk and Vance Went to Bat for a Self-Described Racist

by Michelle Goldberg

'If you want to understand the nature of our new regime, compare the fates of two federal employees who recently found themselves at least temporarily unable to keep doing their jobs. One is a West Point graduate, an Army veteran and a former prosecutor who was asked by political appointees in the first Trump administration to join a diversity committee. The other is a 25-year-old self-described racist. You can probably guess which of them Vice President JD Vance intervened to help out.

The West Point grad, who doesn’t want his name used because he’s still hoping to return to his duties, is a regional director at the Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education. Based in a red state, he investigates abuses in the education system, including racial discrimination, sexual harassment and the failure to accommodate disabilities. His last three performance reviews were impeccable, according to documents shared with me. He saw himself as an apolitical civil servant and told me that even before Donald Trump’s inauguration last month, he was thinking about how to align his office’s priorities with those of the incoming administration. So he was blindsided when, on Jan. 31, he was placed on indefinite administrative leave, along with dozens of other Department of Education employees. . .

It’s useful to compare this administration’s treatment of the regional director to its handling of Marko Elez, a member of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency who, until recently, had access to a highly sensitive payments system at the Department of the Treasury. Elez resigned last week, after The Wall Street Journal uncovered racist social media posts he’d made just months ago, which included, “Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool,” and “Normalize Indian hate.” Reinstating him, however, quickly became a cause embraced by the world’s most powerful men. . .

According to the rules of the old system, Chandra’s client, the regional director, did everything right. But as the Trump administration shows us every day, those rules don’t apply anymore.'

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/10/opinion/musk-vance-racist-education.html