Congress Is One Vote from Expanding Opportunity for Millions of Americans

Michael Brickman

Issue Areas

The second Trump Administration is continuing its first-term efforts to remove barriers to good jobs for workers. Now, Congress can act to open doors to millions of qualified Americans without a college degree.

In the summer of 2020, President Trump signed an executive order curtailing college degree requirements for federal jobs and barring agencies from judging candidates on educational attainment alone. Since that time, the Cicero Institute and other groups have championed state versions, and more than half of state governments have adopted skills-based hiring policies that pull unnecessary degree requirements out of public sector jobs.

Unfortunately, while lowering barriers for its own employees, the federal government still raises them for private contractors, adding costs for taxpayers and reducing opportunities in the private sector. The burden falls hardest on veterans, who often leave the military holding active security clearances and directly relevant technical experience, but find that the contract work they are plainly qualified to do is closed to anyone without a bachelor’s degree.

A bill to remove college degree barriers and move more towards hiring based on merit barely failed in the last Congress. Fortunately, the Skills-Based Federal Contracting Act cleared the House without any member objecting, an increasingly rare feat. This month, it advanced out of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee unanimously. Now, it just needs to be taken up and passed by the whole Senate.

Under the commonsense bill, education requirements cannot be included in requests for services from federal contractors unless the contracting officer includes a written justification that “explains why the needs of the executive agency cannot be met without any such requirement.”

The benefits of passage would be widespread. Veterans and others without a degree would not be forced to go back to college for a degree they may not want, allowing them to avoid student debt and preserve GI Bill or other education benefits for their children. Federal agencies would have a wider range of talent to choose from, resulting in more competition and likely yielding higher quality services at a lower cost to taxpayers.

The federal government should not stop there, however. It is one thing to remove barriers; it is another to truly hire based on merit. For decades, an employer who screened applicants with an aptitude test or a background check risked liability under disparate impact theory whenever the results differed across groups, which gave that employer every reason to fall back on the college degree as a legally safer proxy.

That incentive is now unwinding. Executive Order 14281 directed agencies to eliminate the use of disparate impact liability to the maximum extent possible. The Justice Department has since concluded that the EEOC’s Title VII guidelines on disparate impact are unconstitutional, freeing employers to use job-related tools like aptitude tests and criminal background checks without fear that a difference in outcomes alone will land them in court.

Federal and state agencies could also promote merit hiring by ensuring scarce workforce dollars go first to fund training where employers have identified an open job and a pathway to get it that does not necessarily require a college degree. None of this guarantees that a contractor will hire the network technician who never finished a degree. Habits built up over decades do not break easily, and a written justification requirement can decay into one more box that contracting officers learn to check. But the federal government buys hundreds of billions of dollars in services every year, and solicitation requirements travel outward through the entire labor market. When Washington stops treating a diploma as the default proof of competence, private employers will have less reason to treat it that way either. The Senate should pass the Skills-Based Federal Contracting Act and let millions of Americans compete based on what they can actually do.