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Policy, Enforcement, and Implementation

The Selection Criterion: Attenuated Design, Sequence Evidence, and What Deregulation Cannot Explain About Federal Civil Rights Policy

Publisher: Real Safety AI Foundation

Legal research article.

Written
July 2026
Version
v1.0
Pages
29
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Abstract

Between December 2025 and July 2026 the federal government took four discrete actions narrowing civil rights enforcement, each accompanied by a neutral administrative justification. This article argues those justifications are insufficient on their own terms, and that the insufficiency is demonstrable without proving animus toward any protected class. A deregulatory rationale predicts contraction distributed across an agency’s functions. What the record shows is something narrower and harder to answer. The Department deregulated across its portfolio in this period, but it ran a public negotiated rulemaking committee on accreditation and notice and comment rulemaking on student loans, while the four civil rights actions took no public process at all and two of them were effective on publication. The contraction was not confined to civil rights; the absence of procedure was. That occurred alongside the first nationwide federal program subsidizing private elementary and secondary schooling, an expansion that as a matter of Free Exercise doctrine reaches religious schools. Selective contraction paired with a single expansion is reallocation, and reallocation rests on a criterion the stated rationales do not supply. The article develops the federal tax credit scholarship program as the analytically decisive instrument on three grounds. First, its architecture reproduces what political scientists have documented as attenuated design: the deliberate routing of public money through private intermediaries and the tax system, a technique whose recorded origin is the effort by southern legislatures to insulate segregation tuition grants from judicial challenge. Second, private schools receiving such funds may lawfully discriminate on disability, so the instrument removes children from the statutory regime built for them. Third, the tax credit structure is plausibly designed to keep receiving schools outside the federal financial assistance trigger on which Title VI, Section 504, and Title IX all depend. The article engages the substantial scholarly dispute over how far the segregationist origins of vouchers extend, and shows that the argument advanced here survives the strongest revisionist account. The claim developed is an arbitrary and capricious claim under the Administrative Procedure Act rather than an equal protection claim, a placement that lets pretext evidence assembled under Village of Arlington Heights operate on the administrative record without requiring a court to assign a tier of scrutiny to any class.

Keywords

  • Administrative Procedure Act
  • arbitrary and capricious review
  • notice and comment rulemaking
  • pretext
  • civil rights enforcement
  • disparate impact
  • racial discrimination
  • disability discrimination
  • school vouchers
  • tax credit scholarships
  • attenuated governance

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First slide of the plain language summary of The Selection Criterion: Attenuated Design, Sequence Evidence, and What Deregulation Cannot Explain About Federal Civil Rights PolicyOpen the 43-slide summary (PDF)

Suggested citation

Gilly, Travis. "The Selection Criterion: Attenuated Design, Sequence Evidence, and What Deregulation Cannot Explain About Federal Civil Rights Policy." Real Safety AI Foundation Legal Research Article, July 2026. https://realsafetyai.org/research/selection-criterion/

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References (71)

This paper cites its sources in footnotes. Each authority is listed once, where it is first cited, with its footnote number.

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