There was some good news out of the governor’s office yesterday, for which we can be thankful – or at least hopeful.

Gov. Jeff Landry announced Monday that the state’s Civil Service employment policy has been changed to eliminate language associated with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

Landry posted that the former policy required departments to establish an affirmative action program that ensured employment opportunities.

Now, the new policy says that employment decisions “shall be based strictly on the basis of merit.”

Here was Landry’s post on X…

https://twitter.com/LAGovJeffLandry/status/2010799192760005087?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2010799192760005087%7Ctwgr%5E7b9e278a1962bc31429e4a151b51ad05fc3e63b9%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wbrz.com%2Fnews%2Fgov-landry-says-dei-language-has-been-taken-out-of-civil-service-hiring-policy%2F

We’re more hopeful than thankful, because what we’ve noticed in the case of a lot of this DEI stuff is that you can change the policy language all you want and you’ll usually be disappointed in the bureaucracy’s reaction to the changes.

Namely, there is no reaction.

The old saying goes that personnel is policy. This is what worries us – the DEI garbage got put into the Civil Service rules not just because John Bel Edwards was governor and he wanted it that way, but because the people in the state bureaucracy wanted it that way.

Are the people in the state bureaucracy the same as they were? Not completely, no – there has been a bit of turnover since Landry took office a couple of years ago (yes, it’s been two full years; it seems like six weeks).

But bureaucratic resistance to reform – and getting rid of DEI and recommitting to meritocracy is absolutely reform – is one of the world’s most impressive phenomena. If you could bottle it you’d have the best glue on the market.

Frankly, what we’d like to see is an abandonment of civil service altogether and a return to the spoils system, where the whole government gets changed out, or at least potentially changed out, every time somebody new gets elected.

The true professionals in the bureaucracy generally survive those changeovers. Those guys are needed. But the drones and the political operatives? The problem with the civil service is that left-wingers go in as left-wing politicians expand the bureaucracy, and they never come out when the conservatives get elected and take power.

So civil service is basically like a spoils-system ratchet for the Democrats.

And implementing DEI when it first became an institutional fad was something these guys took to like frogs to water.

Landry is changing the rules, and he absolutely should have done so. It’s what he was elected to do and we congratulate him for it.

We’re pretty sure, though, that in a couple of months we’re going to find out there are rogue bureaucrats perpetuating the DEI garbage – because it’s who they are.

The good news around that is at least they’ll be in clear violation of policy and they can get fired for it. And we’d expect they will. And when they are, it’ll be proof, according to the local media, that Landry is a racist, or a sexist, or a homophobe. Or something else the Left doesn’t like.

And perhaps a half-dozen crusty leftists will take to the sidewalks in front of the Pennington Biomedical Center on Perkins Road, probably literally the safest place in the state, to hold signs saying mean things about the governor.

By now he ought to be happy to see that. We’re just saying it’s almost certain to happen.