“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others,” George Orwell wrote in Animal Farm.
The legal tide is turning against reverse discrimination. In Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services, the Supreme Court is reviewing whether Marlean Ames, a straight white woman, was unfairly denied a promotion in favor of a gay colleague. The case challenges the higher burden of proof long imposed on majority-group plaintiffs — one the high court now seems likely to overturn, possibly leveling the playing field in discrimination claims.
In Shannon Phillips v. Starbucks, a jury awarded $25.6 million to a white regional manager, finding that race played a key role in her termination. Meanwhile, a February memo from Attorney General Pam Bondi warned federal agencies to eliminate race-based practices, signaling a broader rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion mandates.
Together, these developments reinforce a growing consensus: Identity-based discrimination, regardless of the target, is wrong. The Federal Emergency Management Agency not only prioritized hiring based on DEI categories but took it a step further — actively discriminating against qualified people who were not part of a protected class. My team experienced this firsthand while working as contractors for FEMA in Puerto Rico. Initially embarrassed and unsure whether discrimination against people like us was even illegal, we hesitated to file a complaint. But the abuse became impossible to ignore. When we reported it, FEMA retaliated and buried it.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in 2017, FEMA was charged with leading the recovery. But instead of prioritizing competence and accountability, it injected identity politics into its mission. I previously outlined FEMA’s dysfunction in my Feb. 19 Washington Examiner piece, “FEMA’s DEI problem,” which detailed how FEMA elevated ideology over performance, placed identity above merit, and created a discriminatory culture that punished dissent. That article chronicled how our experienced team ran into a bureaucracy more focused on optics than outcomes — collapsing a promising program under the weight of DEI-driven bias.
In May 2018, FEMA awarded a $10 million contract to ATCS, a Virginia-based civil engineering firm, to improve internal operations and train personnel. Our team of seven, including former executives and decorated military officers, was deployed to implement Lean Six Sigma, a process improvement method used by General Electric, Amazon, and the Defense Department.
Instead, we encountered a contract riddled with Federal Acquisition Regulation violations, likely contract fraud, conflicts of interest, falsified records, Antideficiency Act violations, Prompt Payment Act violations, and intellectual property theft. FEMA personnel tolerated and even colluded with contractors to cover up the misconduct. The problems were so pervasive we dubbed it the “AntiFAR” contract — a grim reference to FEMA’s and ATCS’s disregard for Federal Acquisition Regulations. We filed reports with the inspector general and Congress, identifying nearly $2 billion in broader malfeasance.
We reported these problems to FEMA’s Continuous Improvement Program, which oversaw our work. It was led by individuals selected for identity over qualifications — what we informally called the “LGBT mafia.” Our leadership, including the deputy federal coordinating officer, openly identified as LGBT and showed a clear bias against our team. From Day One, they undermined the program, suppressed positive evaluations, and created a toxic work environment.
The toll was real. One team member was hospitalized with heart problems. Another suffered a stroke. A Bronze Star recipient resigned in disgust, saying, “Iraq was a goddamned German train schedule compared to this place.”
The discrimination was so blatant that FEMA’s Alternative Dispute Resolution team offered to mediate — despite Alternative Dispute Resolution typically being off-limits to contractors. We initially declined, believing the primary aggressor, a transgender Native American, was rotating back to the mainland and that the threat had passed. But FOIA requests and court testimony later revealed that he continued sabotaging the program from headquarters. He also publicly mocked straight white men, Republicans, and veterans on social media — with no consequences. FEMA officials knew and did nothing.
At one point, an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission official even told us, “This process isn’t for people like you.” It revealed an institutional mindset that dismissed discrimination against anyone outside a protected class. It wore the team down. Five of our team members ultimately withdrew their complaints — exhausted, demoralized, and convinced the process was rigged from the start.
We tried to resolve the issue quietly, informing our Continuous Improvement Program team lead, an unqualified Hispanic woman who had been failing our course and ranked dead last in the training, of our whistleblower and EEOC complaints. She pretended not to have received it, leaving the team confused and offering a veneer of plausible deniability or willful blindness. FOIA and court records later showed she escalated it immediately to FEMA leadership and attorneys in Washington. She even contacted the person who had mocked us online to dig for dirt. I personally emailed the federal coordinating officer and deputy federal coordinating officer when retaliation began. She ignored me.
The following week, retaliation came swiftly. FEMA officials never asked for our side — they simply acted as if nothing had happened. They circled the wagons, isolated our team, and quietly terminated the program.
The consequences were severe. Over $100 million in projected savings evaporated. Fifty Lean Six Sigma students went uncertified. A cadre of process improvement professionals, trained at great taxpayer expense, was sidelined. The Continuous Improvement Program team lead shut down all active projects. Despite immense recovery needs in Puerto Rico, she reassigned her team to spend a year writing an after-action report on Hurricane Dorian, which never even made landfall in Puerto Rico. FEMA squandered a fully developed, mission-ready capability that could have strengthened future recovery efforts.
During mediation, we didn’t ask for a payout or for anyone to be fired — just the opportunity to complete the work we believed in and for managers to be trained in the Federal Acquisition Regulation and EEOC rules. FEMA refused. What followed was a coordinated cover-up, years of stonewalling, and the weaponization of FEMA’s entrenched bureaucracy, what critics call the “deep state” to silence our efforts, a story explored in the next article.
Barry Angeline is a retired corporate executive with over 30 years of experience in process improvement at organizations such as General Electric, Sun Microsystems, Time Warner, the Marine Corps, and the Army. He holds multiple awards for quality management, was awarded several patents, and has publications in performance management. He was a technical leader for the FEMA Lean Six Sigma deployment in Puerto Rico.
Ret. Col. Dan McCabe was awarded two Bronze Star Medals. He was an Army armor officer and two-tour veteran of OIF-1. After retirement, he worked with U.S. and Iraqi flag officers and the State Department in transferring U.S. security training operations over from the Army to the State Department and then to the Iraqi government. McCabe was a senior consultant for the FEMA Lean Six Sigma deployment in Puerto Rico.