Reagan Expected to Retain Affirmative Action Order

The White House indicated today that President Reagan will continue implementing a 20-year-old executive order requiring affirmative action hiring goals for government contractors, sidestepping confrontations with blacks, women, Congress and private industry.

Since August, Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III--one of Reagan’s closest associates--has pushed for revising the landmark 1965 order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson and endorsed by each of his successors.

But after several meetings of a Cabinet subcommittee, where Labor Secretary William E. Brock III, among others, stridently opposed Meese, the issue has yet to reach Reagan’s desk and is not likely to, a White House official said.

The official said, “There is nothing happening on it now. The betting here in the White House is you have seen the last of the meetings on it.”

The Administration aide predicted that the issue “will either be settled out of the White House between Justice and Labor on some sort of language” interpreting the existing rules, “or nothing will come here.”

White House spokesman Larry Speakes said: “The matter has not been decided. There are no meetings on the schedule and no presidential decision has been scheduled.”

To date, 62 senators have contacted Reagan urging him to leave the executive order intact. The New York Chamber of Commerce, in a break with its parent organization, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, is supporting the executive order and the National Assn. of Manufacturers has reaffirmed its support.

The order requires that about 30,000 companies with about 25 million employees that do business with the federal government establish numerical goals for hiring and promoting minorities.

Meese proposed amending the order to state that it is not intended to require numerical goals, quotas or rations.

Reagan has long opposed quotas and racial preference, but has never made clear his position on numerical goals.