Who cares? If the Asians are equally qualified as whites then they are only hurting themselves by excluding them. And they aren't really excluding them. They still hire vastly more Asians than expected by the proportion of general population.
The government, because its a violation of an executive order that applies to all government contracting, and Palantir is a government contractor. (Hence why one of the proposed remedies is cancelling all of Palantir's government contracts and subcontracts, and banning them from future contracting.)
> If the Asians are equally qualified as whites then they are only hurting themselves by excluding them.
If they are only equally (and not more) qualified, and they have to narrow the pool anyway to get a manageable pool for later stages of the hiring process, then they actually aren't hurting themselves, before considering the consequences of enforcement actions like this one.
And yes technically you are correct. But that assumes they are exactly equal. If you exclude a bunch of people for arbitrary reasons then you necessarily get worse results. Some of the best candidates may be excluded.
There may be an argument that the government shouldn't require non-discrimination by government contractors, but I don't think that there is a particularly good argument, that, given the existence of the requirement as a term of every government contract, that the government should not care that a government contractor is just casually disregarding the terms of its contract with the government and expecting to continue to be paid.
> If you exclude a bunch of people for arbitrary reasons then you necessarily get worse results. Some of the best candidates may be excluded.
Since Palantir is a government contractor, the argument that they would be hurting the quality of work they do (which is valid, just not supported by mere equality of qualifications) is another reason the government should be concerned. Remember, this isn't an enforcement action under general anti-discrimination law, its an enforcement action under the specific rules that apply to government contractors.