As someone with a fair amount of experience on hiring review boards in the public sector (local and federal), I felt what many of these programs/approaches did was ensure that minorities were given a better opportunity to be evaluated based on their merits. My expectation now is that if someone is a minority they're going to have a much harder time getting a shot to demonstrate that character and capability at all, maybe not though, time will tell.

Perhaps for some it's viewed as a positive if these groups are underrepresented in terms of percentage of federal employees as long as their roles are filled by someone perceived to be more capable with stronger character (weird how frequently that's a white guy these days).