Trade unions pointed out that political funds were already subject to 10-year affirmative ballots and said this reform, once contemplated by the then employment secretary Norman Tebbit in the 1980s, was not discussed during the election.
With trillions of taxpayer dollars on the table every year, affirmative action in Hill staffer jobs would seem irresponsible.
Lisa Navarette, vice president of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group, said, "If all we do over the 25 years is affirmative action, then we will still need affirmative action".
Texas, he said, saw similar trends in the years that affirmative action programs were barred there.
For several years, the affirmative action policies of university admissions offices have been under legal and political assault.
But after more than 30 years of affirmative action, the full-time faculty will be far less varied.
In the 40 or so years since affirmative action began in higher education, the focus has been on increasing the numbers of black students at selective colleges, not on their family background.
And while many companies have joined in Supreme Court briefs in recent years supporting affirmative action and diversity in the workplace, those moves came long after landmark Supreme Court cases like Bakke in 1978, in which a white male student challenged affirmative action in admission at the medical school at the University of California, Davis.
In recent years, traditional affirmative action has been under attack because it has lost public support and become legally suspect: ballot initiatives in California and Washington state have eliminated affirmative action policies, and federal courts in Georgia and Texas have ruled such practices unconstitutional as applied to state university admissions.
That legislation reversed the legal basis for segregation in America, but against a backdrop in the South of Jim Crow laws, all-white juries and a gathering Civil Rights movement, it would take more than 30 years, and affirmative action such as the busing in of black students to white neighbourhoods, for things to change.
