(FORTUNE Magazine) – You gotta watch those guys every minute. Just when it seems as though something useful, or at least harmless, is coming out of this Administration, one looks more closely and -- they've done it again.

Their latest escapade is somewhat surreal. Pursuant to high-minded campaign rhetoric, they are setting up a National Skill Standards Board. Background thought behind the exercise: In a country that once depended on union apprenticeship-training programs to bring high schoolers into blue-collar jobs, the decline of the unions leaves us with nobody to certify workers as competent -- so maybe the government had better do it. In any case, the deal is that the skills board will (in the words of Labor Secretary Robert Reich) ''provide the clarity and coherence needed to integrate the too often chaotic elements of our training and education system.'' Sounds great, eh? But what is this funny language in the enabling legislation, where the board is being told to set up a system for certifying workers' competence in various jobs -- but also told ''to avoid disparate impacts''? Why do clarity and coherence require that the board avoid ''substantially different rates of certification . . . based on race, gender, age, ethnicity, disability, or national origin''? Why must every group get certified at about the same rate?

Testifying about this language before the Senate Labor Committee, lawyer Lawrence Z. Lorber said it sounded to him as though we were back to ''race norming'' -- the practice of adjusting job applicants' test scores so as to ensure parity for each group. Race norming was banned by the 1991 Civil Rights Act, and was thought to have no remaining defenders in the Senate. Now it seems to be back, except that the ''norming'' process would now involve not only race but sex, age, and you name it. Nobody at the hearing contradicted Lorber's worries about the certification deal, and the betting line here says that language stays in the act. Remember. Eternal vigilance.