President Donald Trump began rolling back decades of entrenched DEI bureaucracy within his first 36 hours in office.
Trump signed orders on Tuesday directing the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to end DEI in hiring and rescinding a 60-year-old order instituted by President Lyndon B. Johnson that established affirmative action.
The moves follow his day one executive order “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing.”
“Trump’s executive orders end racial preferences in the federal government, in federal contracting, and grant-writing,” GianCarlo Canaparo, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “If that was all Trump did, those would be some of the most significant presidential actions for race neutrality in recent memory. But Trump has also directed the full enforcement power of the federal government against private discriminators.”
Trump’s Tuesday order specifically directs agency heads to work with the attorney general to identify potential targets for civil compliance investigations among corporations, foundations, medical associations and higher education institutions. (RELATED: Trump Making ‘Sex’ Great Again On Day One Of Presidency)
William A. Jacobson, founder of the Equal Protection Project, told the DCNF the Trump administration seems interested not only in how federal funds are being used, but also whether institutions that receive federal funds are violating civil rights laws. Many civil rights complaints EPP has filed against universities involve private funding for discriminatory programs, he said.
“Potentially, this is really earth shattering in terms of federal enforcement of civil rights laws,” he said. “As of now, the schools act like they’re immune. They act like they can take federal money, and they can discriminate openly.”
To every reporter asking about this: I can gladly confirm! https://t.co/gRb356vSwO
— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) January 22, 2025
An Office of Personnel Management memo directs DEI office employees to be placed on administrative leave by 5 p.m. on Wednesday.
By Thursday at noon, every agency must have a list of DEI offices, employees and contracts. Agencies are expected to have a written plan for reducing employees working in those offices by Friday.
Several of Trump’s newly selected agency heads already laid out their plans for implementing his goals.
Yesterday, President Trump issued an Executive Order to end the government’s promotion of DEI.
Today, as Chairman of the FCC, I am ending the FCC’s promotion of DEI and will focus our work on competently carrying out the FCC’s statutory mission. pic.twitter.com/jH8uhpdz12
— Brendan Carr (@BrendanCarrFCC) January 21, 2025
Brendan Carr, who Trump selected as Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair, announced on X he would be eliminating DEI from the agency’s strategic plan and budget, as well as removing DEI analysis from agency reports and ending the DEI task force.
Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) acting chair Andrea Lucas said we must “reject the twin lies of identity politics: that justice is measured by group outcomes and that civil rights exist solely to remedy harms against certain groups.” (RELATED: Trump Executive Order Signals Crackdown On Pro-Terrorist College Students)
“In recent years, this agency has remained silent in the face of multiple forms of widespread, overt discrimination,” Lucas wrote. “Consistent with the President’s Executive Orders and priorities, my priorities will include rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination; protecting American workers from anti-American national origin discrimination; defending the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights, including women’s rights to single-sex spaces at work; protecting workers from religious bias and harassment, including antisemitism; and remedying other areas of recent under-enforcement.”
Canaparo told the DCNF Trump will be on the right side of any potential legal challenges, noting he has “only recommitted America to the Equal Protection Clause and the Civil Rights Act, which require the government to treat people fairly without regard to race, color, or ethnicity.”
“And as the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard shows, it reads the law the same way he does,” he said. “On this, Trump has both moral and legal authority on his side.”
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