Washington (AP) In addition to ordering that all federal diversity, equality, and inclusion employees be placed on paid leave and subsequently let go, President Donald Trump’s administration took steps Tuesday to eliminate affirmative action in federal contracts.
The actions come after Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office that called for a comprehensive overhaul of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion initiatives, which may include assistance for minority farmers and homeowners as well as anti-bias training. Trump has referred to the programs as discriminatory and demanded that hiring be done only on the basis of merit.
The executive order on affirmative action restricts DEI programs by government contractors and grant recipients and revokes an order issued by President Lyndon Johnson. The Biden administration’s primary instrument for promoting DEI programs in the private sector is being used to persuade federal contractors to stop utilizing them.
In a memo sent Tuesday, the Office of Personnel Management instructed agencies to remove any publicly accessible DEI-focused webpages by the same date and put DEI office employees on paid vacation by Wednesday at 5 p.m. Even prior to the directive, the webpages had been taken down by a number of federal departments. Federal employees are being instructed to report to Trump’s Office of Personnel Management within 10 days if they believe any DEI-related program has been renamed to obscure its purpose, or else they risk negative repercussions. Agencies are also required to terminate any DEI-related contracts and cancel any DEI-related training.
Federal agencies are required to create a list of federal DEI offices and employees as of Election Day by Thursday. They must come up with a strategy to implement a reduction-in-force measure against those federal employees by next Friday.
CBS News was the first to report on the memo.
The action follows Monday’s executive order accusing former President Joe Biden of implementing DEI (diversity, equality, and inclusion) initiatives that imposed discriminatory practices on almost every branch of the federal government.
That action is the first in a massive campaign to undermine DEI initiatives across the country, which also includes using the Justice Department and other agencies to look into private companies that use hiring and training practices that conservative critics say discriminate against white men and other non-minority groups.
Where the Trump first administration left off, the executive order continues: An executive order prohibiting federal agency contractors and beneficiaries of federal assistance from doing anti-bias training that covered topics like systemic racism was one of Trump’s last actions during his first term. On his first day of office, Biden swiftly revoked that order and signed two now-rescinded executive orders detailing a strategy to advance DEI across the federal government.
Trump’s new anti-DEI program is more muscular than his first, and it arrives amid far more hospitable business terrain, even though many measures may take months or even years to accomplish. In response to Trump’s election and litigation supported by conservatives, many firms, including Walmart and Facebook, have already reduced or discontinued some of their diversity practices.
Here are a some of the programs and policies that Trump plans to eliminate:
Accountability, training, and diversity offices
Biden’s extensive attempt to integrate diversity and inclusion policies into the federal workforce—which is the largest in the country, with over 2.4 million employees—will be immediately destroyed by Trump’s order.
All agencies were required by Biden to create a diversity plan, submit annual progress reports, and provide information for a dashboard that tracks demographic changes in hiring and promotions across the government. A Chief Diversity Officers Council was also established by the administration to supervise the DEI plan’s execution. Demographic information for the federal workforce, which is over 60% white and 55% male overall, as well as more than 75% white and more than 60% male at the senior executive level, was included in the government’s first DEI progress report, which was published in 2022.
Trump’s executive order will eliminate any positions or offices devoted to advancing diversity and throw out equity plans created by government agencies. It will entail getting rid of programs like diversity objectives in performance assessments and DEI-related training.
Programs for federal grants and perks
The bold but bureaucratically complex revamp of billions of dollars in federal spending that conservative groups say unjustly favor women and racial minorities is made possible by Trump’s directive.
The order calls for a government-wide examination to make sure that grants and contracts are in line with the Trump administration’s anti-DEI position, but it doesn’t say which programs it will target. Additionally, it suggests that continuing lawsuits against federal programs that aid historically marginalized communities—some of which go back decades—be settled by the federal government.
According to Dan Lennington, deputy council for the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which has filed multiple challenges against federal programs, Trump’s executive order represents a radical shift in the federal government’s purpose and direction. An influential paper published recently by the institute enumerates hundreds of programs that the Trump administration should think about eliminating, including emergency relief assistance for majority-Black communities and credits for minority farmers.
He admitted that it could be challenging to discontinue some long-standing programs. For instance, the Treasury Department uses block grants to states that have their own ways of fulfilling diversity criteria to carry out housing and other aid programs.
Pay parity and employment procedures
It’s unclear if every effort that resulted from Biden’s DEI executive order will be targeted by the Trump administration.
A practice that many civil rights groups claim perpetuates wage discrepancies for women and people of color is the Biden administration’s ban on federal agencies inquiring about an applicant’s salary history when deciding remuneration.
According to Chiraag Bains, a former deputy director of Biden’s White House Domestic Policy Council and current nonresident senior fellow at Brookings Metro, Trump would need to go through a similar rule-making process, which includes a notice and comment period, in order to revoke the final regulations, which took the Biden administration three years to issue.
The executive director of the gender rights organization Equal Rights Advocates, Noreen Farrell, expressed optimism that the Trump administration won’t make a special effort to repeal the rule, which she said has been well-received in certain states and towns that have passed comparable legislation.
Additionally, according to Bains, Biden’s DEI plan included certain projects that had bipartisan backing. He assigned the Executive Council of Chief Diversity Officers, for instance, the responsibility of increasing federal employment prospects for people with criminal records. The Fair Chance Act, which Trump signed into law in 2019, is the foundation of that campaign. It prohibits government agencies and contractors from inquiring about an applicant’s criminal background prior to making a conditional job offer.
According to Bains, the goal of Biden’s DEI policies was to make sure that the federal government was set up to accommodate historically underrepresented groups rather than to discriminate against white men in reverse.
“The reality of implementing such massive structural changes is far more complex,” Farrell said, despite the broad language of Trump’s directive.
She went on to say that federal agencies have deeply ingrained norms and processes that cannot be turned off overnight.