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.
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.
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.”
“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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