Demonstrating the primacy of the issue, President Donald Trump spent his first two days in office issuing three executive orders and a memo that dealt heavy blows to the practices of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the federal government, federal contractors, and among grantees.
Let’s hope the blows prove to be lethal.
The president, for his part, was clear how he felt about DEI practices, not just by taking so many actions so quickly but also by excoriating DEI as “dangerous, demeaning, immoral, and illegal.”
With three EOs he signed in his first 48 hours and a memo his Office of Personnel Management issued Tuesday, Trump revoked the slew of race- and sex-based preferences that former President Joe Biden had introduced, then detailed how precisely DEI would be dismantled. The OPM memo put all federal DEI officials on paid leave as they wait for their offices to be closed.
The memo, which came as guidance to one of three EOs, instructed agency heads to do the following by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Jan. 22:
“Send a notification to all employees of DEIA offices that they are being placed on paid administrative leave effective immediately as the agency takes steps to close/end all DEIA initiatives, offices, and programs.”
The private sector had already led the way, starting to distance itself from these practices beginning in 2021, and practically running away from them in the past year. Yet the immense federal apparatus under Biden had remained a renegade bulwark of these racist practices.
The press will emphasize the firing of the DEI bureaucrats — NPR led with the story Wednesday morning — but Trump was only undoing what Biden wrought.
Indeed, Trump began his administration by rescinding an EO that Biden had signed on his first day in office on Jan. 20, 2021, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.”
That fateful Biden act ended up deeply impacting his four years in office. His EO 13985 mandated all federal departments and agencies to submit “Equity Action Plans” that minutely detailed how they were implementing the practices.
Like the tentacles of an octopus, that first-day Biden EO reached everywhere. The federal apparatus issued “action plans,” and appointed “chief diversity officers” and other DEI bureaucrats. “That ends today,” Trump wrote in one of his three EOs dealing with DEI in his first two days.
On Inauguration Day 2025, Trump began taking a pickax to the head of the octopus, by revoking Biden’s EO 13985 with the first EO of his second term, Initial Rescissions Of Harmful Executive Orders And Actions.
With a simple stroke of one of his famous sharpies, Trump later in the day signed a second EO eliminating DEI itself. “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing” decrees that all these practices, bureaucracies and positions come to an end within 60 days as far as the federal government is concerned.
In it, he directed “each agency, department, or commission head” to coordinate with the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the Attorney General and the Director of the Office of Personnel Management to take the following actions:
“Terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions (including but not limited to ‘Chief Diversity Officer’ positions); all ‘equity action plans,’ ‘equity’ actions, initiatives, or programs, ‘equity-related’ grants or contracts; and all DEI or DEIA performance requirements for employees, contractors, or grantees.”
On his second day in office, Trump signed yet a third EO, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity. It repealed several old EOs, even one issued by Lyndon Johnson in 1965, that entrenched racial discrimination in the federal government, its contractors, and its grantees.
The Biden administration issued its Equity Action Plans in April 2022. It was, as I and other Heritage Foundation colleagues wrote in a paper at the time, “part of the unprecedented push for color-conscious policies that it has sought since President Joe Biden’s first day in office.”
The 25 plans, we explained, violated federal civil rights laws against discrimination. Additionally, and underscoring the radicalness of the Biden administration, my co-authors and I discovered that operatives from the main organization of Black Lives Matter, founded by Marxists to fundamentally transform America, had helped the Biden Administration draft the equity action plans.
The Trump administration obviously reached the same conclusion about the illegality of the plans and of all of DEI. This is why Trump’s order started out by noting that “The Biden Administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’, into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military.”
The Trump EO requires that all of the different federal agencies and departments provide the director of OMB — a position for which Trump has nominated Russ Vought, who held the same position in the first term — with a list of DEI or “environment justice positions, committees, programs, services, activities, budgets, and expenditures in existence on November 4, 2024.”
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The reason for that specific date is that the American people on the following day elected Donald Trump president, and his new administration is well aware that bureaucrats intent on subverting the will of the voters may have relabeled these positions, committees, programs, etc. since the election.
None of this is to say that DEI is dead. But it surely is in intensive care.
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its board of trustees.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
