New executive actions from the Trump administration on Tuesday make it clear that President Donald Trump is not using his power to purge diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices from the federal government — he is trying and acting to purge it from American culture. overall
in a executive order Trump broke the decades-old ban on Tuesday night Requirement that federal contractors practice affirmative action Try to hire more women and people of color. Trump’s acting head of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — the office that oversees the federal civil service — also All employees of DEIA have been instructed (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) offices of federal agencies will be placed on paid administrative leave through the end of the day Wednesday.
But Trump went further, also taking aim at DEI in the private and nonprofit sectors. His executive order directed the Justice Department and other agencies to identify “the most egregious and discriminatory DEI practitioners” in their jurisdictions.
Each federal agency must send recommendations to the attorney general for up to nine possible investigations into corporations, large nonprofits, foundations with assets of $500 million or more, institutions of higher education with endowments of $1 billion or more, the order said. Bar and Medical Associations. All this, the order says, is to “encourage the private sector to end illegal discrimination and preferences, including DEI.”
DEI is, broadly, the effort in companies, universities and other institutions to manage their internal cultures on identity-related issues, from recruitment to workplace policies. Its supporters say DEI is necessary to combat bias and make employees from underrepresented backgrounds feel comfortable and supported. Its critics argue that it often crosses the line into speech policing and advances a progressive political agenda that conservatives do not share.
Trump’s legal justification for all of this is his claim that DEI programs or race- and gender-based preferences can violate civil rights laws—he claims they often amount to illegal discrimination (ie: discrimination against whites, Asian Americans, and men when they does not get such preferences). The order argues that “personal merit, aptitude, hard work and determination” — not race or gender — should matter. (Exactly what line is crossed to make a DEI program “invalid” is left extremely vague in the order.)
All of this marks a seismic cultural and legal shift away from racial profiling in the 2010s and 2020s, when these programs became widespread across the United States. A few years ago, they seemed to many to be a common response to enduring structural inequality — now, they can investigate you.
But rollback goes further than that. Trump A 1965 order by President Lyndon B. Johnson was revoked The federal treaty calls for affirmative action, which has become a pillar of the civil rights canon for decades.
The order also heralded the rise to power of “anti-awakening” crusaders, who, outraged by the growing dominance of progressives in American culture, came up with a detailed plan to use federal power to combat it. They are now seeing that the plan of the President of the United States has been carried out.
This principle shows the influence of the “anti-revival” crusaders
In a certain sense, this latest move is not surprising, given that conservatives have long criticized affirmative action practices adopted after the civil rights era.
Proponents of affirmative action argued that such programs were necessary to help widen access to white-dominated institutions due to chronic social inequality.
There have long been two-pronged criticisms of entitlements: first, that these programs deprive meritocracy and “talent”; And second, programs that benefit minorities or women count as “reverse discrimination” against whites and men (and, in recent years, Asian Americans). That is, far from being consistent with civil rights laws, affirmative action actually violates the principle of race neutrality by discriminating in its own form.
In the 1990s and 2000s, conservative activists won some states that approved affirmative action bans, but they kept coming up short in the Supreme Court and federal policy remained status quo.
Then, in the 2010s, the practice evolved into a new trend toward DEI programs, which focused not only on affirmative action in hiring but also on managing the internal culture of organizations more broadly on identity-related issues, leading to an intensified focus on such issues. is 2020 Ethnic Account.
During Trump’s first term, he and his appointees did not make challenging affirmative action, or DEI, a top priority. But in 2020 and in the years since Trump’s defeat, activists on the right have increasingly focused on pushing back against the “awakening.” Among their number was Trump policy expert Stephen Miller, who primarily preoccupied immigration during Trump’s first term, but also branched out to focus on challenging the DEI during the Biden years, when he A legal non-profit established to challenge Biden’s policies. And in 2023, the Supreme Court finally struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions, handing down the anti-affirmative action ruling long sought by the right.
But Adhikar did not want to stop there. Advocates and commentators such as Chris Ruffo and Richard Hanania Prominent on the right by coming up with theories on why the Awakening was so widespread – and how it might be countered. Rufo’s big idea was that the left controlled the major institutions in American life, and the right must seize such institutions and use power to liberate leftist ideas and practices from them.
Hananiah – K Wrote various extreme racist things in the early 2010s as a pseudonym for white supremacist sites, but Since claiming He now finds his old beliefs “repulsive” – he argued The awakening had its roots in federal civil rights laws. He pointed to LBJ’s 1965 executive order on affirmative action for government contractors as the start of the trend, arguing that GOP presidents (including Trump) have inexplicably failed to roll it back. He argued for going further and issuing a new executive order stating that “you can’t Have an affirmative action program.”
Trump’s sweeping actions are aimed at reshaping American law and culture
Basically that’s what Trump did. Trump is acting much more aggressively on the issue than in his first term, apparently spurred by a new focus of conservative activists, interest in Miller, his deputy chief of staff and some combination of coverage from Supreme Court decisions. Another possible contributor is a perception that many in the public have woken up – and that public response will be muted.
His new executive order reflects the Rufo-Hanania agenda, specifically reversing the LBJ order to repeal affirmative action in federal contracts, while putting the private sector and nonprofits on notice that DEI initiatives they deem “discriminatory” could land them in legal hot water.
with his OPM orderTrump’s team is also completely purging DEI supporters from the federal government. And they’re warning against a war on federal employees. The OPM announcement emphasized that officials are “aware of some government efforts to disguise these programs using coded or imprecise language” and directed employees to report any changes in “obvious” connections to DEI since the election. “Failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences,” the announcement added.
The question now is how American institutions will respond. Enthusiasm for DEI has already cooled In recent years, as several large corporations have scaled back their efforts; More companies may follow their lead, using this legal threat as justification. More progressive-leaning colleges and nonprofits may be more inclined to fight — but they also face the threat of investigation (Trump’s order calls out major universities, nonprofits and foundations as potential “serious” offenders).
Legal challenges to Trump’s order are likely to follow. Progressives may argue that the mandate goes too far and threatens constitutional rights to speech or association. But it is questionable whether the Supreme Court will be sympathetic to progressives, as its six conservatives share the view that affirmative action amounts to discrimination. (“The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discrimination on the basis of race,” Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote in 2007.)
For now, what is clear is that Trump’s team is making every effort to dismantle both the legal framework and the larger culture underpinning affirmative action and DEI in recent years.
It’s unclear what pushback they’ll get — and, if none materializes, the ultimate legacy of racial reckoning could be a backlash that reverses decades of progressive policy.
