The President of the United States is pursuing an aggressive push against diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
US President Donald Trump’s administration has ordered all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff to be placed on paid leave and eventually fired, as the Republican leader targets initiatives aimed at confronting systemic racism.
An Office of Personnel Management memo, first reported by CBS News, ordered agencies to place DEI office staff on paid leave at 5pm (22:00 GMT) on Wednesday and to remove all public web pages focused on DEI within the same term.
The agencies will also cancel any DEI-related training and terminate any related contracts, and federal workers are asked to report to the office if they suspect that any DEI-related program has been renamed to obfuscate its purpose in 10 days – or face “adverse consequences”. “.
From Thursday, federal agencies were directed to compile a list of offices and federal workers DEI from the day of the election in November. They are also expected to develop a plan to carry out a “reduction in force action” against those federal workers next Friday.
The moves follow an executive order that Trump signed his first day in office this week ordered a radical dismantling of the federal government’s DEI programs, which could touch everything from anti-bias training to funding for minority farmers and landowners.
Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and has insisted on restoring what he describes as strictly “merit-based” hiring.
But civil rights advocates have argued that DEI programs are needed to address long-standing inequities and structural racism.
Basil Smikle Jr, a political strategist and political consultant, said he was troubled by the Trump administration’s assertion that diversity programs “diminish the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work and determination” because it suggested that women and people of color lacked merit. or qualifications.
“There is this clear effort to hinder, if not erode, the political and economic power of people of color and women,” Smikle said.
“What that does is open the door for more patronage,” he said.
Trump’s anti-DEI push picks up where his first administration left off.
One of Trump’s final acts during his first term in 2017-2021 was an executive order prohibiting federal agency contractors and recipients of federal funding from conducting anti-bias training that addressed concepts such as ‘and systemic racism.
His successor, Democrat and former US President Joe Biden, promptly rescinded that order on his first day in office and issued a pair of executive orders – now revoked – outlining a plan to I promote GODS throughout the federal government.
While many changes may take months or even years to implement, Trump’s new anti-DEI agenda is more aggressive than his first and comes on much more susceptible ground in the corporate world.
Prominent companies from Walmart to Facebook already have scaled or finished some of their diversity practices in response to Trump’s election and the conservative lawsuits sustained against them.
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2025-01-22 17:22:00
