Trump’s sweeping new order tries to dismantle DEI in government — and the private sector

New executive actions from the Trump administration on Tuesday make clear that not only is President Donald Trump using his power to purge the practice of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) from the federal government — he’s acting to try and purge it from American culture as a whole.

In an executive order Tuesday night, Trump dismantled the decades-old requirements that federal contractors practice affirmative action by trying to employ more women and people of color. Trump’s acting chief of the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) — the office that oversees the federal civil service — also ordered that all employees of DEIA (diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility) offices at federal agencies be placed on paid administrative leave by the end of the day Wednesday.

But Trump went further, also taking aim at DEI in the private and nonprofit sectors. His executive order instructed the Justice Department and other agencies to identify “the most egregious and discriminatory DEI practitioners” in their jurisdiction. 

Every federal agency, the order went on, must send a recommendation to the attorney general of up to nine potential investigations of corporations, large nonprofits, foundations with assets of $500 million or more, higher education institutions with endowments of $1 billion or more, or bar and medical associations. All this, the order said, was meant to “encourage the private sector to end illegal discrimination and preferences, including DEI.”

DEI is, broadly, efforts at companies, universities, and other institutions to manage their internal cultures on identity-related matters, from hiring to workplace policies. Its supporters say DEI is necessary to combat bias and ensure employees of underrepresented backgrounds feel comfortable and supported. Its critics argue say it often crosses the line into speech policing and advances a progressive political agenda that conservatives don’t share.

Trump’s legal justification for all this is his claim that DEI programs or race- and sex-based preferences can violate civil rights laws — he claims that they often amount to illegal discrimination (the implication being: discrimination against whites, Asian Americans, and men when they do not receive such preferences). The order argues that “individual merit, aptitude, hard work, and determination” — not race or sex — should matter. (What exactly crosses the line to make a DEI program “illegal” is left extremely vague in the order.)

All this marks a seismic cultural and legal shift away from the 2010s and the racial reckoning of 2020, when these programs became widespread across the US. A few years ago, they seemed to many to be a commonsense response to enduring structural discrimination — now, they might get you investigated. 

But the rollback goes even further than that. Trump revoked a 1965 order by President Lyndon B. Johnson calling for affirmative action in federal contracting, which has become a pillar of the civil rights canon in the decades since.

The order also underscores the ascendance to power of the “anti-wokeness” crusaders who, irate at what they viewed as increasing progressive dominance in American culture, came up with a detailed plan for using federal power to combat it. They are now seeing that plan put into action by the president of the United States.

This policy shows the impact of the “anti-wokeness” crusaders

In a certain sense, this latest move is nothing surprising, given that conservatives have long criticized affirmative action practices that were adopted after the civil rights era.

Supporters of affirmative action argued that such programs were necessary to help broaden access to institutions dominated by white men due to longstanding societal discrimination. 

The right has long had a two-part critique: First, that these programs deprioritize qualifications and “merit”; and second, that programs to benefit minorities or women amounted to “reverse discrimination” against whites and men (and, in recent years, Asian Americans). That is, that, far from being compliant with civil rights law, affirmative action actually violates the principle of race neutrality by doing its own kind of discrimination.

In the 1990s and 2000s, conservative activists won victories in certain states that approved bans of affirmative action, but they kept coming up short at the Supreme Court and the status quo prevailed in federal policy. 

Then, in the 2010s, the practice evolved into a newfound trend toward DEI programs, which focused not just on affirmative action in hiring but on more broadly managing institutions’ internal culture on identity-related matters, culminating in an intense focus on such topics during the racial reckoning of 2020.

During Trump’s first term, he and his appointees did not make challenging affirmative action or DEI a top priority. But in 2020 and the years after Trump’s defeat, activists on the right increasingly focused on pushing back against “wokeness.” Their number included Trump’s policy expert Stephen Miller, who was mainly preoccupied with immigration during Trump’s first term, but branched out to focus on challenging DEI as well during the Biden years, when he founded a legal nonprofit to challenge Biden’s policies. And in 2023, the Supreme Court finally delivered the anti-affirmative action ruling long sought by the right, severely curtailing the use of affirmative action in college admissions.

But the right didn’t want to stop there. Advocates and commentators like Chris Rufo and Richard Hanania had gained prominence on the right by coming up with theories of why wokeness was so widespread — and how it could be combated. Rufo’s big idea was that the left controlled major institutions in American life, and that the right must take over such institutions and use power to purge left-wing ideas and practices from them.

As for Hanania — who wrote various extremely racist things for white supremacist sites in the early 2010s under a pseudonym, but has since claimed he now finds his old beliefs “repulsive” — he argued the roots of wokeness were in federal civil rights law. He singled out LBJ’s 1965 executive order on affirmative action for government contractors as starting the trend, arguing that GOP presidents (including Trump) had inexplicably failed to roll it back. He also 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

This is in essence what Trump did. Trump is acting far more aggressively on this topic than he did in his first term, apparently spurred on by some combination of the new focus from conservative activists, interest from Miller, his deputy chief of staff, and cover from the Supreme Court decision. Another potential contributor is a sense that many in the public have soured on wokeness — and that public backlash will be muted.

His new executive order reflects the Rufo-Hanania agenda, rolling back the LBJ order specifically to dismantle affirmative action in federal contracting, while putting private sector and nonprofit institutions on notice that DEI initiatives they deem “discriminatory” could land them in legal hot water. 

With his OPM order, Trump’s team is also outright purging DEI supporters from the federal government. And they’re also warning federal employees against fighting back. The OPM announcement stressed that higher-ups are “aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language,” and instructed employees to report any changes made since the election to “obscure” connections with DEI. “Failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences,” the announcement adds.

The question now is how American institutions will respond. Enthusiasm for DEI has already cooled in recent years, as several major corporations have rolled back their efforts; more companies could follow their lead, using these legal threats as justification. More progressive-leaning colleges and nonprofits may be more inclined to fight back — but they, too, face the threat of investigations (Trump’s order calls out major universities, nonprofits, and foundations as potential “egregious” offenders).

Legal challenges against Trump’s order will clearly be coming. Progressives could argue that the order goes too far and threatens constitutional rights of speech or association. But whether the Supreme Court will sympathize with progressives is questionable, given that 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 discriminating 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 an all-out effort to dismantle both the legal framework and the larger culture that have underpinned affirmative action and DEI in recent years. 

It is unclear what pushback they will receive — and, if none materializes, the ultimate legacy of the racial reckoning could well be a backlash that ends up rolling back decades of progressive policy.