Politics
JUST IN: DOGE Gets To Work As Trump Shutters Government DEI Offices
Less than two full days after being sworn in, President Donald Trump is already shuttering diversity, equity, and inclusion departments across the federal government, and the newly created Department of Government Efficiency plans to do much more than that.
On Tuesday, the White House directed all DEI hires across the federal bureaucracy to take an immediate leave of absence, ensuring that many of the social equity standards federal employees were held to under the Biden-Harris administration were ripped to shreds. An announcement by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) ordered all affected employees to clean out their desks by the end of the day Wednesday.
Charles Ezell, the acting director of OPM, also instructed all agencies’ acting heads of departments to:
- Inform all employees about the closure of DEI programs and ferret out whether DEI initiatives are being obfuscated using coded language or some other form of subterfuge.
- Notify all Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) staff that they are being placed on paid administrative leave immediately, and that the total closure of DEIA offices is imminent.
- Remove all websites, social media accounts, or external presences of DEIA departments in their agencies.
- Wind down the review or implementation of any documents, directives, orders, materials and equity plans authorized under former President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order, titled Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce.
- Cancel all DEI-related trainings and terminate any DEI-related contractors.
Twenty-four hours after those steps are completed, acting agency heads must also report to OPM:
- A comprehensive list of DEIA personnel within their office as of November 5th, 2024.
- A list of all active DEIA-related contracts through November 5th, 2024.
- Any existing agency plans to comply with the now-rescinded Biden executive order.
By Friday at 5 p.m., agency heads must have completed:
- A written plan regarding how they will proceed to reduce their agency’s workforce, starting with the dismissal of DEIA employees.
- A list of all contract descriptions or personnel position descriptions since November 5th, 2024 that may have been changed to hide their purpose within the agency.
Ezell’s memo comes one day after President Trump signed an executive order instructing all parts of the federal government to shutter their DEI initiatives, fulfilling a much-touted promise by himself and Musk, through DOGE, to terminate policies that conservatives have seen as discriminatory and affirmative action-based. The order states it will be “the official policy of the U.S. government to only recognize two genders: male and female,” according to Fox News.
At the signing, Trump said his latest executive order would “serve as a bedrock supporting equality of opportunity for all Americans” and that he “has a solemn duty to ensure that these laws are enforced for the benefit of all Americans.”
“Yet today, roughly 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, critical and influential institutions of American society, including the Federal Government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) or ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation,” the order reads.
It adds that these “illegal DEI and DEIA policies also threaten the safety of American men, women, and children across the Nation by diminishing the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work, and determination when selecting people for jobs and services in key sectors of American society, including all levels of government, and the medical, aviation, and law-enforcement communities.”
