Trump comes for DEI

The mood in the country is changing, and no issue illustrates that better than the rapid decline of DEI initiatives and policies, which suffered a body blow executive order on affirmative action.

DEI—diversity, equity, inclusion—has become the polite term for woke in this country. It’s the acronym employed by universities, Fortune 500 companies, and the government as code for prioritizing opportunities to racial minorities, women, and LGBTQ people. At first glance, DEI seemed like any other warm, fuzzy corporate slogan—a chance to embrace diversity and inclusivity. Who could oppose that? But after living with DEI for the past six or so years, the American people have wised up. They see now that DEI is not a soft, happy message of inclusion, but a cudgel, a blunt object with which to whack anyone who dissents from the woke orthodoxy. Rather than inclusion, it has become a tool of exclusion that puts people down and shuts people up.

So for the past year we have seen a successful push back against DEI, and major corporations like Walmart, Meta, and Tractor Supply have announced they are backing away from the DEI agenda. Now the biggest employer around—the United States government—is taking the same step, and in a big way.

President Trump’s week one executive order on DEI this time around goes way further than the executive order on DEI in his first term. Last time around, the order was limited to just the internal human resources practices of federal agencies, barring things like “anti-racism” trainings that would sort and label employees by race.

This time around, the president has ordered the termination of all federal government programs that illegally discriminate based on race, a category that can be quite broad in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Many set-aside programs for government contracting, for instance, are in line to be shut down. A study by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty estimates that the federal government spends approximately $124 billion of taxpayer funds on race-based programs.

The EO further orders investigations of private companies, universities, and other regulated entities to ensure that they are complying with federal anti-discrimination laws. There is a particular focus in the order on institutions of higher education, which have been particular bastions of DEI ideology and often slow on the uptake after the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The president is also tackling DEI within the federal government. The Biden Administration went all chips in on DEI, and tried to model what it wanted from corporate America by placing full-time DEI bureaucrats in senior positions of leadership across the agencies with a mandate to push the DEI agenda through whatever tools were available to that agency. President Trump repealed that Biden order and instead instructed that all those offices were to be closed.

Importantly, though, the president’s executive order is not only a repeal of DEI within the federal government and an investigation of DEI in regulated bodies. It also proposes a positive vision for American society: color-blind and merit-based. As the press release accompanying the order explains, its goal is “restoring the values of individual dignity, hard work, and excellence,” which are “fundamental to American greatness.” As a concrete example of those principles in action under the order, “Federal hiring, promotions, and performance reviews will reward individual initiative, skills, performance, and hard work and not, under any circumstances, DEI-related factors, goals, policies, mandates, or requirements.”

That should be the standard across the board: in human resources, but also in contracting and vendor selection, in military promotions, and in grantmaking. The order will take some time to achieve implementation—dismantling DEI won’t be done in a day—but it is a strong mandate directly from the president to boldly confront many practices that have been deeply embedded into the administrative state. The goal, to quote Justice Scalia, is simple: “In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.”