President Donald Trump holds up a signed executive order in the Oval Office.Planet Pix/ZUMA
Federal diversity, equity, and inclusion employees are set to be placed on paid administrative leave by the end this afternoon as part of President Donald Trump’s executive order to put a stop to DEI programs in government agencies.
According to a Tuesday memorandum from the US Office of Personnel Management, agencies are required to send a plan for “executing a reduction-in-force action”—in other words, layoffs—for their DEI employees.
A separate but related executive order—titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity”—argues that DEI programs violate civil rights laws by illegally enforcing “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences” that “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement.” The White House also claimed that these policies are discriminatory because they select based on “how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.”
The Trump administration memo also seeks to coerce federal employees into informing on their agencies and colleagues. It instructs agency heads to tell employees via email: “We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language. If you are aware of a change in any contract description or personnel position description since November 5, 2024 to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances…within 10 days.” The email template warns that any “failure to report this information within 10 days may result in adverse consequences.”
But Trump isn’t content with just targeting federal employees. In a section of his executive order labeled “Encouraging the Private Sector to End Illegal DEI Discrimination and Preferences,” the president calls on the attorney general to submit “specific steps or measures to deter DEI programs or principles…that constitute illegal discrimination or preferences” within 120 days.
This comes as companies like Meta, Walmart, and McDonald’s have scaled back DEI initiatives in the wake of Trump’s reelection and several conservative-backed lawsuits, which cite the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling curtailing affirmative action in college admissions.
The right’s attacks on DEI programs is nothing new—anti-DEI activists like Christopher Rufo have been pushing against such initiatives since Trump’s first term. The backlash has also appeared in places like Project 2025, which argued that a 60-year-old anti-discrimination executive order should be rescinded because it improperly enables the government to force private employers to comply with “novel anti-discrimination theories (such as sexual orientation and gender identity theories) that Congress had never imposed by statute.” Trump revoked that landmark executive order—enacted by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965—on Tuesday.
“This attack on DEI is part of a larger backlash against racial justice efforts that ignited after the 2020 killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor,” Leah Watson, a senior staff attorney for the ACLU, wrote in February 2024 in response to dozens of bills from the right targeting DEI in higher education. According to Watson, DEI programs are necessary to “repair decades of discriminatory policies and practices” harming underrepresented individuals and communities.
Trump is clearly unmoved by such arguments. “This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life,” he said in his Monday inauguration address. “We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.” But the important question remains: merit-based for whom?