January 22, 2025 - 4:00pm

Many of the controversies covered by Donald Trump’s executive orders are relatively new. But his antipathy towards the diversity, equity and inclusion industry goes back to his first term, when he first sought to ban the practice in government. So it has come as no surprise that Trump has now signed at least three orders ending “radical” and “wasteful” DEI programmes in US government agencies, claiming they amounted to “immoral discrimination”.

What’s noteworthy is that the President is returning to a strategy which ran into legal trouble during his first term: banning DEI not only for federal employees but also for federal contractors. By treating federal contractors as an extension of the federal workforce, Trump enters risky legal territory which resulted in an unfavourable court ruling in 2020 declaring that his first DEI ban was unconstitutional.

This time around, Trump’s chances appear to be more propitious. DEI is much more controversial now, and there will be less enthusiasm to defend the axiom of social justice that forms the backbone of DEI logic — that the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.

The original executive order featured a florid, essayistic preamble invoking Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr, denouncing DEI as a “destructive ideology” that is “grounded in misrepresentations of our country’s history”. The order highlighted how DEI rhetoric echoes the now-discredited claims of 19th-century slavery apologists, that America is governed “by white men, for the benefit of white men”.

The 2020 order was expansive, stating that “federal contractors will not be permitted to inculcate such views in their employees.” This effectively disqualified any non-profit from taking a federal contract if that organisation had a week-long DEI retreat or an hour-long online module. A US District judge in California declared the ban to be a sweeping and vague government infringement on the free speech rights of US citizens.

Trump’s latest order on DEI, published on Tuesday, requires agency heads to stipulate that every federal contract must require the contractor to “certify that it does not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws”. It also directs federal agency heads to identify potential targets of an investigation into illegal DEI policies. The targets include publicly traded corporations, large non-profit corporations or associations, and state and local bar and medical associations.

Another Trump executive order issued this week specifically cancels Joe Biden’s infamous “Equity Action Plans” that required more than 90 agencies and offices to come up with DEI policies for their staff and operations. Taking just one example from Biden’s “whole-of-government equity agenda”, the Smithsonian Institution — a complex of 21 museums, several dozen libraries and research centres, and a national zoo — embedded diversity and equity in “everything we do”, and redoubled its commitment to telling Americans “how race has informed all our lives” by reminding them of “the centrality of race in America”.

The euphoria over racial justice and queer advocacy has since subsided, and the national mood has shifted by orders of magnitude, particularly on the fraught question of medicalised sex changes for minors, a topic now pending before the US Supreme Court.

Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders come at a promising moment. Red states have been on a DEI-ending binge in higher education since Texas disbanded the practice in 2023. On the corporate front, Meta, Boeing, McDonald’s, Harley-Davidson and other marquee names have recently shuttered their DEI programmes.

With the President now throwing his full weight behind the anti-DEI drive across America, it could signal the end of the movement once and for all.


John Murawski is a journalist based in Raleigh, NC. His work has appeared in RealClearInvestigations, WSJ Pro AI and Religion News Service, among other outlets.