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.
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SubscribeThey can always find work in the NHS.
Sense is the DEI stuff ran away with itself a good bit more in US than UK. The contraction was coming both sides of the Atlantic. The Trump push on this may not be worse thing he does.
But even then Trump’s danger is it to turns out to be much less in numbers and money than the urban myth. Myth as we all know runs well ahead of fact. It’ll be a saving for sure, but it won’t be making much of a dent in Elon’s £2trillion DOGE promise
I think we saw the real scale of the damage done by DEI in the response to the California wildfires.
Hurrah!
Go for it, Donald!
DEI is an anodyne term concealing Marcusian, New Left communist concepts. It’s about as realistic as communism itself (a utopian state that could only exist were there no people involved, with their contrary natures, messy emotions, differing levels of ability and talents, and will to revenge/avenge). The way in which it has been implemented has been devastating for everyday people, imposing a complicity of silence on dissenters and the weak-willed, threatening jobs, livelihoods and social status and scourging those who do not comply with all its tenets. It’s the confluence of a number of ideologies that have been hijacked for ignoble means – intersectionality, with its current emphasis on victimhood narratives; critical race theory, which centres the lens on Black oppression; postcolonialism, the drive to replace the white working classes in industrialised societies with the third world (the third world is the Third Estate, as Fauvy wrote in the early 1950s, changing the emphasis of Marxist theory entirely); trans- and gender-ideology, which demands we deny reality and, ironically, lived experience (again, actually usurping Marx, who saw women’s bodies as the site of historical violence and advocated not equity but equality; the dominance of cross-dressing men and fetishists over women and our spaces, aided and abetted by those in hock to the biotech, pro-pharma, pro-medicalisation of children like Biden and his useful idiots is, for want of a better word, evil); hobbyhorses like Net Zero and pro-Palestine (yet again, the emphasis on victimhood – what skillful work the KGB did in 1964 to render those from a non-existent state the greatest sufferers in history and their struggle as the acme of civilised politics); and the great diversity Trojan horse, multiculturalism, which demands we change our societies for those with no stake in them, rather than emphasising adaptation, assimilation and community cohesion. I’m no great fan of Trump. I find him bombastic and profoundly egotistical. But he is a symptom of all that is wrong with progressivism, elected by those utterly fed up with middle-class whining about their pet causes (‘I feel so invigorated after a good protest,’ one white middle-class woman was heard to say after a ProPal march, as if she had just visited a spa). I’m thrilled that we are already seeing an end to the utter nightmare which has riven the world since at least 2016, pigeonholed us, divided us, silenced us, separated us; but also profoundly disgusted by those whose voices were the loudest and are now proclaiming the precise opposite of what they called their ‘deepest, most sincerely held beliefs’ in a bid to maintain social status. What do others think of the rhetoric on social media and in the press? And what do you think shall happen in the UK, which always seems to metamorphose into a 51st state about five years after America has proclaimed a new way of being?
No one is interested in this Unherd.
Your subscribers want to comment on the corrupt Labour government you are protecting from criticism.
Yes they are
No they don’t (all the time)
No UnHerd isn’t
Oh just shut up, you’re an absolute bore, and therefore doing whatever cause you espouse a disservice.
Lots of UnHerd subscribers are American, Richard. I’m sure plenty of them have been subjected to these ridiculous struggle sessions, so are more than happy that it’s on its way out. All hail the common sense of the people!!
DEI is out, DUI is in! Come on down, Pete Hegseth!
Unherd this is what happens when you commission endless appeasing-articles. People go elsewhere.
What a pathetic comments thread. Just me and my trolls.
I notice that the hurt lefties don’t produce evidence that the DEI machinery actually works better than not having DEI.
Perhaps Trump is pushing against a door that is already swinging open?
The debunked McKinsey report is in the bin and the money-men are tip-toeing backwards out of the DEI room at quite a pace. The DEI game is indeed well and truly up.
In the end, money talks. It always does.
Possibly true for the private sector companies – but not in the public sector organisations. “Working better” does not seem to be important to many of them.
It’s not “anti-racist discrimination”, it’s racist discrimination.
The splitting up of the world into oppressed and oppressor and numbering by colour is as outrageous as it is unfair. It’s end is a welcome relief.
Hopefully we can all be more thoughtful in future.
DEI on the basis of skin tone is reminiscent of the apartheid pencil test. The results might be interpreted in a different way, but the crude categorisation is the same. Subtleties of ethnicity and culture are entirely ignored in the monochrome worldview.
I was in a charity shop a few weeks ago in London and there was a lady sitting at the back where you drop off your donations.
Whilst leaving my donations, I overheard the computer terminal she was at explaining what a “micro-aggression” was. She was clearly completing the charity’s DEI training and wishing she wasn’t (rather than actually working, which is presumably why she volunteered for them in the first place).
My primary issue with it is, that it’s rammed down all of our throats and presented as fact – a dogma, a sacred ideology pronounced from on high that must not be questioned. It is mandatory.
It is also sad that a volunteer must undergo this form of righteous indoctrination in a charity shop in order to contribute to society and work with members of the public.
Does she also have mandatory lessons on Kant or tutorials on Locke, or even a workshop on the highway code for morality (or customer service which presumably would be much more relevant)?
The Western political Right’s routine cravenness in the face of “risky legal territory” is the big story of why it has so completely failed to stem the Woke Tide in the last thirty years. If Western publics are finally coming to realise the extent to which we are ruled not so much by politicians as by a vast parasitic ‘Progressive’ lawyer caste…. that will be ‘progress’ indeed. And this lawyer caste is just part of a vast Expertocracy that – until now – rendered democratic electoral politics increasingly illusory in the ‘Progressive’ West. (See https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/take-me-to-your-experts for details.) If the Trumpist revolution does manage to roll it back in the USA then maybe some of that will wash over to us benighted souls in Europe.
To put the lawyers “back in their baskets” it will be essential to write legislation in a way that allows virtually no room for “interpretation”. It is their continuous interpretation of legislation – in a way that completely ignored the laws original intent – that is spreading the “liberal” cancer.
Re-writing the Human Rights Act would be a great start.