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DEI Is DOA: Trump Ends Federal Government-Sponsored Racism

January 23, 2025

Federal employees promoting racialized socialism under the name of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) are soon to hear President Donald Trump’s most famous phrase: “You’re fired!” Responding to President Trump’s executive orders, federal agencies have placed every DEI employee in the vast federal bureaucracy on paid leave, pending the elimination of their jobs.

Christians should rejoice that the Trump-Vance administration has not merely pared back the Left’s latest ideological fad; it has laid the axe to the root of government-sponsored racial discrimination in employment dating back 60 years and opened the doorway to a new golden age of fairness, equality before the law, and racial harmony.

Under Trump, DEI Is DOA

President Trump has fomented a “revolution of common sense” by throwing DEI employees out of their jobs like so much tea in Boston Harbor. Hours after he signed an executive order aimed at “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing,” Biden administration ideologues learned that DEI is DOA. 

All federal agency leaders received a memo Tuesday evening from the Office of Personnel Management instructing closing DEI programs and placing their ideologue-employees on paid leave beginning at 5 p.m. Eastern Wednesday. The memo also halts all DEI-oriented federal regulations or rules now being processed, cancels future diversity training sessions, and orders agency heads to shut down all government websites promoting DEI. Departments must identify any offices advancing these policies under another name, especially those which changed their description after the 2024 election to evade detection and accountability.

The federal bureaucracy has matched DEI’s intellectual dishonesty with process lies. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) has already tried to hide DEI hires and rebrand its policies. ATF employee Lisa Boykin suddenly went from “Chief Diversity Officer” to “senior executive” after Trump’s election, drawing the attention of Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa).

Separately, the president has extended his DEI purge to protect travelers by air. His presidential memorandum revealed that, under the Biden-Harris administration, the Federal Aviation Administration’s “Diversity and Inclusion website revealed that the prior administration sought to specifically recruit and hire individuals with serious infirmities that could impact the execution of their essential life-saving duties. … It also penalizes hard-working Americans who want to serve in the FAA but are unable to do so, as they lack a requisite disability or skin color.” The FAA administrator will review the performance of everyone in a critical safety position. That seems particularly pressing, as Boeing experienced a series of highly publicized disasters in 2024 after diverting significant company resources to its DEI team, which it disbanded last November.

One should hardly be surprised that DEI destroys competence. DEI is based on critical race theory (CRT), a divisive ideology drawn up by “a bunch of Marxists” (in the words of one of its founders, Richard Delgado), such as Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Angela Harris. Discrimination animates Marxism, which has 100 years’ experience producing the world’s worst cars, planes, economies, and gulags. Ibram X. Kendi, in his bestseller “How to Be an Antiracist,” wrote, “The only remedy to racist discrimination” against minorities “is antiracist discrimination” in favor of minorities. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” (Kendi has altered this passage in the latest edition of his book.)

DEI takes Marxist cosmology of victims and exploiters — the proletariat vs. the bourgeoisie — and applies it to ethnic, sexual, and sexual-preference minorities. “DEI’s foundational rhetoric and ideas foster intergroup hostility and authoritarianism,” accurately noted a White House fact sheet on Trump’s actions. “Billions of dollars are spent annually on DEI, but rather than reducing bias and promoting inclusion, DEI creates and then amplifies prejudicial hostility and exacerbates interpersonal conflict.” Indeed, a study from the Rutgers University Social Perception Lab released last November found individuals subjected to DEI teaching and rhetoric became more likely to agree with Adolf Hitler.

But the government policies that made DEI a “whole-of-government” undertaking under the Biden administration began before Joe Biden entered public office more than five decades ago — and the Trump administration dealt with that problem, as well.

Axing Affirmative Action

On Tuesday night, President Trump signed an executive order “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” which repeals affirmative action policies in hiring. “[E]quality of opportunity for all Americans is a bedrock of the U.S. legal order,” it states. “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.” (Note that word “immoral.” We will discuss that below.)

“I therefore order all executive departments and agencies to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements,” wrote President Trump.

Trump’s new EO repealed executive orders dating back to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 of September 24, 1965. LBK mandated that any business receiving at least $10,000 in federal contracts must “take affirmative action” about the hiring of minorities, the second executive order to use that phrase. That promptly led to race- and sex-based hiring quotas, which Americans were promised would never happen. Senator Hubert Humphrey, LBJ’s future vice president, promised when stumping for the 1964 Civil Rights Act, “I will eat my hat if anyone can find language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion or national origin.” The 1971 Supreme Court decision in Griggs invented the doctrine of “disparate impact,” which states any policy that disproportionately harms a minority group may ipso facto be considered racist.

Late in the Carter administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) issued a policy formally instituting quotas. Management Directive 702 (MD-702), adopted in December 1979, refined the government practice of “setting hiring goals for targeted occupations and timetables.”

Trump’s executive order announced that the Labor Department will stop promoting diversity, requiring federal contractors to implement affirmative action programs or artificially “engage in workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin.” From this point forward, federal contractors’ employment policies “shall not consider race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin in ways that violate the [n]ation’s civil rights laws.” Every contract or grant recipient must “certify that it does not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.”

The government will also “[e]xcise references to DEI and DEIA principles, under whatever name they may appear, from Federal acquisition, contracting, grants, and financial assistance procedures.” Changing the rules of federal contracting will inevitably have a spillover effect into the broader job market. But the Trump administration will move to eradicate racial and sexual discrimination in hiring from the private sector, as well. All agency heads must draw up a “plan of specific steps or measures to deter DEI programs or principles (whether specifically denominated ‘DEI’ or otherwise).” They will also “identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations” of corporations, nonprofits with assets of $500 million, or institutions of higher education with endowments of at least $1 billion (such as Harvard University).

In addition, his attorney general and Secretary of Education will inform every university that accepts federal public education funding or student loans that it must comply with the Supreme Court’s decision striking down race-based affirmative action college admittance policies in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College.

President Trump’s appointees are on board with the policy. “Consistent with the President’s Executive Orders and priorities, my priorities will include rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination; protecting American workers from anti-American national origin discrimination; defending the biological and binary reality of sex and related rights, including women’s rights to single-sex spaces at work; protecting workers from religious bias and harassment, including antisemitism; and remedying other areas of recent under-enforcement,” said Trump’s acting EEOC chair, Andrea Lucas. “We must reject the twin lies of identity politics: that justice is measured by group outcomes and that civil rights exist solely to remedy harms against certain groups.”

Equality Before the Law, Equality at the Cross

The president’s use of the word “immoral” to describe DEI should hearten Christians everywhere. On a legal basis, race-based hiring systems treat unequal behavior and skills equally. Worse yet, they stoke the racial resentments they are supposedly designed to quell. As usual, the best legal answer belongs to Justice Clarence Thomas. “Racialism simply cannot be undone by different or more racialism,” wrote Thomas in the 2023 Supreme Court case on race-based college admissions. “That is the same naked racism upon which segregation itself was built.”

Christians understand people must be treated based on their behavior, not their ethnic identity, in temporal and eternal affairs. The Bible declares, “It is not good to have respect of persons in judgment” (Proverbs 24:23). Jesus commanded the discerning to “[j]udge not according to the appearance, but judge just judgment’ (John 7:24). Instead, magistrates must distinguish between citizens based on “righteousness” (Leviticus 19:15) — that is, by testing their behavior by one moral standard. Transposing this to a secular standard, employers must hire and promote the most talented individuals — not those who belong to a government-favored “protected group,” who go to the boss’s Bible study, or have family connections.

Hiring the best talent will lead to a golden age in employment. Ending the taxpayer-funded atomization of society will help old wounds to heal. And no longer instrumentalizing the government in favor, or against, any one group allows American citizens of all backgrounds to find the common threads that unite them — a plumbline that leads from their common ancestors in the Garden of Eden, through their redemption on the Cross, to our eventual summons to the great judgment throne of Christ, where all will be judged by the same standards, and have the opportunity to be liberated by the same Savior.

Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.



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