All federal employees in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) offices will need to be placed on paid administrative leave “effective immediately,” according to a memo from the Trump Administration on Tuesday.
Why It Matters
In a sweeping move after his inauguration on Monday, President Donald Trump rescinded numerous Biden-era executive orders and implemented many of his own. Amid the new orders, Trump ordered what he called the “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing.”
In a memo sent to the acting heads of government DEIA offices on Tuesday, which was first obtained by CBS News and then confirmed by Trump’s Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on X, formerly Twitter, the Trump Administration laid out the steps to inform DEIA office employees of the upcoming changes.
What To Know
The memo, from Charles Ezell, the acting director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, directs department heads to inform employees by 5 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday that they are being placed on paid leave due to the closure of the offices and warns them against attempting to “disguise” DEI programs in light of Trump’s ban.
“Send an agency-wide notice to employees informing them of the closure and asking employees if they know of any efforts to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language,” the memo reads.
“Send a notification to all employees of DEIA offices that they are being placed on paid administrative leave effective immediately as the agency takes steps to close/end all DEIA initiatives, offices and programs,” it continues.
The memo also instructs DEIA offices to “take down all outward facing media,” including websites and social media accounts, to “withdraw any final or pending documents, directives, orders, materials, and equity plan” and to “cancel any DEIA-related trainings, and terminate any DEIA-related contractors.”
Department heads are further ordered to submit a “written plan for executing a reduction-in-force action” for DEIA office employees by January 31, in addition to providing “a list of all contract descriptions or personnel position descriptions that were changed since November 5, 2024 to obscure their connection to DEIA programs.”
Leavitt, in response to media queries about the memo, wrote the following on X: “To every reporter asking about this: I can gladly confirm!”
What People Are Saying
The White House Office of Communications, in a “fact sheet” emailed to Newsweek on Tuesday night: “President Trump promised to terminate DEI in the federal government, protect equal opportunity, and force schools to end discriminatory admissions policies, and he delivered.”
The House Foreign Affairs Committee Democrats account on X, in a post on Monday night: “Trump & MAGA Republicans claim diversity is a weakness, but it’s our greatest strength—an asset our competitors don’t have. The [executive order] targeting DEIA is self-sabotage. We can better navigate our diverse world if we leverage all the talent our nation has to offer, including @StateDept.”
What Happens Next
The government DEIA offices should shut down by the end of the month. The closures should not affect other government employees who were hired under DEIA initiatives, although future actions by the Trump administration might.
The president also signed an executive order banning federal employees from working remotely on Monday, which may be part of a strategy to gut the federal workforce and replace vacancies with workers who are explicitly loyal to Trump.
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