The Trump administration on Tuesday ordered all federal employees working on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives to be placed on paid leave as government agencies work to shutter DEI offices.
The Office of Personnel Management — the government’s top human resources agency – notified federal department heads in a memo that DEI program employees must be notified by 5 p.m. Wednesday that their administrative leave is “effective immediately.”
The memo further directs federal agencies to take down all “outward facing media” – such as webpages and social media accounts – focused on DEI programs, cancel all employee diversity trainings and terminate any DEI-related contracts by the same deadline
OPM also asked agency heads to ask “employees if they know of any efforts to disguise” DEI programs with “coded or imprecise language,” and to report back their findings on attempts to obfuscate the initiatives by Jan. 31.
Employees who do not report DEI programs that may have been renamed to skirt the Trump administration’s widely expected move to gut diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives may face “adverse consequences,” OPM warns.
By the end of the month, OPM also wants “a written plan” from all federal agencies for how they will execute “a reduction-in-force action regarding the employees who work in a DEIA office.”
The missive was sent in response to President Trump’s first day executive order directing federal agencies to dismantle the “illegal and immoral discrimination programs” promoted by the Biden administration.
Trump’s order slams DEI programs, which were deployed throughout the government by the Biden administration to promote racial and environmental “justice,” as discriminatory and an “immense public waste.”
OPM’s DEI memo was released on the same day the White House announced that the president will order the Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration to “immediately return to non-discriminatory, merit-based hiring.”
In a statement, Trump argued that his “Keeping Americans Safe in Aviation” action will ensure that all FAA employees have “the ability to perform their jobs to the highest possible standard of excellence.”
Trump charged that under the Biden administration the FAA “betrayed its mission by elevating dangerous discrimination over excellence” and “sought to specifically recruit and hire individuals with serious infirmities that could impact the execution of their essential life-saving duties.”
“The Secretary of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administrator shall review the past performance and performance standards of all individuals in critical safety positions and take all appropriate action to ensure that any individual who fails or has failed to demonstrate requisite capability is replaced by a high-capability individual that will ensure top-notch air safety and efficiency,” the president said.
The private sector already has been in the process of pulling back from DEI programming in response to the US Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which addressed the use of race in college admissions decisions.
Tech giants Meta and Amazon, for example, have recently moved to scrap DEI initiatives.
McDonald’s, Walmart, Ford Motor Company, Molson Coors, Jack Daniel’s parent company Brown-Forman, Boeing and Harley Davidson have all also scaled back their focus on DEI.
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