The Trump administration is reportedly intensifying its efforts to remove Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) workers from the federal government.
According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, administration officials are urging federal agencies to dig deeper within their ranks to identify and eliminate DEI employees. Current and former officials familiar with the matter say the push reflects the administration's ongoing focus on scaling back diversity-focused initiatives within the government.
The move follows a recent directive from President Donald Trump's Office of Personnel Management, which mandated that federal agencies shut down offices dedicated to DEI initiatives. As part of this order, employees working within these divisions were placed on paid administrative leave, with the deadline for compliance set for January 22.
The day after the deadline, agency leaders were instructed to submit a detailed list of all employees working in DEI-related roles, according to the WSJ report. Agencies were also reportedly asked to identify additional employees who had worked on DEI initiatives, even if their official titles didn't directly reflect those responsibilities.
According to the report, it appeared that the Trump administration had anticipated a larger number of DEI-related positions across federal agencies. As a result, some agency officials were reportedly told to go through job descriptions meticulously, searching for roles that may have had ties to DEI work, in an effort to meet the administration's expectations.
When former President Joe Biden was in office, he signed the "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce" executive order, which aimed to create a federal workforce that reflects the nation's full diversity.
Trump has been critical of the Biden administration's approach to diversity programs, including that order, arguing that it promotes divisiveness and undermines merit-based hiring.
"The previous administration has embedded deeply unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical practices within every agency and office of the Federal Government," the president said in an executive order signed the same day he was sworn into office. "The injection of 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' (DEI) into our institutions has corrupted them by replacing hard work, merit, and equality with a divisive and dangerous preferential hierarchy."
In another executive order issued the following day, Trump said he was acknowledging his duty to enforce "longstanding Federal civil-rights laws protect individual Americans from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin," adding that those protections "serve as a bedrock supporting equality of opportunity for all Americans."
The Trump administration further said in a Fact Sheet that the previous administration engaged in "radical DEI preferencing" and that now the federal government will "combat private sector discrimination."
Analysts anticipate that the Trump administration's actions on DEI will likely prompt legal challenges.