‘We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based,’ President Donald Trump stated.
Within hours of his inauguration, President Donald Trump took action to fulfill his promise to dismantle the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) agenda of the Biden administration.
Signing an executive order titled, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” President Trump canceled what he deemed were his predecessor’s “illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.’”
The Trump directive orders the director of the Office of Management and Budget, the U.S. Attorney General, and the director of the Office of Personnel Management to terminate “all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the federal government, under whatever name they appear.”
This action will apply to all federal employees, contractors, and grantees, according to the order.
In Trump’s inauguration speech, he pledged to “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.”
“We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based,” Trump said.
Among Trump’s presidential executive orders signed on inauguration day was a broad recision of 78 of Biden’s executive orders, many of which set out the former administration’s DEI agenda. These included, among others, Biden’s Executive Order 14035 “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce,” Executive Order 14091 “Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” Executive Order 13985 “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” and several of Biden’s orders for “Advancing Educational Equity” regarding various racial groups.
During his term, President Biden issued numerous executive orders to implement DEI ideology throughout all agencies of the federal government, as well as the military.
In addition to revoking Biden’s orders, the Trump administration in its second term will likely also bring stronger enforcement of U.S. civil rights laws for both public and private employees. The U.S. Department of Labor, which regulates private companies on issues of discrimination, states that “the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.”
Just before Trump’s inauguration, the FBI quietly dismantled its DEI department in December, without providing an official statement or justification.
Trump questioned the timing of this move on Truth Social, alleging “corruption” within the bureau, and demanding that “the FBI preserve and retain all records, documents, and information on the now closing DEI Office—Never should have been opened and, if it was, should have closed long ago.”
In 2020, Trump issued his first executive order on DEI, which he stated would “combat offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating” for government employees and the military.
The order stated that “it shall be the policy of the United States not to promote race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating in the Federal workforce or in the Uniformed Services, and not to allow grant funds to be used for these purposes. In addition, Federal contractors will not be permitted to inculcate such views in their employees.”
This order was rescinded by President Joe Biden immediately upon taking office.
Stating that “the enduring legacies of employment discrimination, systemic racism, and gender inequality are still felt today,” Biden’s June 2021 executive order established “a government-wide initiative to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility in all parts of the Federal workforce.”
In addition to race-based hiring, promotion, and training, a 2024 investigation by Parents Defending Education, a parent’s rights group, said that the Biden administration had spent more than $1 billion on DEI salaries and grants in K-12 schools.
Federal courts often rejected the Biden administration’s race-based policies, including striking down $4 billion in federal grants to non-white farmers in 2021 and preferences for minority-owned small businesses in 2024.
In a landmark decision in 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Harvard University and the University of North Carolina violated civil rights laws by discriminating on the basis of race or gender in their admissions. This decision applied to organizations that receive government funding but will also likely apply to private companies, leading many of them to shed their DEI programs in recent months.
Advocates of DEI have responded forcefully to Trump’s efforts to remove it.
The ACLU pledged in a position paper written by staffers Alexi Agathocleous, Kim Conway, and ReNika Moore, to “resist a second Trump administration’s retreat from civil rights enforcement.”
“Perversely,” the authors stated, “a Trump DOJ would employ the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, along with landmark civil rights statutes such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964—including Title VI, which prohibits recipients of federal funds from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin, and Title VII, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and national origin—in its efforts.”
Writing in the Harvard Business Review in November 2024, NYU law professors Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow and project director of the advancing DEI initiative, Christina Joseph, stated that the Trump administration’s strategies to counter DEI will likely include anti-DEI executive orders, abolishing DEI departments within the federal government, enforcing laws against racial preferences and quotas, appointing conservative federal judges, and removing “disparate impact” criteria from anti-discrimination laws. Disparate impact criteria allow courts and regulators to find discrimination where there is no discriminatory policy or action but an unequal outcome when measured by race or gender.
The authors urged private companies to adopt a three-part strategy: comply with laws “but don’t over-comply”; create a safe haven for “trans individuals, immigrants, pregnant workers, and people of color” within their companies; and “use their powerful voices to advocate for DEI in the public sphere.”
Companies including Meta, Walmart, Ford, McDonald’s, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Tractor Supply Company, Lowe’s, Molson Coors, Nissan, Toyota, Stanley Black & Decker, and others have dismantled or scaled back their DEI programs. Many companies have seemingly concluded that DEI programs may create legal liabilities and violate federal and state civil rights laws that ban discrimination on the basis of race and gender, both for government agencies and private companies, in addition to violating their fiduciary duties to investors and shareholders.
In response to Trump’s 2020 order banning DEI in government, UCLA law school stated in a position paper that this order “directly threatened the ongoing efforts to address racial disparities in the workplace … But in reality, this ‘equity gag order’ aimed to censor the use of language that fell within the vague definitions of ‘divisive concepts’ and ‘race and sex scapegoating.’”