President Donald Trump has begun purging federal workers in diversity, equity and inclusion roles as part of his promised crusade on so-called “woke” culture. A memo from the Office of Personnel Management, first reported Tuesday night by NBC News, ordered agency and department heads to put DEI workers on paid administrative leave by the end of the day Wednesday, and to make plans to permanently dismiss the employees by January 31.
The purge follows a flurry of sweeping and highly controversial executive orders in which Trump axed federal DEI programs, rescinded long-standing civil rights protections for federal contractors and mandated new hiring practices at the Federal Aviation Administration. Such initiatives—which broadly sought to diversify the federal workforce and bring it more in line with the makeup of the country as a whole—constituted “illegal and immoral discrimination,” Trump claimed in a Monday executive order.
That characterization, and much of Trump’s other anti-DEI rhetoric, parrot the wider right-wing backlash against diversity programs. Since late 2021, a network of conservative activists, pundits and donors has mobilized to oppose the growth of diversity-hiring initiatives in government, the private sector and academia. In the year before Trump won reelection, more than 20 states considered or approved anti-DEI laws, the New York Times reports. Major US companies, including Ford, Boeing and Lowe’s, also began rolling back their DEI programs months before Trump won a second term.
But the president’s anti-DEI crusade is likely to accelerate that trend further—particularly given his latest threats against large companies, professional associations and universities that keep their diversity programs. Such organizations could face “civil compliance investigations,” one of Trump’s new orders says, though it’s unclear what those would consist of. McDonald’s, Walmart, Amazon and Meta all ended or scaled back their DEI programs in the past month, some citing a changed legal or political environment. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly chose to dismantle his company’s DEI programs only after meeting with the Trump surrogate Stephen Miller, who told him the president-elect planned to “go to war” with progressive corporate culture.
Ironically, several people in Trump’s immediate orbit have themselves benefited from DEI. Vivek Ramaswamy, the embattled former co-chair of Trump’s government cost-cutting project, attended law school on a scholarship from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. Kash Patel, the president’s pick to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation, also participated in an American Bar Association internship program for “underrepresented” groups, according to a questionnaire he filed with the Senate committee weighing his nomination.
The FBI, meanwhile, shuttered its own DEI office last month, just ahead of the ongoing purge. On Truth Social, Trump expressed outrage that the department had ever existed: “Never should have been opened … and should have closed long ago,” he wrote.
