(Al Jazeera Media Network) United States President Donald Trump’s administration has directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off.
An Office of Personnel Management memo, first reported by CBS News, directed agencies to place DEI office staffers on paid leave by 5pm (22:00 GMT) on Wednesday and take down all public DEI-focused webpages by the same deadline.
Agencies must also cancel any DEI-related training and end any related contracts, and federal workers are being asked to report to the office if they suspect any DEI-related program has been renamed to obfuscate its purpose within 10 days – or face “adverse consequences”.
By Thursday, federal agencies have been directed to compile a list of federal DEI offices and workers as of election day in November. They also are expected to develop a plan to execute a “reduction-in-force action” against those federal workers by next Friday.
The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day in office this week ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s DEI programs.
Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and insisted on restoring what he describes as strictly “merit-based” hiring.
But civil rights advocates have argued that DEI programmes are necessary to address long-standing inequities and structural racism.
Basil Smikle Jr, a political strategist and policy adviser, said he was troubled by the Trump administration’s assertion that diversity programs were “diminishing the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work, and determination” because it suggested women and people of colour lacked merit or qualifications.
“There’s this clear effort to hinder, if not erode, the political and economic power of people of colour and women,” Smikle said.
“What it does is open up the door for more cronyism,” he said.
Trump’s anti-DEI push picks up where his first administration left off.
One of Trump’s final acts during his first term in 2017-2021 was an executive order banning federal agency contractors and recipients of federal funding from conducting anti-bias training that addressed concepts like systemic racism.
His successor, Democrat and former US President Joe Biden, rescinded that order on his first day in office and issued a pair of executive orders — now rescinded — outlining a plan to promote DEI throughout the federal government.
While many changes may take months or even years to implement, Trump’s new anti-DEI agenda is more aggressive than his first and comes amid far more amenable terrain in the corporate world.
Prominent companies from Walmart to Facebook have already scaled back or ended some of their diversity practices in response to Trump’s election and conservative-backed lawsuits against them.
