Trump’s Magnificent Blow Against DEI

National Review Online

Thursday, January 23, 2025

 

As part of his flurry of initial executive actions, President Trump released an executive order titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” It is no mere public relations statement but a long and carefully drafted order that, if upheld and properly executed, will eliminate the blight of racially preferential treatment in the federal government; it also seeks boldly (and likely less successfully) to eliminate it from our culture at large by applying indirect pressure.

 

The order is truly sweeping in its breadth; its immediate effect is to uproot with one stroke the vast bulk of the federal infrastructure of affirmative action and DEI protocols and hiring practices. This is an edifice that was built up painstakingly over decades by one Democratic executive order after another, dating all the way back to the Johnson administration’s infamous 1965 Executive Order 11246, which first established “affirmative action” as a necessary criterion in government hiring and contracting decisions: Any company doing business with the federal government from that day forward has been required to comply with what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission deems to be racially equitable in terms of hiring, salary, or promotion practices, or else take their case to court.

 

Now it is no more. E.O. 11246 has been repealed, along with four other Obama- and Clinton-era orders which implemented it. Companies contracting with the federal government will no longer be required by the Department of Labor to address racial or sexual “underrepresentation” with formal affirmative action plans. The federal government will now be commanded to immediately cease promoting “diversity,” cease “holding Federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for taking ‘affirmative action,’” and cease “allowing or encouraging Federal contractors and subcontractors to engage in workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin.”

 

As anyone familiar with the current government contracting process is aware, shedding the cumbersome, expensive, and deeply unjust DEI “compliance” requirements will be an instantaneous victory not only for justice but also for the effectiveness of our government. But Trump’s executive order does not limit itself to undoing the mistakes of the past; it is aggressively forward-looking as well. In the past, government contractors had to promise compliance with affirmative action under penalty of nonpayment, but now they are required to sign terms certifying they do not “operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.”

 

Trump also makes clear his intent to apply painful public and government pressure on private-sector DEI practices as well, and does not cloak his reasons. As part of a section explicitly titled “Encourage the Private Sector to End Illegal DEI Discrimination and Preferences,” the order directs agency heads to compile lists of public companies, universities, and large foundations in order to name and shame “the most egregious and discriminatory DEI practitioners in each sector of concern” and consider civil-compliance investigations and possible civil action over their DEI programs. Furthermore, Section 5 of the E.O. puts higher education on notice that these rules will be applied to any college or university that receives federal grant money or participates in the federal student-loan assistance program — functionally speaking, every major university in America. (The order specifically states the Trump administration’s intent to force colleges to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the landmark case striking down racial discrimination in public and private college admissions.)

 

Naturally, several aspects of this momentous executive order will be fiercely litigated. But expect the bulk of it to stand, and stand as a major achievement for Trump’s second term. The government’s ruinous racial policies over the past half century were created primarily by executive order, not legislation, and what was done with the mere stroke of a presidential pen can be undone by the same means.

 

Meanwhile, discriminatory practices have spread throughout academia and the private sector. The architects of this system have used legerdemain and moral bullying — especially the accusation of racism — to preserve and steadily extend it, even when it means defying the law. Now, President Trump wants to smoke them out.

 

The advocates of DEI have long believed that the arc of the moral universe bends toward ever more racialized practices. To its great credit, the Trump administration is pointing to a more just and fair future and one in keeping with our deepest ideals.