Trump administration takes aim at diversity programs

For Marguerite Fletcher, diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are day-in-day-out topic.

As a DEI consultant, she works with companies and their leadership on developing plans and coaching to work to address bias in the workplace.

So, when President Donald Trump, within the first days of his administration signed multiple orders rolling back federal DEI actions, she found the moves “disturbing.”

“I feel like as a nation, we’ve made a lot of progress and so I’m very worried that the moves he’s making — with his executive orders, for example — are really going to set us back,” Fletcher said.

But for Sophia Hall, deputy litigation director at Lawyers for Civil Rights, the fight isn’t coming out of nowhere.

“At LCR, what we recognize is that with the new administration and the flurry of changes in various aspects of life, the executive orders and the direction specifically related to DEI is actually unsurprising and not new,” she said, pointing to legal and social fights about the programs since the Supreme Court of the United State’s 2023 decision reversing affirmative action programs in colleges and universities.

But, while potentially unsurprising — DEI was a topic Trump doubled down on throughout his presidential campaign — his actions in office have not been small or few.

Among a spate of executive actions signed on his first day in office, Trump signed one order ending “illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government, under whatever name they appear.”

Another order, signed the next day, doubled down on the effort.

And his actions have taken aim not just at actions from the last four years when, under the Biden administration, where the federal government saw growth in diversity efforts, but also decades-old governmental actions.

Since reentering the White House, Trump revoked an executive action from the administration of former President Bill Clinton that targeted environmental injustices in low-income and minority populations and another from the administration of Lyndon Johnson that set requirements for nondiscriminatory hiring practices among government contractors.

“All of this is about messaging and is harmful. It’s harmful for a country that is still dealing with learning how to discuss race and equity in a day-to-day way,” Hall said. “It’s harmful for our success as a country.”

Attacks on DEI from Trump have been constant throughout the first weeks of his new administration, including in instances where critics say diversity measures were not involved.

Following a crash between a helicopter and plane at Reagan National Airport, Trump claimed, without evidence, that DEI efforts among the country’s air traffic controls was partly to blame. A former Federal Aviation Administration official told ABC News that diversity programs do not apply to air traffic control hiring.

Individuals working in the DEI space said they see the administration’s actions as a call to chill those in favor of diversity-focused efforts and embolden those who are opposed.

“I think his whole approach is emboldening to people who want to be unkind to other people, or who want to be mean or discriminatory,” Fletcher said.

Shifting definitions

Part of that, Hall said, is what she sees as an effort to narrow the definition of DEI.

“DEI is broader than just this Black and white sort of lens, it encompasses swaths of people from all types of protected backgrounds that we don’t traditionally think of,” Hall said.

Narrowing the definition, she said, can limit support for opposition, especially as the Trump administration floods the field with executive actions that touch on issues across the board.

“[It makes people think] perhaps this issue, when there’s so many of them to focus on, isn’t the one that should be priority because it’s not impacting my community or my interests,” Hall said. “It allows things to happen without any opposition.”

But Hall said that DEI efforts don’t fall only on racial lines, but rather all types of protected classes: for example people living with disabilities, women, people who identify along the LGBTQ spectrum.

Fletcher said that, despite political messaging to the contrary, DEI is about removing barriers to level the playing field, not to give extra benefits.

“It’s not about giving people advantages,” she said. “It’s about removing the things that were in the way, the blockages that were in the way that made it difficult for people to have to have access.”

Administration efforts extend to private industry

As Trump pushes to limit diversity programs among the federal government, his administration has also started to take aim at private diversity efforts.

In his executive order removing federal DEI initiatives, he ordered all agencies to combat “illegal” DEI practices in the private sector. It’s an order that newly-installed Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly started to tackle, calling on the Department of Justice target private DEI initiatives for potential criminal investigation.

The moves come as companies have started to shed diversity programs and pledges, many of which were created in the wake of the murder of George Floyd.

Some of that shift had been occurring before Trump took office — over the summer companies like John Deere, Ford and Harley Davidson first took steps away — but the number and rate of abandoned DEI programs has grown since the election.

“For anybody who didn’t want to keep moving forward, certainly what [Trump has] done makes it easier for them,” Fletcher said.

As things like the definition of “illegal DEI” remain in flux — Trump’s order offered no explanation — Hall said at LCR they encourage companies to comply with the law as much as they have to, but to not abandon their values.

“There is actually a middle ground there that does exist,” she said. “It’s not an all or nothing in terms of how companies have to respond to this moment.”

In that sense, she said that she sees media reports of large companies completely rolling back DEI initiatives as another oversimplification of what the options are.

Within the U.S. legal system — including as determined in the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action — illegal DEI actions are limited to quota systems — and even then, specifically in the higher education space.

“There is nothing out there that says you can’t utilize somebody’s lived experience and their background — whether it be racial, linguistic whatnot — as a factor in terms of whether or not you want to select them for a program, whether you want to select them for grants, whether you want to select them into your place of employment,” Hall said.

Fighting for the future

But for people working in the DEI space, the early actions from the Trump administration signal that the next four years will be a fight, but at the end of the day abandoning DEI altogether will be a challenging task for the administration.

Fletcher said she thinks that even if the next four years are “really bumpy,” it’ll be hard to leave behind efforts to level the playing field indefinitely.

“We’ve come through much harder periods. I wish we didn’t have to do this kind of stuff again — I kind of resent that —but I can’t imagine that we would not come back.”

It was a sentiment that Hall, too, expressed.

“We live in such a richly diverse country in America that no matter the leadership — no matter the desire of one person in power — people of color are not going away,” she said. “They can’t be subjected to second-class citizenship where they can’t access schools and can’t access workplaces. We as a country can’t allow ourselves to go back to the 50s and the 60s.”

In the meantime, they said they’re anticipating the need to pursue legal challenges and local action. To keep what protections they can in place.

“In Massachusetts, what we’ve seen is that we always have to step in when the federal government starts to claw back either rights, opportunities, access that we believe as a Commonwealth everyone is entitled to,” Hall said

She pointed to steps taken by the Healey-Driscoll administration in 2021, following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, and with it the constitutional right to abortion, like creating a state stockpile of mifepristone, a drug used in medication abortion, and establishing a legal information hotline.

State and local efforts to continue diversity efforts may face challenges from the federal governments in the form of limits on federal funding, but Fletcher said she would like to see state and local leadership continue to push back.

“I would imagine that at our state level of government and even some of the local governments, I think folks here will do everything that they can to continue to live our values. That would be my expectation, my hope.”

And, already, Trump’s push against DEI initiatives outside of the federal government has faced legal pushback. In a federal lawsuit filed Feb. 3, officials from Baltimore, Maryland, as well as groups education and labor organizations, sued the administration over the orders. The lawsuit alleges the orders infringe on First Amendment free speech protections and due process rights. The vague nature of the orders adds to the chilling effect, the suit claims.

Ahead of the election, Trump’s critics expressed concerns about how legal challenges will fare in today’s judicial system, with six conservative justices on the Supreme Court — three of whom were nominated by Trump in his first term — as well as a host of other Trump-appointed judges across the federal courts system.

Hall said she recognizes the strong conservative presence in the nation’s top court, but described a basic trust that there are certain rules the courts will still uphold.

It’s a belief she said is rooted in her personal journey as a first-generation college student into a career as a civil rights lawyer, which sets her up to believe that any outcome where the legal system doesn’t uphold the rule of law properly doesn’t feel like an acceptable outcome.

She said she can’t envision an outcome where something blatantly unconstitutional makes it to the Supreme Court and still they let it go.

“To throw completely out the window the values and the morals that we hold as lawyers when we’re supposed to uphold the law feels like it should not be a possibility,” Hall said.