Trump orders all federal diversity staff placed on leave

President Donald Trump 's administration is directing that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion staff be put on paid leave, and that agencies develop plans to lay them off, according to a memo Tuesday from the Office of Personnel Management.

The memo follows an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programmes that could touch on everything from anti-bias training to funding for minority farmers and homeowners.

Yet another executive order Tuesday rolls back affirmative action in federal contracting, revoking an order issued by President Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programmes by federal contractors and grant recipients. It’s using one of the key tools utilized by the Biden administration to promote DEI programmes across the private sector — pushing their use by federal contractors — to now eradicate them.

The Office of Personnel Management memo directs agencies to place DEI office staffers on paid leave by 5 pm Wednesday and take down all public DEI-focused webpages by the same deadline. Several federal departments had removed the webpages even before the memorandum. Agencies must also cancel any DEI-related training and end any related contracts, and federal workers are being asked to report to Trump's Office of Personnel Management if they suspect any DEI-related programme has been renamed to obfuscate its purpose within 10 days or face “adverse consequences.”

By Thursday, federal agencies are directed to compile a list of federal DEI offices and workers as of Election Day. By next Friday, they are expected to develop a plan to execute a “reduction-in-force action” against those federal workers.

The memo was first reported by CBS News.

The move comes after Monday's executive order accused former President Joe Biden of forcing “discrimination” programmes into “virtually all aspects of the federal government” through “diversity, equity and inclusion” programmes, known as DEI.

That step is the first salvo in an aggressive campaign to upend DEI efforts nationwide, including leveraging the Justice Department and other agencies to investigate private companies pursuing training and hiring practices that conservative critics consider discriminatory against non-minority groups such as white men.

The executive order picks up where Trump's first administration left off: One of Trump’s final acts during his first term was an executive order banning federal agency contractors and recipients of federal funding from conducting anti-bias training that addressed concepts like systemic racism. Biden promptly 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.

Here's a look at some of the policies and programmes that Trump will aim to dismantle:

Diversity offices, training and accountability

Trump's order will immediately gut Biden's wide-ranging effort to embed diversity and inclusion practices in the federal workforce, the nation's largest at about 2.4 million people.

Biden had mandated all agencies to develop a diversity plan, issue yearly progress reports, and contribute data for a government-wide dashboard to track demographic trends in hiring and promotions. The administration also set up a Chief Diversity Officers Council to oversee the implementation of the DEI plan. The government released its first DEI progress report in 2022 that included demographic data for the federal workforce, which is about 60 per cent white and 55 per cent male overall, and more than 75 per cent white and more than 60 per cent male at the senior executive level.

Trump's executive order will toss out equity plans developed by federal agencies and terminate any roles or offices dedicated to promoting diversity. It will include eliminating initiatives such as DEI-related training or diversity goals in performance reviews.

Federal grant and benefits programme

Trump's order paves the way for an aggressive but bureaucratically complicated overhaul of billions of dollars in federal spending that conservative activists claim unfairly carve out preference for racial minorities and women.

The order does not specify which programmes it will target but mandates a government-wide review to ensure that contracts and grants are compliant with the Trump administration’s anti-DEI stance. It also proposes that the federal government settle ongoing lawsuits against federal programmes that benefit historically underserved communities, including some that date back decades.

Trump’s executive order is a “seismic shift and a complete change in the focus and direction of the federal government,” said Dan Lennington, deputy council for the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, which has pursued several lawsuits against federal programmes. The institute recently released an influential report listing dozens of programmes the Trump administration should consider dismantling, such as credits for minority farmers or emergency relief assistance for majority-Black neighbourhoods.

He acknowledged that unwinding some entrenched programmes may be difficult. For example, the Treasury Department implements housing and other assistance programmes through block grants to states that have their own methods for implementing diversity criteria.

Pay equity and hiring practices

It's not clear whether the Trump administration will target every initiative that stemmed from Biden's DEI executive order.

For example, the Biden administration banned federal agencies from asking about an applicant's salary history when setting compensation, a practice many civil rights activists say perpetuates pay disparities for women and people of colour.

It took three years for the Biden administration to issue the final regulations, and Trump would have to embark on a similar rule-making process, including a notice and comment period, to rescind it, said Chiraag Bains, former deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under Biden and now a nonresident senior fellow with Brookings Metro.

Noreen Farrell, executive director of gender rights group Equal Rights Advocates, said that she was hopeful that the Trump administration “will not go out of its way to undo the rule,” which she said has proved popular in some state and cities that have enacted similar policies.

And Biden's DEI plan encompassed some initiatives with bipartisan support, said Bains. For example, he tasked the Chief Diversity Officers Executive Council with expanding federal employment opportunities for those with criminal records. That initiative stems from the Fair Chance Act, which Trump signed into law in 2019 and bans federal agencies and contractors from asking about an applicant’s criminal history before a conditional job offer is made.

Bains said that's what Biden's DEI policies were about: ensuring that the federal government was structured to include historically marginalized communities, not institute “reverse discrimination against white men.”

Despite the sweeping language of Trump's order, Farrell said, “the reality of implementing such massive structural changes is far more complex.”

"Federal agencies have deeply embedded policies and procedures that can’t simply be switched off overnight,” she added.

By ALEXANDRA OLSON and ZEKE MILLER