By Joe Davidson · The Washington Post (c) 2025
Like a grinch stealing Christmas, the Trump administration has pilfered not only the meaning of diversity but also Black History Month programs from federal employees. In the process, the White House has emboldened white supremacists who applaud the effort, according to experts on the extremist groups.
Ordinarily, federal agencies would be commemorating African American accomplishments this month, Women’s History Month in March and similar observances throughout the year as part of efforts to hail diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
President Donald Trump, however, has killed these once traditional American mores in the federal government by executive fiat, with bogus statements about DEI’s mission, while alsoclosing diversity offices and sending their employees home. DEI is not a hostile, foreign ideology, as he claims. It’s not even affirmative action.
DEI works “to expand your qualified pool by casting that wide net for talent, and then you pick your best qualified person from that pool,” said Jenny R. Yang, who was deputy assistant to President Joe Biden for racial justice and equity.
Ironically, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth contradicted and went beyond Trump’s DEI assault by banning Black History Month programs and similar ceremonies in the government’s largest department. “Efforts to divide the force – to put one group ahead of another – erode camaraderie and threaten mission execution,” he wrote in a statement slandering “identity months.”
That conflicts with Trump’s Black History Month proclamation that encouraged “public officials, educators, librarians, and all the people of the United States to observe this month with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.”
While DEI has long been a bedrock American goal, including for the many capitalists whose companies embraced it (though some are now following the president’s lead), Trump has sabotaged its meaning, just as Hegseth has done with historical and cultural observances. Heeding claims that DEI means discrimination against White men, Trump shuttered all federal DEI offices and placed their employees and others on leave pending dismissal, creating massive disruptions in the process.
“Extremists – particularly white supremacists – historically view DEI initiatives as a form of antiwhite discrimination, claiming that DEI is taking jobs away from white people and weakening white influence in society,” said Oren Segal, vice president of the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism, which tracks hate groups.
Segal noted a neo-Nazi, Klan-connected organization that “celebrated Trump’s attack on DEI programs as ‘Not perfect. But a start.’” Another white supremacist, he added in his email, encouraged “memes about Trump putting [n-words] back in their place.”
Segal also noted that “many more white supremacists are convinced that Trump is ‘owned’ by Jews or Israel, and that the recent crackdown on DEI is only meant to distract and appease the masses.”
Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a group that tracks hate groups and has often clashed with conservatives,called DEI attacks “a new twist on an old, racist and misogynistic idea – that women, Black and Brown people, and other marginalized groups are inherently less capable.”
Trump’s executive order scorns DEI as “illegal, pernicious discrimination” – language that echoes extremist groups on the issue.
The White House did not answer questions about his DEI attack, but press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement last month that he “campaigned on ending the scourge of DEI from our federal government and returning America to a merit based society where people are hired based on their skills, not for the color of their skin.”
Erec Smith, a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute, complained by email that diversity advocates focus “on diversity of race and ethnicity; diversity of ideology is not meant. … Equity is not equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome. It also involves decentering or excluding white people to prioritize minority voices.”
Yet, America’s automatic affirmative action privileges for White men were central to the nation’s founding. And unlike more recent corrective affirmative action programs that have been struck down by the Supreme Court, federal DEI programs (sometimes called DEIA to include “accessibility”) do not use quotas or goals, or award a racial “tip” or “plus” to certain college applicants.
Jeremy Wood, an Agriculture Department DEI staffer forced on leave by the administration, said if an agency used employment mandates, the “DEIA program should catch that and be like, ‘No, no, this is not what we do.’” Danisha Parker, a federal DEI program manager, described her work as “a proactive approach to equal employment opportunity.”
Diversity efforts seek to widen employment application pools of qualified candidates by recruiting in diverse places, setting realistic job requirements rather than unnecessary ones, and using other methods that discriminate against no one.
“The work of diversity and inclusion at its core is grounded in equal opportunity,” Yang said. “Removing barriers to opportunity is ensuring that qualified people that have been underestimated or devalued in the past, but are fully qualified, have the chance to be considered. … We all do better when we all do better.”
One often cited example of removing barriers is the use of blind auditions in hiring musicians for symphony orchestras, long a domain of White male privilege. When candidates performed behind screens, shielded from the view of evaluators, “the percent of female musicians in the five highest-ranked orchestras in the nation increased” more than threefold over 23 years, according to the Harvard Kennedy School. That’s a long time but nonetheless represents significant improvement given the low turnover in that profession.
Too often, Yang said, employers “presume that the baseline of what is being done now is somehow a higher set of qualifications. Sometimes it’s just the wrong set of qualifications. It’s not actually higher or better or more likely to identify people who can perform the job well.”
Yang previously was chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and director of the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. The office was created in 1978 to consolidate the equal employment opportunity functions of a dozen agencies.
Now it is on Trump’s hit list.
His Jan. 21 executive order says the office “shall immediately cease promoting ‘diversity.’” It doesn’t say diversity efforts should be done differently – just that the feds shouldn’t do diversity at all.
“We have to call this out for what it is. Trump’s onslaught against DEI is … a wholesale attack on our civil rights,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts). “It has “never been about efficiency or building a so-called ‘meritocracy.’”