Posted on January 22, 2025

Trump Rolls Back Bedrock Civil Rights Measure in Sweeping Anti-DEI Push

Russell Contreras and Emily Peck, Axios, January 22, 2025

President Trump issued a sweeping executive order revoking decades of diversity and affirmative action practices in federal government.

Why it matters: This takes the current pushback on diversity, equity and inclusion into the next stratosphere — abolishing decades of government standards on diversity and equal opportunity, and seeking to crackdown on the same in the private sector.

Zoom out: Trump’s order revokes one that President Johnson signed on September 24, 1965, more than two years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have A Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

  • LBJ’s order gave the Secretary of Labor the authority to ensure equal opportunity for people of color and women in federal contractors’ recruitment, hiring, training and other employment practices.
  • It required federal contractors to refrain from employment discrimination and take affirmative action to ensure equal opportunity “based on race, color, religion, and national origin.”

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Zoom in: Trump’s order directs all “executive departments and agencies (agencies) to terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements.”

  • And it extends out to the private sector: “I further order all agencies to enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs.”
  • “The Federal Government is charged with enforcing our civil-rights laws.  The purpose of this order is to ensure that it does so by ending illegal preferences and discrimination.”
  • It goes a step further and orders federal agencies to compile lists of public companies, universities and large foundations for investigations and possible civil action over their DEI programs.

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