Trump's Epic Anti-DEI Executive Order

By Rich Lowry on Jan 23, 2025

We're only days into the Trump administration, and we can already identify one of his top five achievements.

With one carefully crafted act, the president initiated the end of DEI in the federal government and perhaps in the private sector and educational system as well. It is a breathtakingly bold and wholly righteous move that could bring about a generational change. One way or the other, books will be written about the executive order, "Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity."

Trump's directive repeals a series of executive orders promoting affirmative action in government, including the granddaddy of them all, President Lyndon Johnson's 1965 Executive Order 11246. The implementing regulations for 11246 have created a vast archipelago of racial preferences in federal contracting. The rollback of the LBJ order alone would be momentous.

Trump's order goes further, though. It instructs executive departments and agencies to "terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders, and requirements."

This is not empty verbiage. The Trump administration immediately ordered diversity offices in the federal government closed and DEI workers put on administrative leave, while it suspended contracting programs that run afoul of the race- and gender-neutral standard set by Trump's order.

Again, all of this would be historic on its own, but the order goes further still. It takes solid aim at other institutions of American life that have, through government pressure or their own initiative, embraced DEI.

A key, and correct, contention of the Trump order is that DEI's race-consciousness practices violate federal civil-rights laws.

It then uses the prospect of federal enforcement of the civil-rights laws as a stick to move private actors toward fair, colorblind policies. The federal contracting process itself will be a massive point of leverage. The order says that in their "employment, procurement, and contracting practices" federal contractors and subcontractors cannot "consider race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin in ways that violate the Nation's civil rights laws."

Given that the federal government doles out about $1.7 trillion in contracts and grants annually, this provision will have huge ripple effects.

Moreover, federal contractors have to assure the government that they aren't promoting DEI in violation of antidiscrimination laws. If a contractor provides false information, it is potentially liable under the sweeping False Claims Act.

Then, more broadly, each federal agency is to identify nine potential civil compliance investigations "of publicly traded corporations, large non-profit corporations or associations, foundations with assets of 500 million dollars or more, State and local bar and medical associations, and institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars."

That is intended to -- and will -- get the attention of the general counsels to every institution in America that falls into one of those buckets.

Finally, the order puts public education systems and institutions of higher education on notice that if they don't comply with the Supreme Court's recent anti-affirmative action decision their federal funding will be at risk.

Taken together, this is seismic. Maybe the administration will get stymied in the inevitable legal fights. Maybe institutions will keep their heads down and rename their DEI programs and pursue the same noxious ends using different means. But this looks like an inflection point.

Will a subsequent Democratic president come into office and reinstitute decades-worth of government quotas? It's possible, but this would require an electoral mandate to do so, and color-blindness has much more political appeal than racial preferences do.

Even if a new Democratic administration is encouraging of DEI, will private entities want to get whip-sawed back and forth and break out the Robin DiAngelo books again and begin discriminating on the basis of race and gender anew? The safer and more rational course would be to stay out of DEI altogether and focus on their core business.

That outcome would be profoundly welcome for our society, and the first step could have been a Trump stroke of a pen.

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(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)