The DEI Madness

It’s been obvious that the Trump-Musk coalition would see DEI as something to oppose, but the single-mindedness and vehemence with which they have attacked it have surprised me.

DEI – Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and we might add Accessibility – is the latest acronym for efforts to treat people decently. It’s important to say that explicitly. You have skills to bring to working with us? Welcome. What do we need to do to help you do the best job? That’s relative to employment. Hilzoy makes a more general argument.

Attacking DEI rallies conservatives and brands things that Musk-Trump don’t like. Thus USAID is DEI. DEI is a synonym for “woke” and less subject to parody. It is being used to negate the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the acceptance of people of color and women in positions of authority and perhaps the work force generally. Darren Beattie, the Trump administration’s choice for the top public diplomacy post at the State Department, has said “competent white men must be in charge.” Public diplomacy means the part of the State Department that deal with the media and universities.

The Verge enumerates many of the ways that the attack on DEI is being used, including laundering racist policies into the mainstream. The article is a resource, and I agree with it but want to go in a different direction in this post. Like most of Trump’s executive orders and Musk’s actions, the attack on DEI probably breaks multiple laws, federal, state, and local.

Attacking DEI can also split the Democrats. There is a group of centrists, currently most vocally Thomas Chatterton Williams, but also much of the New York Times opinion page and several other Atlantic contributors, who have long promulgated the idea that there is too much DEI. This can appeal to people who have to take DEI training at their workplaces. Like safety and other trainings, DEI trainings are generally bad, and people hate them.

So the reactionary centrists squawk that it is all the fault of those pushing DEI, employees can’t feel too unhappy if those trainings go away, and Democratic consultants suggest that maybe the party needs to give up supporting trans people. Senator Mark Warner says the party lost the last election because of “over-the-top wokeism,” even though in August 2024 he said that ending DEI programs could harm national security.

This prevents a united front against the destruction.

According to a DOGE document obtained by the Washington Post, the attack on DEI has three phases:

• Phase 1 starts January 20. Shut down DEI-related agency websites and place staff in any DEI-related agency on administrative leave. They planned to focus on 31 offices and councils. Cancel all DEI training and contracts.
• Phase 2 runs January 21 through February 19. Elements tied to DEI initiatives in offices required by law will be shut down. The ultimate goal is to fire all employees identified as doing DEI-related work. Cancel DEI-related contracts.
• Phase 3 runs February 20 through July 19. Terminate all DEI-linked employees via a Reduction In Force, or RIF, the government form of layoffs. Positions to be cut include employees in non-DEI positions and people working in offices required by law. The documents note the possibility of legal challenges and state: “We are exploring options for this.”

The Post also has an analytical article on the document. They compare goals in the document with actions by the Musk boys. Their overall sense is that things are proceeding as planned. I believe that there are significant exceptions to that and will expand them in a later post.

The lists of words come from this effort. They are used to find departments, grants, or other organizations or documents that can be labeled DEI by people who don’t understand what they are doing, justifying their destruction within their orders.

A number of agencies have voluntarily removed websites or museum exhibits simply because they feature women or people of color or LGBTQ people, apparently in response to Trump’s executive orders and the attacks by Musk’s boys. When the public has objected, some have restored the websites or exhibits, but their willingness to remove chunks of history, which is made by women and people of color as well as white men, suggests an underlying understanding that the goal of the attacks on DEI is to rewrite history as the province of white cishet male supremacy.

Some businesses have removed DEI statements and programs. Others have defended theirs. Some that have removed their programs, like Target, are feeling a backlash from the public.

The Department of Education has given institutions, from preschools to colleges, two weeks to stop using “racial preferences” in admissions, hiring, and other areas or risk losing federal funding. Which programs violate the Department’s order will be difficult to determine.

It’s not clear whether DEI is being used as a way to justify firings because it is convenient, or because the people involved, from Trump through Musk and on down, feel extremely strongly about it. It’s likely both. Certainly their rhetoric – that DEI was responsible for the DCA air crash a couple of weeks ago, that DEI is the reason Silicon Valley innovation has slowed down – suggests it is a major factor in their thinking.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner