Less than 24 hours after a midair collision between a passenger jet and a military helicopter left dozens of people dead on Wednesday night, President Donald Trump pointed the finger at the right’s favorite boogeyman: diversity efforts.
After briefly offering condolences to the victims’ loved ones, Trump quickly blamed “DEI” — diversity, equity, and inclusion — efforts for the tragedy. The investigation had barely begun, yet Trump falsely claimed that the Obama administration had decided the Federal Aviation Administration was “too white” and subsequently had hired scores of unqualified people of color.
When reporters asked him for evidence of his claims, Trump responded, “Because I have common sense.”
Since his return to the White House on Jan. 20, Trump has sought to purge government agencies of employees who do diversity work.
He fired National Labor Relations Board officials in a move the president of the AFL-CIO labor federation told HuffPost was “illegal.” Trump also fired two Democratic-appointed commissioners at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, an agency tasked specifically with combating discrimination at work. And he also revoked a 1965 executive order from Lyndon B. Johnson that banned federal contractors from discriminating based on race, sex, religion and sexual orientation.
Trump’s war on the “diverse” hires within the federal workforce will disproportionately affect workers of color. In many cases, “DEI” has become a barely disguised euphemism for Black people.
The federal government has long been a reliable source of economic security for Black people and other people of color who have been historically discriminated against in the private sector. Over the last 100 years, the federal government has hired Black people at a higher rate than the public sector. Stable government jobs have been one of the keys to upward mobility for Black families and other workers of color, thanks to the government’s robust anti-discriminatory practices.
In June 2021, then-President Joe Biden signed an executive order that would make the federal government an even more diverse workplace. The Government Accountability Office later released a report on the diversity of the federal workforce, concluding that there had been small increases of representation of racial minority groups and that the federal workforce had a higher percentage of people of color than the civilian one.
Trump took efforts to roll back that progress as soon as he was in office. On his first day, he signed an executive order that called the Biden administration efforts an “infiltration.”
“The Biden Administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military,” the order said.
The Trump administration went on to set up an email account where federal workers could report their colleagues for doing DEI work (it was, unsurprisingly, flooded with jokes and spam) and workers were not allowed to change their titles to remove DEI-related terms in order to avoid being fired.
The anti-DEI orders sent a shockwave through the federal workforce — and left officials scrambling to figure out how they should be interpreted and implemented.
Government agencies understood the order to mean that even the mention of diversity or equity was to be banned. The Smithsonian Institution, which oversees many of the popular museums in Washington, D.C., and gets the bulk of its funding from the federal government, shut down its diversity office.
The U.S. Air Force announced that it would stop using videos about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black military pilots, in courses for new recruits in order to comply with Trump’s order. (It later reversed its decision after backlash.)
Targeting DEI programs is not the only way Trump has been looking to shrink the government. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s policy planfor the administration, calls for drastically reducing headcount at many agencies.
This week, the Office of Personnel and Management offered a “buyout” to the vast majority of employees that amounts to eight months of pay. Federal workers unions are urging workers to not take the deal because it’s unclear if OPM has the authority to make such deals.
There’s evidence that such massive cuts will disproportionately harm workers of color. During government shutdowns, when the federal government ceases operations because Congress could not come to an agreement on funding, Black people and other workers of color frequently bear the brunt of being furloughed.
In the wake of Trump’s orders, conservatives have been calling out federal workers of color and even advocating for them to lose their jobs.
Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Mo.), posted to his X (formerly Twitter) account a photo of a Black woman employed at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, alleging that she changed her title in order to evade the DEI ban. (He also called for the agency to be abolished.) It’s not clear why Boykin’s title was changed.
Chaya Raichik, who attacks teachers, immigrants and liberals on her Libs of TikTok X account — which has more than 4 million followers — posted a photo of a Black National Weather Service employee, calling for her termination.
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“Patricia Brown is the DEI director at the National Weather Service,” Raichik said in a post last week. “Has she been fired yet? This page is still up.”