The biggest story of the past week was, of course, Donald Trump’s return to the White House and his quick action on numerous policy fronts through a flurry of sweeping executive orders and other initiatives. The volume of actions reflected an extremely effective strategy, as the press and activists have been relatively quiet about the most important of those orders thus far.
Of all the policy changes Trump enacted in his first week, one stands out as the most momentous: his bold decision to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion policies throughout the federal government and, even more daringly, to end affirmative action in federal hiring and employment.
Eliminating affirmative action in the 60th year since its adoption by President Lyndon Johnson is a historic action, at least as important as Johnson’s original executive order imposing the policy.
Trump’s Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity directive ordered the executive branch to stop pushing DEI and affirmative action immediately. Trump backed that up by immediately putting all federal government DEI staff on paid administrative leave and requiring the termination of all their offices, positions, and programs within 60 days.
Trump further directed the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs immediately to cease “Promoting ‘diversity,’” stop “Holding Federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for taking ‘affirmative action,’” and no longer allow or encourage contractors and subcontractors with the federal government “to engage in workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin.”
That covers an amazing amount of ground because the federal government is a big customer for the nation’s businesses. As a Wall Street Journal analysis noted on Friday, “Most big American companies plus thousands of small ones sell goods and services, such as toilet paper, jet fighters and website design, to the U.S. government. The government uses its clout to mandate policies on everything from their wages to workforce diversity practices.”
That amounted to around $759 billion in contracts with private companies in 2023, for businesses employing approximately 20 percent of all U.S. workers.
On top of that, the new rules will affect much more than the firms that do business directly with the feds. “[R]ules for federal contractors — typically well-known companies whose policies tend to influence other firms — are likely to ripple out to other employers,” the article noted.
In addition, “one executive order asks the attorney general to submit a report to the White House within four months with recommendations to ‘encourage’ private companies ‘to end illegal discrimination and preferences, including DEI,’” the article reported. This directive could extend beyond businesses to include countless other institutions, Trump’s EO stated: “[E]ach agency shall identify up to 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.”
Together, these directives “have the potential to revamp DEI at thousands of private workplaces across the country,” the Journal observed — and well beyond, as the above quote from Trump’s EO demonstrated.
The executive orders are intended to root out what Trump calls “dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences” that “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement” throughout all the nation’s institutions via government-enforced discrimination based on “how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing,” as stated in Trump’s order on Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.
What Trump has set out to do is nothing less than start the process of dismantling the regime of race– and sex-based discrimination that Johnson set in motion six decades ago. Trump has explicitly stated that his motive is to restore the idea of merit as the basis for judgments about rewards for individual initiative. Along with political decentralization, meritocracy was one of the key principles that made the American experiment such a success in the nation’s first two centuries.
The rejection of those principles that began in the 1960s has brought an acceleration of social disorder, economic turmoil, and discrimination instead of the promised peace, prosperity, and fairness. The elevation of merit above birth is now in the foreground as a central element of Trump’s intended return to traditional American values. This emphasis on merit is in fact central to all the executive orders and other actions Trump took in his first week back in office.
There will be plenty of resistance to Trump’s efforts. It has already begun, in fact, with filings of lawsuits and the typical blast of media hysteria and misrepresentations. The blowback specific to the affirmative action orders, however, has been muffled by the overall stunned reaction from the leftist corporate media and other political activists toward Trump’s first week of reforms.
In addition to reflecting the nation’s founding values, Trump’s EOs would restore Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colorblind society instead of one ruled by a government increasingly intent on micromanaging the distribution and redistribution of the fruits of people’s investments of labor and capital. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board noted: “It’s appropriate the President signed the order just after Martin Luther King Jr. Day. King called America to its better self — by making good on its founding promise that people would be judged on their character and merit.”
That would indeed be a big change.
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