President Donald Trump signed three executive orders during his first days in office that effectively brought about the end of DEI. First, he ordered all DEI employees to be placed on administrative leave. Then, with another executive order, he gave all DEI offices in the federal government 60 days to close down. Finally, he reinstated merit-based opportunities by repealing several orders from the past, one as far back as 1965 under Lyndon B. Johnson.
FULL LIST OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS, ACTIONS, AND PROCLAMATIONS TRUMP HAS MADE AS PRESIDENT
“This is stunning to me, especially because they‘re really charging this word ‘DEI’ as if it‘s something that undermines the ability for the government to hire the best people. It‘s actually the opposite of that,” Booker said on CNN News’s State of the Union Sunday. “When we‘re trying to hire the best of the best, having a more inclusive search to go to HBCU’s or Hispanic-serving institutions to find as big of an applicant pool as possible, to me, these are the kinds of things that help us to hire the best of the best.”
Meanwhile, Meta, Walmart, Target, Lowe’s, Toyota, Ford, and others have rolled back their diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. These companies will no longer make hiring and firing decisions based on race or any other identity while phasing out the phrase “DEI.”
“Donald Trump wants to try to demonize ideas of inclusion, of equity, of fairness, and that is unfortunate and frustrating. And he‘s using that as a way of ripping out entire aspects of our government that are vital,” Booker said. “Using terms like DEI as a justification for making us less safe, we should be outraged that organizations and agencies created by Congress in a bipartisan way, have now been torn down by a president who has no authority or does not have the legal justification for doing that.”
Booker continued, “They want to talk about all these things as a distraction to the truth of what they‘re doing, which is making us less safe, making government more corrupt, making violating people‘s privacy, and ultimately, how‘s that lower costs working for Americans?”
Govs. Patrick Morissey (D-WV), Ron DeSantis (R-FL), and Kevin Stitt (R-OK) signed similar orders to eliminate DEI in their respective state governments. More efforts to root out the practice are underway in Kentucky, North Carolina, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and Texas.
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A renewed debate over DEI heightened when Trump alluded that diversity, equity, and inclusion policies could have had something to do with the crash at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport last month.
Trump has not explained the evidence that DEI hiring practices caused the crash. Out of the entire Transportation Department, Secretary Sean Duffy confirmed that the Federal Aviation Administration is the only agency that had an active DEI policy until he took office. The FAA manages the employees that work at various control towers in every airport across the nation Duffy explained that during the Biden administration, entrance exam scores were lowered to get people into air traffic control school.
