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Executive Order Ends DEI Efforts in Government, Federal Contracting

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order directing all executive departments and agencies to end all discriminatory preferences, including diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs.

The White House said Tuesday the EO titled Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity revoked several executive actions promoting DEI within the federal government and among federal contractors and subcontractors.

According to the new policy, the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs should immediately end holding federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for advancing “affirmative action.”

The office should also cease efforts to encourage or allow contractors to “engage in workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin.”

In his EO, Trump said that diversity initiatives “violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws” and “undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system.”

Ending Diversity Efforts in the Private Sector

The Trump policy also calls for the U.S. attorney general to submit a report by May “containing recommendations for enforcing Federal civil-rights laws and taking other appropriate measures to encourage the private sector to end illegal discrimination and preferences, including DEI.”

The report should identify the “key sectors of concern within each agency’s jurisdiction,” include a plan containing measures aimed at deterring illegal DEI principles or programs and determine the “most egregious and discriminatory DEI practitioners in each sector of concern,” among others.

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