JABIN BOTSFORD / THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES
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On Wednesday evening, newly appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi distributed over a dozen memos to multiple divisions within the Department of Justice (DOJ), including one signaling that private-sector DEI initiatives may face potential criminal investigation under a recent executive order by President Donald Trump.
“President Trump issued Executive Order 14173 … making clear that policies relating to ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (“DEI”) and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (“DEIA”) ‘violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws’ and ‘undermine our national unity,’” the memo states.
Trump’s Executive Order 14173 mandates the dismantling of DEI programs within the federal government and halts related hiring, mischaracterizing these initiatives as discriminatory. It also directs executive branch agencies to aggressively scrutinize private-sector DEI efforts through civil compliance investigations.
While legal experts emphasize that “[w]ithout congressional action, the DEI Executive Orders alone won’t dismantle existing federal antidiscrimination laws,” civil rights advocates warn that recent actions by the Trump administration show that it is weaponizing these laws against the very groups they were designed to protect.
“[T]he administration is not only undoing decades of federal anti-discrimination policy, spanning Democratic and Republican presidential administrations alike, but also marshalling federal enforcement agencies to bully both private and government entities into abandoning legal efforts to promote equity and remedy systemic discrimination,” ReNika Moore, director of the ACLU Racial Justice Program, wrote in a commentary about the order.
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