RICH LOWRY: Trump’s epic anti-DEI executive order

We’re only days into the Trump administration, and we can already identify one of his top five achievements. With one carefully crafted act, the president initiated the end of DEI in the federal government and perhaps in the private sector and educational system as well.

It could bring about a generational change.

Trump’s directive repeals a series of executive orders promoting affirmative action, including the granddaddy of them all, President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order 11246. The implementing regulations for 11246 have created a vast archipelago of racial preferences in federal contracting. The rollback of the LBJ order alone would be momentous.

Trump’s order goes further, though. It instructs executive departments and agencies to “terminate all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs, activities, guidance, regulations, enforcement actions, consent orders and requirements.” This is not empty verbiage. The Trump administration immediately ordered diversity offices in the federal government closed and DEI workers put on administrative leave, while it suspended contracting programs that run afoul of the race- and gender-neutral standard set by Trump’s order.

The order also takes solid aim at other institutions of American life that have, through government pressure or their own initiative, embraced DEI.

A key, and correct, contention of the Trump order is that DEI’s race-consciousness practices violate federal civil-rights laws. It then uses the prospect of federal enforcement of the civil-rights laws as a stick to move private actors toward fair, colorblind policies.

The federal contracting process itself will be a massive point of leverage. The order says that in their “employment, procurement, and contracting practices” federal contractors and subcontractors cannot “consider race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion or national origin in ways that violate the nation’s civil rights laws.” The federal government doles out about $1.7 trillion in contracts and grants annually.

Then, more broadly, each federal agency is to identify nine potential civil compliance investigations “of publicly traded corporations, large nonprofit 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.” That will get the attention of the general counsels to every institution in America that falls into one of those buckets.

Finally, the order puts public education systems and institutions of higher education on notice that, if they don’t comply with the Supreme Court’s recent anti-affirmative action decision, their federal funding will be at risk.

Maybe the administration will get stymied in the inevitable legal fights. But this looks like an inflection point. Will a subsequent Democratic president reinstitute decades-worth of government quotas? It’s possible, but colorblindness has much more political appeal than racial preferences do.

Even if a new Democratic administration is encouraging of DEI, will private entities want to get whip-sawed back and forth? The safer and more rational course would be to stay out of DEI altogether and focus on their core business.

That outcome would be profoundly welcome for our society, and the first step could have been a Trump stroke of a pen.

Rich Lowry is on X @RichLowry.