Trump's Anti-DEI Push Erodes Civil Rights & Enacts Key Project 2025 Goal
Under the guise of an anti-DEI crackdown, Trump revoked a foundational civil rights era executive order and targeted companies that prioritize diversity—all while echoing Project 2025 almost verbatim.
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We’re only a few days into President Trump’s second term, and so far, he has behaved exactly as many of us warned. Trump has taken multiple executive actions straight out of the Project 2025 playbook, as predicted.
From Trump’s immigration orders, his reinstatement of Schedule F to make firing civil servants easier, his executive order targeting trans rights, and his environmental regulation rollbacks, Trump is proving that those who were deemed “alarmists” for calling out the fact Trump’s Agenda 47 aligns directly with Project 2025 are actually realists.
There’s one policy area in particular where President Trump’s executive orders echo Project 2025 almost verbatim, and that’s Trump’s targeting of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. But, as we’ve seen, Trump isn’t simply targeting DEI. He’s targeting civil rights.
Just as anti-Critical Race Theory (CRT) efforts became a catch-all method to target the teaching of civil rights education more broadly, anti-DEI efforts have become a smokescreen to target fundamental civil rights era anti-discrimination policies.
DEI is mentioned at least 39 times in the 920-page Project 2025 policy playbook. Project 2025 explicitly calls for the elimination of all federal DEI programs and calls for the prosecution of “local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” who implement DEI policies. It mentions this all under the guise of targeting discrimination, which they falsely equate with DEI.
This week, President Trump signed executive orders that seek to accomplish much of what Project 2025 laid out, and he uses the same anti-discrimination pretenses.
After ending all federal DEI initiatives on Monday, in a Tuesday executive order, President Trump revoked a foundational anti-discrimination executive order from the civil rights era. Trump’s order, titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” doesn’t end illegal discrimination or promote merit-based opportunity. It permits it.
Trump’s executive order terminates all DEI practices in the federal government and revokes decades of executive orders from the Clinton and Obama administrations. It goes even further. Trump rolled back the “Equal Employment Opportunity Executive Order 11246” of September 24, 1965, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ).
This LBJ executive order enforced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and prohibited federal contractors from discriminating “against any employee or applicant for employment because of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.” It also called for contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.” That concept of “affirmative action” became a focal point of decades of right-wing opposition.
LBJ’s executive order has been the government’s key anti-discrimination enforcement mechanism for federal contractors for 60 years, opening up opportunities for people of color and women who were eager to work for these companies. But this change didn’t come without pushback.
The Heritage Foundation, which now leads Project 2025, published a 1985 report entitled “Revising Executive Order 11246: Fulfilling the Promise of Affirmative Action.” President Ronald Reagan wanted to fulfill the Heritage Foundation’s wishes to roll back this executive order but faced pushback. Now, Trump has finally done it.
NYU History Professor Thomas J. Sugrue talked to
about what impact Trump’s rollback of LBJ’s executive order could have in an interview published on Thursday:“The impact is going to be hindering the opportunities of minority and non-white people to get government contracts because there's been scrutiny. That matters whether or not they're in compliance… A lot of private firms are government contractors, that includes most of the major corporations in the country who are doing everything from providing office supplies to road construction materials to technology to the federal government. And so they're now released from any commitment to create or maintain a diverse workforce.”
Trump’s executive order goes even further than releasing corporations from DEI commitments. Trump declares that DEI initiatives are “illegal” and threatens private companies with potential investigations if they pursue DEI initiatives. The order reads:
“I further order all agencies to enforce our longstanding civil-rights laws and to combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.”
Trump also directs the Attorney General to work with the Director of Office and Budget Management, which would be Project 2025 architect Russell Vought if confirmed, to submit a report with “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.”
This push for the Justice Department (DOJ) to target DEI initiatives in the private sector can be found on page 561 of Project 2025’s policy playbook:
“The Attorney General and other DOJ political leadership should provide the resources and moral support needed for these efforts. The Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements.”
Project 2025 describes DEI initiatives as “discrimination,” so it’s clear that’s what they’re referring to in that paragraph.
Trump’s claims that this is all about improving merit-based hiring are meritless and contradicted by data. Studies have shown that DEI initiatives not only successfully boost diversity but also improve company performance.
Trump’s move will have a chilling effect throughout the private sector, University of South Carolina Law Professor Joseph Seiner told USA TODAY: "This is going to start a tidal wave of companies self-censoring and cutting back on those types of DEI efforts for fear of litigation with the federal government on the other end of that.”
This comes as Trump has also ordered the DOJ to halt all new civil rights cases and ordered federal employees to report their colleagues who work in DEI roles so they can be placed on paid leave.
It’s also important to understand just how similar Trump’s executive order is to Project 2025’s own language. First, let’s look at how Trump describes DEI in his executive order:
“Yet today, roughly 60 years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, critical and influential institutions of American society, including the Federal Government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race - and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) or ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ (DEIA) that can violate the civil-rights laws of this Nation… the American people have witnessed first-hand the disastrous consequences of illegal, pernicious discrimination that has prioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.”
Now, take a look at how Project 2025 describes DEI on page 561 of their policy playbook:
“Even though numerous federal laws prohibit discrimination based on notable immutable characteristics such as race and sex, the Biden Administration— through the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and other federal entities—has enshrined affirmative discrimination in all aspects of its operations under the guise of ‘equity.’ Federal agencies and their components have established so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices that have become the vehicles for this unlawful discrimination, and all departments and agencies have created ‘equity’ plans to carry out these invidious schemes.”
Trump and Project 2025 both claim that DEI, which actively seeks to include people from diverse backgrounds in various organizations, is the real form of discrimination. But what’s really happening here is that Trump is targeting foundational anti-discrimination policies under the guise of a crackdown on DEI while echoing Project 2025 almost verbatim.
Americans who voted for Trump thinking he would walk into office on day one and try to lower prices were sadly mistaken. Instead, what we’re getting is a far-right agenda that seeks to redefine who is allowed to be an American and reduce the number of people of color and women in certain organizations.
When Trump said, “Make America Great Again,” it’s now clear, more than ever, exactly how far back Trump wants to turn the clock on American progress.
Yes, Ahmed. It is so clear that Project 2025 is being implemented in full. The Heritage Foundation and The Federalist Society have been playing a long game just waiting for the right patsy to follow their marching orders. And the billionaire cabal is happy to help. Where’s that tape showing the then-candidate disavowing any knowledge of this document? Lying through his teeth as usual. Thank you for continuing to expose the rot.