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On only the second day of the second Trump administration, thousands of federal government workers received an ominous email from the heads of their respective departments. The directive, signed variously by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the State Department and acting Attorney General James McHenry at the Justice Department, obligated government workers to undertake a personal hunt-and-destroy mission for “contracts” and “projects” that might be secretly sympathetic to existing Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility policies.
This new directive wasn’t just a renunciation of DEI programs—that was long promised and much messaged. The language of the new orders was explicitly threatening “adverse consequences” for anyone failing to report on their knowledge of secret, subversive DEIA sympathizers within 10 days. Some emails characterized DEIA as a “shameful” and “discriminatory” attempt to undermine “traditional American values” like “hard work” and “individual achievement.” This wasn’t just a call to narc. It was an express threat of punishment for anyone who failed to promptly report anyone associated with allegedly hidden DEIA programs.
The emails were evidently received by workers in all federal agencies, even independent agencies such as NASA, but the most exhaustive version came from Rubio in a four-page memorandum which cited seven different executive orders signed by Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden that were being countermanded. Rubio even included in his list forbidden “concepts” like those that might be contained in the National Plan to End Gender-Based Violence, one supposes to correct for the DEIA (and reality-based) notion that women are disproportionately victims of violence by men.
The emails were greeted with jaw-dropping horror by their recipients, to judge only by my buzzing phone, as friends and clients—I was unaware some were even federal workers—sent screenshot after screenshot of the emails. People from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of Labor, Department of Justice, and even an immigration judge reached out to me.
The country has been on notice that this day might be coming since Oct. 21, 2020, when Donald Trump issued Executive Order 13957, which had required the heads of all federal agencies to recommend federal civil service positions that could be reclassified as “Schedule F,” converting thousands of federal workers into at-will employees, stripping them of long-standing protections against discrimination for myriad reasons, including political. Trump lost the election and the policy never had a chance to take root, and then Biden promptly rescinded it when he assumed office.
Only days before Trump’s second inauguration, Sen. Tim Kaine, in an apparent attempt to head off Schedule F’s reemergence, introduced a bipartisan bill called the Saving the Civil Service Act, the stated purpose of which is to protect the federal workforce from “politicization and political manipulation.” But on Day 1 of Trump’s second term, he reinstated Executive Order 13957, making only a handful of mostly cosmetic changes, such as changing the designation “Schedule F” to “Schedule Policy/Career.”
Of course, Wednesday’s emails went out to all federal employees, irrespective of their employment or designation, but the theme was the same: Trump, fearing dissent and imagining enemies everywhere, is again reshaping the federal workforce to prize not expertise but loyalty, and is determined to not relive the mistakes of his first term, when he was thwarted by Cabinet members and the civil servants he characterized as members of the “deep state” declining to indulge his every whim, lawful or otherwise.
The greater irony here is that the ostensible basis for this attack on DEIA is that “hard work, merit, and equality” will be swapping seats with undeserving DEIA policies, when it’s plain to see that Trump only prizes loyalty and fealty. “Hard work, merit, and equality” will become the victims in the coming days, not the prized values. As Kaine suggested when introducing his bill, top talent won’t join the American workforce “if they know they can be fired on a whim based on their politics.” The people who will be fired, whispered about, and disparaged? They will be disproportionately people of color, who were funneled into DEIA roles in their various agencies.
These emails, despite the inclusion of empty paeans to meritocracy, are clearly designed to divide workers on the basis of loyalty alone. It wouldn’t be accurate to describe them as “chilling” because the clear purpose of the emails isn’t to silence—but rather quite the opposite.
The emails appear designed to pit federal workers against one other, granting carrots to the snitches and wielding sticks over the silent. The incoming administration is essentially bypassing human resources in favor of a wholesale Lord of the Flies approach: Let the workers hash out the first round of staffing cuts among themselves, conveniently revealing which go-getters really want the conch, and who, by their silence or by virtue of being ratted out by their co-workers, are tagged as disloyal; federal agencies will be hollowed out, not by any meaningful metric, but because workers will be turned against their colleagues, on penalty of reprisals, should they fail to root out some unknowable DEIA-based infraction.
This Machiavellian loyalty-reveal technique could have been about almost anything, but no issue probably suits Trump’s purpose better than DEIA because it serves as a proxy for party preference. Compelling workers to confess their party affiliation would be a cleaner tell, but the law still prohibits this. For now, anyway.
As a relevant aside, it’s worth noting that “Accessibility” has sneaked in, converting the pejorative use of “DEI” to “DEIA.” Is the Americans with Disabilities Act the next target? Are Republicans planning on demolishing wheelchair ramps at libraries? While it might still seem to be in the realm of the unthinkable, influential right-wing figures such as Christopher Rufo and Charlie Kirk recently took aim at sign-language interpreters “taking up half the screen” during a news conference about the Los Angeles wildfires.
The unspoken idea at the heart of every anti-DEIA argument is that for every job, there is one person more qualified than anyone else, and in this construction it is DEIA policies which prevent that one person—unerringly a white man—from achieving their own personal manifest destiny. The reality is that thousands of people can be qualified for any particular government job, and demographic groups have tended to favor their own. Left to write their own code, white men have effectuated a sort of gender and race gerrymander. It shouldn’t be a point of contention that the federal workforce should generally reflect and look like the people it serves. Effective today it is not just a point of contention, it is a sin, to be ferreted out through rumor and whisper, to be punished by reprisals, unstated but ever present.
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