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Top Education Department officials during the president’s prior administration routinely hailed diversity efforts. Now employees who participated in them have faced reprisals.
- Feb. 14, 2025, 12:57 p.m. ET
During President Trump’s first term, employees at the Education Department would regularly be reminded of the value of a diverse workplace from their highest-ranking leaders.
Orientation presentations for new employees devoted more than half a dozen slides to promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, and encouraged new hires to join affinity groups, become “diversity and inclusion champions” and support the department’s “diversity change agent” program.
These efforts, which had become ingrained in the department’s ethos, were not championed by career staff members or Democratic officials. They came at the urging of hard-line conservatives President Trump had appointed to run the agency, including the education secretary at the time, Betsy DeVos.
“Diversity and inclusion are the cornerstones of high organizational performance,” Ms. DeVos wrote in a 2020 memo to staff members, among a series of internal documents from that period obtained by The New York Times.
In Mr. Trump’s second term, those same principles are now forbidden lexicon — and the employees who supported them are targets.
At least 74 people in the Education Department have been put on administrative leave in a rolling crackdown by Mr. Trump aimed at eradicating D.E.I. from the federal government.
