February 16, 2025
Leaked documents reveal Musk had always planned to fire workers tied to DEI roles, even if not explicitly labeled as such.
Donald Trump has made no secret of his disdain for diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, and to that end, leaked documents from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) show that the attacks are about to escalate to a full-on war over the next six months.
According to The Washington Post, DOGE employees will be pruning the jobs of staffers who do not work in DEI roles and who work in offices that were established to protect equal rights, such as the EEOC, an office of Veterans Affairs which helps veterans receive equal access to much needed care, and an office within Health and Human Services that provides information about the health of various minority populations.
Per the leaked documents, which the Post reports comes from workers within DOGE, the next step of Musk and his Silicon Valley rejects is to fire a number of workers whose roles are not explicitly DEI roles, but are determined to be related to DEI.
This distinction does not have much clarity at the moment, but the workers seem to be fairly certain that these moves will trigger another wave of legal challenges as they are most likely illegal, as is much of what Elon Musk and DOGE are doing in the federal government.
The White House, however, is backing whatever DOGE decides to do, positioning the actions of DOGE to eliminate DEI as a check against waste, fraud, and abuse, per a White House spokesman’s comments to the Post on Feb. 14. The implication here, undoubtedly, is that DEI programs themselves are wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive.
“The White House’s position is that we are ridding the federal government of DEI, full stop,” a White House spokesman said. “DOGE is there as a collaborator ensuring that we get rid of waste, fraud and abuse. And if DEI is waste, fraud and abuse, it’s gone.”
DEI, in the conservative imagination, has largely become synonymous with Black Americans, but the term actually refers to large swaths of the population like disabled persons, veterans, women, any ethnic minority, individuals under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, and more, and in a society like the United States, all of these groups will feel the impacts of an administration which wants to return to a rule of white supremacists, some of whom advise Trump on diversity, equity and inclusion policy, like Stephen Miller.
According to Politico, DOGE and the Department of Education have already threatened to pull funding from state education departments if public schools and universities do not comply with their mandate to remove all diversity, equity, and inclusion programming within 14 days of receiving a letter penned by the department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, Craig Trainor.
The letter, they report, bases much of its argument on the 2023 Supreme Court decision to roll back decades of progress and rule that affirmative action is unconstitutional, arguing that the decision by the court sets forth a framework which the department is thus free to apply in a broader context.
As Trainor writes, “The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent.”
Democrats have already denounced Trainor’s letter as illegal, and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash) said in a press release that the letter is yet another example of the Trump Administration (and DOGE) overstepping their legal bounds to target whatever they think is related to DEI.
“This threat to rip away the federal funding our public K-12 schools and colleges receive flies in the face of the law. I hope no parent, student, or teacher is intimidated by these threats—this former preschool teacher certainly is not. While it’s anyone’s guess what falls under the Trump administration’s definition of ‘DEI’, there is simply no authority or basis for Trump to impose such a mandate. In fact, federal laws prohibit ANY president from telling schools and colleges what to teach, including the Every Student Succeeds Act, that I negotiated with Republicans. I refuse to let Trump and Elon try to bully our schools from teaching students basic and important topics like the history of slavery or treatment of indigenous people in America or the powerful contributions of the civil rights movement,” Murray stated in the press release.
RELATED CONTENT: NY AG Letitia James Slaps Trump Admin And Elon Musk With Lawsuit Over Alleged Treasury Data Breach
