President-elect Donald Trump pledged to purge bureaucrats who push the left-wing the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda and could otherwise obstruct his policy agenda. Now, following a landslide victory, he’s finally going to get his chance.
The Biden administration launched its whole-of-government approach to DEI with a pair of executive orders that left no agency unmarred by the left-wing ideology, even capturing institutions essential to America’s defense, intelligence gathering, and foreign policy operations. Federal bureaucrats now expect Trump to sign an executive order shuttering DEI offices and operations throughout executive agencies.
In total, agencies under the Biden administration are believed to have planned or taken an estimated 500 actions intended to embed and promote DEI. An ongoing series of Daily Wire investigations highlighted how the federal government has been captured by the DEI agenda, documenting some of the most extreme ways in which the ideology impacted the operations of the federal government.
DEI officials in each agency enlisted federal employees across the government to form “affinity groups” and “employee resource groups, identity-based employee organizations that effectively serve as far-left activist nodes within America’s executive agencies. The affinity groups had support from the Office of Personnel Management, the federal government’s human resources department, which said that affinity groups “support agency efforts to strategically advance DEI.”
The Trump administration could use these affinity groups to expedite its DEI purge, using membership lists to identify bureaucrats who use their post to advance woke ideology — and who could potentially seek to obstruct Trump’s agenda.
Trump will have the authority to shut down DEI offices throughout the federal government, but formally ending the infrastructure used to push the ideology within the executive branch may not be sufficient on its own to purge the doctrine from the bureaucracy.
Former Trump administration official Ben Carson told The Daily Wire that bureaucrats would often attempt to defy the president’s orders when they personally disagreed with them. “Their tendency would be to try to slow-walk things that they disagreed with,” Carson explained.
The America First Policy Institute’s James Sherk, a former Trump administration official, outlined how bureaucrats worked to block the president’s agenda through a combination of underperformance, obfuscation, and “outright insubordination.”
“Some career employees went beyond withholding information — they actively misrepresented the facts about what agencies could, or could not, do,” Sherk explained in a report for AFPI, adding that other bureaucrats “would flatly disregard political appointees’ directions and instead do what they thought best. Such insubordination and intransigence occurred commonly in some agencies and infrequently in others.”
Former White House Director of Operations for Presidential Personnel James Bacon asserted that bureaucracy’s ability to sidestep the president undermines the will of the American people, who expect those who they elect to have the power to change and enact policy.
“If the policies stay the same no matter who you elect, that’s when democracy is dead,” Bacon contends. “The founders chose Congress and the Supreme Court as the check on executive power, not the president’s staff.”
Media outlets documented this same bureaucratic resistance in the early days of the Trump administration, with Bloomberg News writing that “officials have found it best to simply delay implementation of new initiatives in hopes they may be modified or canceled” in a piece titled “Washington Bureaucrats Are Quietly Working To Undermine Trump’s Agenda.”
The Washington Post reported that Trump faced “resistance from within” as federal agents worked to halt the president’s policy agenda. “Less than two weeks into Trump’s administration, federal workers are in regular consultation with recently departed Obama-era political appointees about what they can do to push back against the new president’s initiatives,” the outlet reported.
The reports from former Trump administration officials and members of the media alike indicate that scrapping DEI on paper may not truly mark the end of the ideology and its influence on the federal government.
But the Trump administration is also expected to conduct a purge of bureaucrats who may otherwise attempt to obstruct the president’s policy agenda and work to maintain the influence of DEI and far-left ideology within the government.
Trump has announced that he will reissue his “2020 executive order restoring the president’s authority to remove woke bureaucrats.” The order in question would reclassify tens of thousands of bureaucrats and make them fireable by the executive.
These bureaucrats work under about 4,000 political appointees chosen by the president in conjunction with his Presidential Personnel Office. But, unlike these appointees, the bureaucrats maintain their employment across presidential administrations — even those they may be hostile towards.
The executive order, which Trump signed but which could not be fully implemented before he left office, would remove civil service protections from those bureaucrats, who some say are excessively difficult to fire.
It is only one of the ways that Trump could potentially ensure that the executive agencies comply with his policies, however. As president, Trump will also be able to work with Congress to rescind funding from agencies he deems bloated or insolent, offering him another lever to use against bureaucrats who he believes may undermine his agenda.
The impending effort from the incoming Trump administration has reportedly already sent shockwaves throughout the administrative state.
“I would say there is a general feeling of dread among everyone,” one bureaucrat said. “We are absolutely having conversations among ourselves about whether we can stomach a round two.”
