24 January 2025

The Trump administration sent an email to thousands of federal employees on Wednesday, ordering them to report any efforts to “hide” their agencies' diversity initiatives or face “negative consequences.”

The request came after President Donald Trump banned Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) offices and programs across the government.

The emails seen by the BBC directed workers to “report all facts and circumstances” to a new government email address within 10 days.

Some employees interpreted it as a request to sell out their colleagues to the White House.

“We are absolutely terrified and overwhelmed,” said one employee at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

The Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal workforce, issued guidance requiring agency heads to send notice to their employees by 17:00 ET on Wednesday. It included a sample email that several federal employees eventually received that night.

Some employees, such as those who work at the Treasury Department, received slightly different versions of the email.

The Treasury email left out the warning about “negative consequences” of not reporting DEI initiatives, according to a copy shared with the BBC.

In one of his first actions as president, Trump signed two executive orders ending “diversity, equity and inclusion” or “DEI” programs within the federal government and announced that any employees working in those roles would be furloughed. He will be immediately placed on paid administrative leave.

Such programs are designed to increase minority participation in the workforce and educate employees about discrimination.

But critics of DEI, like Trump, say the practice itself is discriminatory because it takes race, gender, gender identity or other characteristics into account.

Trump and his allies repeatedly attacked this practice during the election campaign.

In a speech Thursday at the World Economic Conference in Davos, Switzerland, Trump declared that he was making America a “meritocracy.”

Critics of DEI praised Trump's decision.

“President Trump’s executive orders rescinding affirmative action and banning DEI programs are a milestone in American civil rights progress and a critical step toward building a color-blind society,” Yukong Mike Chao, president of the Asian American Coalition for Education, said in a statement. statement.

The group supported the US Supreme Court's successful efforts to strike down affirmative action programs on American universities.

But current federal employees, who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation, said the email they received seemed more like an attempt to intimidate employees than to make the government fairer.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

President Trump has signed a torrent of executive orders since taking office, including a federal government hiring freeze, ordering employees to return to the office and attempting to reclassify thousands of government employees to make it easier to fire them.

A Department of Health and Human Services employee who spoke to the BBC criticized the government's DEI practices, believing that while it is important to build a diverse staff and create opportunities in the health and medical fields, “identity politics has played a role in how we normally work and that is not good for workers.” . workforce”.

“But that doesn’t mean I want my colleagues to be fired,” the employee added.

He described the impact of the email and DEI orders on his agency as “a very calculated chaos.”

He said the personnel department has been confused, with questions about future hiring practices, as well as what programs and directives are allowed to continue, given Trump's broad definition of DEI.

Another HHS employee said recruitment and research grants had been frozen, and the entire department's staff was waiting to see what they could do next.

The Department of Health and Human Services, and one of its subsidiary agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), issues millions of dollars in federal grants to universities and researchers around the world to advance scientific research.

Agency staff fear the DEI order could have an impact outside the government as well. One asked whether grants that allowed labs to create more opportunities to hire minority scientists and medical professionals would now be eliminated.

An employee who works at the FDA told the BBC that she did not receive the email, but that all DEI-related activities had been temporarily halted.

“The elders have asked us to continue doing our jobs,” she said. “But there is a sense of fear about how this will impact our overall business.”

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