By Andrea Shalal and Matt Spetalnick
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. agencies under new President Donald Trump are pushing to implement his mandates to reshape the federal bureaucracy, encouraging workers to report any clandestine efforts to maintain diversity programs and sidelining more than 150 national security and foreign policy officials.
The Republican president has made little secret of his disdain for the sprawling federal workforce and in particular for diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which promote opportunities for women, ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ people and other traditionally underrepresented groups.
In a speech delivered via video on Thursday to the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, Trump said his orders ending DEI programs would make America a “merit-based country” once again.
“These are policies that were absolute nonsense, throughout the government and the private sector,” he said.
Civil rights advocates say the DEI programs are needed to address longstanding inequities and structural racism, but Trump and his supporters say the efforts end up unfairly discriminating against other Americans.
A memo distributed to thousands of federal workers across the government on Wednesday commanded employees to turn in co-workers who sought to “disguise” DEI efforts by using “coded language,” warning that a failure to report relevant information would trigger “adverse consequences.”
The messages carried the imprimatur of top-level Trump appointees: the State Department memo was signed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for instance, while the Veterans Affairs Department email was signed by acting Secretary of Veterans Affairs Todd Hunter.
Officials overseeing DEI programs in numerous agencies and departments were put on leave on Wednesday, and their offices were set for permanent closure by month’s end.
There were other signs that Trump’s order was having an impact. The U.S. Federal Reserve has scrubbed a “Diversity and Inclusion” section from its website, with previous links to a statement of the central bank’s diversity standards and data on the racial, ethnic and gender makeup of its economists and researchers now defaulting to the homepage.
The steps against diversity were part of Trump’s broader campaign targeting the federal bureaucracy, which he has sometimes disparaged as the “deep state” secretly working against his agenda.
About 160 staff members at the National Security Council, which draws from the State Department, the Pentagon and other parts of the U.S. government, were told during a brief call on Wednesday to turn in their devices and badges and head home, three former NSC officials told Reuters.
A spokesperson for the NSC, Brian Hughes, said Trump’s national security adviser, Mike Waltz, had authorized a full staff review.
“It is entirely appropriate for Mr. Waltz to ensure NSC personnel are committed to implementing President Trump’s America First agenda to protect our national security and wisely use the tax dollars of America’s working men and women,” Hughes said.
The news came as a surprise to the staffers, who had been expecting new assignments or perhaps a pep talk, according to one of the former officials who spoke with colleagues who were on the call.
The employees, known as “detailees” – career diplomats, military officials and civil servants – were not fired, and many will likely return to their home agencies, another said.
But the move leaves the council lacking the expertise to respond quickly to domestic or foreign crises, and could actually make it harder for the Trump administration to implement foreign policy, the former officials said.
It was not immediately clear how many employees were left at the NSC. Some 70 people were political appointees who left with the Biden administration, and about 60 new officials entered with the Trump administration, sources said.
REMOVING JOB PROTECTIONS
Trump has frozen virtually all federal hiring and signed an executive order on his first day in office on Monday that would allow his administration to fire at will tens of thousands of career civil servants, who historically have enjoyed job protections that insulate them from political partisanship.
The order, known as Schedule F, would permit Trump to fill those positions with hand-picked loyalists. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents about 150,000 workers in three dozen agencies, filed a lawsuit challenging the move.
“This gleeful hatred of the federal workforce will lead to nothing good,” Democratic Senator Tim Kaine, who represents 140,000 federal workers in Virginia, told reporters.
Trump has also sought to dissuade private companies that receive government contracts from using DEI programs and has asked government agencies to identify any that might be subject to civil investigation.
In a Tuesday order, Trump rescinded a 1965 executive order requiring federal contractors to use affirmative action to ensure equal opportunity and banning them from discriminating in employment practices.
The decades-old order, signed by Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson, was seen as a significant moment of progress in the civil rights movement, coming at a time when Black Americans faced the threat of violence and “Jim Crow” laws that prohibited them from voting and from living in predominantly white neighborhoods.
The federal government committed $739 billion to contractors in fiscal year 2023, according to the Government Accountability Office.
(Reporting by Andrea Shalal and Matt Spetalnick; Additional reporting by Bo Erickson, Humeyra Pamuk, Daniel Trotta, Bianca Flowers and David Ljunggren; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Scott Malone and Howard Goller)
