Trump turned a govt-wide initiative to promote diversity in the federal workforce into a political cudgel

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One of Trump's first acts as president was an executive order to “revoke federal DEI requirements,” a move in line with his promise to “terminate federal staffers implementing DEI policies,” an initiative by his predacessor, Joe Biden, which provided agencies with “information, resources and a methodology to assess” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility in their workforce. Biden’s executive order aimed to establish a “government-wide initiative to promote diversity” in the federal workforce.

“This week I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life,” Trump said during his inaugural address. “We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.”

It should come as no surprise that this promise turned out to be directed at all Americans, as Trump's DEI order has been used to just gut any program or workforce he disgagees with or objects to; not on any legitimate or even any attempt to reconcile that complaint with any iof the cuts, except to claim that "DEI' was a component in the hiring or retention of the terminated workers, or the eliminated funding.

The initiative was mostly outreach and retention efforts for a government which could only benefit from casting a wider net in a larger pool of potential candidates for public service.

Trump's effort not only intends to reduce and eliminate the opportunity for black and brown people (and women, physically challenged; LGBTQ: and others who aren't white maga males) in a federal government which has long employed a slightly larger share of minorities in their workforce than in the rest of society, but intends to just slice workers and programs across the board as he promotes and tells lies about them to the public, and to the courts in which his challenges are being heard by dilly-dallying judges who see no urgency in slowing or halting this open discrimination that has such devastating collateral consequences.

All of the talk about Trump engineering a 'cultural shift' is just putting a gloss over a revival of a new 'Jim Crow' era where black and brown Americans, women, LGBTQ, and others this president and administration arbitrarily, unilaterally determine have no merit to hold their positions in government, or even private businesses, are legislated out of opportunity by the federal government who has signaled they will be more than accommodating to others in the nation who will similarly discriminate against these singled-out inhabitants.

Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees called Trump's efforts “a smokescreen for firing civil servants, undermining the apolitical civil service, and turning the federal government into an army of yes-men loyal only to the president, not the Constitution.”

Every acquiescence to this president and his administration's denigration of diversity and attacks on minorities emboldens them to project even more of their deliberately divisive and opportunistic discrimination and racism to each and every instigation of the federal government and society.

"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, our army and our navy. These are not our reliance against tyranny. All of those may be turned against us without making us weaker for the struggle.

Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in us. Our defense is in the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands everywhere.

Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them.

Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you."

__Abraham Lincoln, Edwardsville, Illinois 09-11-1858 as reported in the Alton Weekly Courier.