Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog

As president elect, Donald Trump has already begun discussing his plans to weed out “Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats” from the nation’s universities and to take aim at schools that continue to discriminate by race “under the guise of equity.”

But dismantling the federal government’s massive DEI bureaucracy, which has ballooned under the direction of President Joe Biden, and rooting out illiberal and unconstitutional racial preferences the Left has deeply embedded into the government and into law will be a yearslong effort, conservative civil-rights lawyers and activists told National Review.

“This is not a short-term project,” said Dan Morenoff, executive director of the American Civil Rights Project, which specializes in fighting identity-based discrimination.

Undoing the Biden administration’s “Equity Agenda” will take not only executive orders from Trump, but also congressional action, efforts by Trump-appointed agency heads, notice-and-comment rulemaking, and likely continued lawsuits from civil-rights groups.

“The president has some real power to get this ball rolling and to dictate where the ball is going, but there are things that are going to take some additional steps,” Morenoff said.

Taking office in the wake of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis and the racial-justice riots that engulfed many American cities, Biden — who owed his presidency to support from the black community — made so-called equity an immediate priority.

On his first day in office, Biden signed Executive Order 13985, or Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government, in part to combat the “systemic racism” he claimed still plagues the nation’s institutions. But even as his administration lost repeatedly in the courts and voters soured on the concept, Biden doubled down with additional orders and a whole-of-government approach to DEI, preferences for select minority groups, and identity politics.

Biden commanded the heads of federal departments and agencies to establish Equity Teams, which were directed to submit annual Equity Action plans to the White House.

A report last month from Do No Harm, a medical watchdog, identified over 500 active or planned DEI actions by federal agencies. A new report from Open the Books, a government transparency group, found that the Department of Health and Human Services alone has about 300 staffers dedicated to diversity at an annual cost of $38.7 million.

Under Biden, aid to small businesses and farmers, contracts, scholarships for students, homeless services, and community-development funds for local governments were all provided with an eye on benefiting certain, often arbitrarily defined, minority groups.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), a conservative law firm that has successfully fought the Biden administration’s discriminatory programs in court, has counted more than 60 programs written into the U.S. Code that continue to provide grants, rebates, set-asides, preferences, waivers, price caps, and discounts based on racial preferences.

Dan Lennington, a WILL lawyer, said Biden’s plan was to “re-orient the entire federal bureaucracy towards eliminating all racial disparities. And what that meant was that in every area — assistance to farmers, to small businesses, in health care, all facets of American life — Biden directed the federal bureaucracy to treat racial groups differently, to give a benefit to some and not a benefit to others.”

In addition to signing executive orders, Biden was “tremendously successful” at signing racial preferences into law through the American Rescue Plan Act, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, and the Inflation Reduction Act, Lennington said. Some of those set-asides have been blocked by the courts, including a loan-forgiveness program for black farmers, but many others remain.

All Biden’s social justice executive orders need to be cancelled and replaced by Trump, and all statutory instances need to be repealed.

With President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, radical and discriminatory Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs could be — finally — on the way out.

DEI has captured almost every level of education and government.

Our CriticalRace.org project has documented how deeply DEI permeates higher education, medical schools and even elite private boarding schools.

The Biden-Harris team itself was birthed by DEI, after then-candidate Joe Biden came under intense pressure to pick a “woman of color” as his running mate.

His choice, Kamala Harris, fully embraced DEI in her 2024 campaign, even creating Zoom calls for different racial, ethnic and sex-based interest groups: “White Women for Harris,” “white dudes,” “black women” and so on.

Turns out, voters didn’t buy Harris or the DEI she was selling

Trump’s win, driven by a broad multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-religious coalition, puts DEI on life support.

It’s time to pull the plug and let DEI die.

In a July 2023 video posted as part of his Agenda 47 policy series, Trump focused heavily on his promise “to fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.”

Elon Musk, Trump’s new government-efficiency adviser, re-circulated the video this week, indicating its importance in the president-elect’s agenda.

Focusing on accreditors will make a real difference long-term.

The US Department of Education has oversight authority over higher education accreditation agencies — and groups like the American Bar Association, for example, use legislative-appointed near-monopoly status as a means of driving DEI into universities and graduate schools.

Trump has also promised that his Department of Justice will “pursue federal civil rights cases against schools that continue to engage in racial discrimination,” defying the Supreme Court’s landmark 2023 decision outlawing affirmative action in admissions

We are all for that, but to ramp up the pressure Trump should also empower private parties to pursue those actions.

Our Equal Protection Project has filed more than 40 civil rights complaints with the Department of Education, leading half of the schools involved to change or drop discriminatory criteria after adverse publicity and public shaming.

But don’t leave it to slow-acting government agencies alone to do this work: Trump can also work with Congress to empower groups like ours, giving us standing to sue in court in our own name under civil rights laws and agency regulations.

Individual victims of DEI often fear retribution and will not sue in their own name, so their grievances go unanswered.

If advocacy groups have standing in court, we can pursue their cases while protecting victims’ safety.

All of the above are systemic changes that will have a lasting impact.

But the quickest fix should be Trump’s highest priority: Cutting off the supply of money that feeds the DEI industrial complex on campuses and elsewhere.

People are entitled to their viewpoints, but they are not entitled to federal money to promote discriminatory conduct.

The federal government must eliminate funding for any program, anywhere in the federal government, that includes race- or ethnicity-based eligibility or preferences — including the use of DEI statements for admission, hiring or promotion.

Indeed, it’s also time to cut federal funding completely for any institution, public or private, educational or otherwise, that uses such discriminatory DEI criteria.

This is all good advice, but it’s easier said than done. If you’re going to get that legislation passed, it has to be part of Trump’s first budget where it cane be passed through reconciliation, because wokeness is still the Democratic Party’s religion, and they will filibuster any attempt to purge the bureaucracy. You’ll probably need to at least amend the Pendleton Act as part of the budget process to specify that Administration’s power to lay off employees, and the senate needs to have the starch to let Trump kill off vast swathes of government agencies. No phase outs, no “oh, look at the out-year savings” shenanigans. Hundreds of departments and agencies need to be eliminated, not pruned. Zeros don’t grow back.

As we recently reported, President-elect Trump pledged to set up a Task Force to look at the infiltration of DEI into the U.S. military…You remember Matt Lohmeier. He is the former Space Force Lieutenant Colonel squadron commander who was fired, forced to resign without a pension just before his retirement date and subjected to an Inspector General investigation within the Pentagon after publishing his bestselling book, Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military, which tore the lid off the military’s obsession with racist and radical “woke” ideologies.

Matt participated in a seminar Legal Insurrection held in 2022 about DEI seeping its way into the curriculum at the service academies, Saving the Military Service Academies from Wokeness, and I attended an event Matt spoke at in Arizona in the summer of 2023: Matthew Lohmeier – a Tour de Force Supporting our Military Members. Matthew Lohmeier during his presentation:

And, as we reported, President-elect Trump has pledged to appoint Matt to the Task Force charged with dismantling DEI in the U.S. military. [And] on Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported that President-elect Trump is indeed considering cleaning house at the Pentagon:

Trump Draft Executive Order Would Create Board to Purge Generals:

The Trump transition team is considering a draft executive order that establishes a “warrior board” of retired senior military personnel with the power to review three- and four-star officers and to recommend removals of any deemed unfit for leadership.

If Donald Trump approves the order, it could fast-track the removal of generals and admirals found to be “lacking in requisite leadership qualities,” according to a draft of the order reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. But it could also create a chilling effect on top military officers, given the president-elect’s past vow to fire “woke generals,” referring to officers seen as promoting diversity in the ranks at the expense of military readiness.

Note how the writer tries to cast this as a negative through the use of the phrase “chilling effect,” but what the writer fails to emphasize is that the current leadership in the Pentagon is all about wokeness and identity politics over merit, to the detriment of the national defense, as we have repeatedly reported:

• New Documents Detail Air Force’s Plan to Cut Number of White Male Officers
• Space Force Personnel Chief Walks Back General’s LGBTQ+ Personnel Assignment Policy
• Air Force Colonel, Selected for Promotion to Brigadier General, Pushes DEI, CRT, and Racist Dogma
• Next Space Force Commander Grilled Over Firing of Space Force Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Lohmeier
• Joint Chiefs Chairman Nominee Soft Pedals His Prior Racist Policies in Confirmation Hearing
• Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley’s Replacement Even More Woke, If That is Possible

The writer also fails to mention that when Barack Obama took over, he purged 197 Generals and Admirals from the ranks, no doubt to re-make the U.S. military in his image: Obama’s Military Coup Purges 197 Officers In Five Years.

In any case, given the current crop of senior military officers and their dedication to all things DEI, cleaning house is definitely in order to make sure the U.S. military returns to a focus on engaging with and killing the enemy, not being a laboratory for the latest left-wing social experiments.

Our military needs real warriors, not social justice warriors.

The Texas A&M University (TAMU) System’s Board of Regents unanimously voted to remove 52 “low-producing” academic programs on November 7, including its controversial “LGBTQ Studies” undergraduate minor, after failing to pass certain threshold requirements recently established by the provost.

The board proposed a resolution on October 29 to eliminate 14 minors and 38 certificate programs found to be “low-producing” after they “reviewed minors and certificate programs to ensure adequate student interest and demand and to eliminate inefficient and low-producing programs,” according to new course thresholds designed by the Office of the Provost.

Per the new requirements proposed by Texas A&M University Provost Alan Sams, in order to maintain an active status as an A&M minor, the program must have graduated “a minimum of 10 students” within the past two school years as well as have at least five students plus five graduates enrolled in the current school year — thresholds the LGBTQ Studies and 13 other A&M minors allegedly fail to meet.

The board directed university President Mark Welsh III to “take actions necessary” for the elimination of such programs, including minors such as LGBTQ Studies, Global Art Design, and Asian Studies, and certificates including Regulatory Science in Food Systems, Cultural Competency, and Landscape Management.