The Trump administration's Department of Education has given public schools and universities across the country until the end of February to eliminate any diversity, equity, and inclusion programs they may be running or risk losing federal funding.
WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) -- The Trump administration's Department of Education (DOE) has given public schools and universities across the country two weeks to eliminate any diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs they may be running or risk losing federal funding.
In a February 14 letter, the DOE Office for Civil Rights (OCR) Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor notified school administrators that, per the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 Harvard decision striking down racial preferences in college admissions, “the test is simple: If an educational institution treats a person of one race differently than it treats another person because of that person’s race, the educational institution violates the law. Federal law thus prohibits covered entities from using race in decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation, financial aid, scholarships, prizes, administrative support, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and all other aspects of student, academic, and campus life.”
But unlawful discrimination can take more forms than that, the letter states. “DEI programs, for example, frequently preference certain racial groups and teach students that certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens that others do not. Such programs stigmatize students who belong to particular racial groups based on crude racial stereotypes. Consequently, they deny students the ability to participate fully in the life of a school.”
“The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions,” Trainor declared. Accordingly, institutions have until February 28 to “(1) ensure that their policies and actions comply with existing civil rights law; (2) cease all efforts to circumvent prohibitions on the use of race by relying on proxies or other indirect means to accomplish such ends; and (3) cease all reliance on third-party contractors, clearinghouses, or aggregators that are being used by institutions in an effort to circumvent prohibited uses of race.”
The indoctrination of children with left-wing ideology on sexuality, race, and other left-wing agenda items has long been a major concern in American public schools, from libraries to athletic and restroom policy to drag events to classroom materials to even “transitioning” troubled children without parental input. Many schools have also displayed hostility to the rights and employment of individual teachers who refuse to go along with such agendas.
More than 30 states have introduced legislation that would eliminate DEI programs from education as part of a broader push against so-called “woke ideology” spearheaded by Republicans such as Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Conservatives have long criticized DEI and other forms of identity politics for stroking rather than curing division and focusing education toward left-wing political indoctrination at the expense of traditional learning.
In May 2024, insiders from the University of California-Los Angeles’ (UCLA’s) prestigious David Geffen School of Medicine warned that the school’s diversity fixation had led to a crisis in which more than half of students in various cohorts admitted since 2020 fail standardized tests for basic medical knowledge of subjects ranging from emergency medicine and family medicine to internal medicine and pediatrics.
The Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) project is currently conducting a thorough review of federal executive-branch spending and previously cut $881 million worth of contracts at the Department of Education, including 29 DEI training grants.
