The Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal workforce, issued guidance requiring agency heads to send a message to their employees by 5 p.m. ET on Wednesday. It included a template email that many federal employees ended up receiving that night.
Some employees, such as employees of the Ministry of Finance, received slightly different versions of the email.
A warning about the “adverse consequences” of not reporting on the DEI’s initiatives was omitted from the Treasury email, according to a copy provided to the BBC.
In one of his first acts 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 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, such as Trump, argue that the practice itself is discriminatory because it takes into account race, gender, sexuality or other characteristics.
Trump and his allies frequently attacked the practice during the campaign.
In a speech Thursday at the World Economic Conference in Davos, Switzerland, Trump said he was making America a “nation based on merit.”
DEI critics praised Trump’s decision.
“President Trump’s executive orders repealing affirmative action and banning DEI programs are an important milestone in civil rights in America and an important step toward building a color-blind society,” said Yukong Mike Zhao, president of the Asian American Education Coalition. statement
The group supported a successful U.S. Supreme Court effort to overturn affirmative action programs at U.S. universities.
But current federal employees, who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said the email they received looked more like an attempt to intimidate staff than to make the government fairer.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Since taking office, President Trump has signed a slew of executive orders, including a federal government hiring freeze, an order to bring workers back to the office, and an effort to reclassify thousands of government employees to make them easier to fire.
An HHS official who spoke to the BBC criticized the government’s DEI practice, saying that while it’s important to create a diverse workforce and create opportunities in health and medicine, “identity politics has affected how we function normally, and it’s not good for the workforce. strength”.
“But this does not mean that I want my colleagues to be fired,” the employee added.
He described the impact of the email and DEI order on his agency as “very calculated chaos.”
He said the staff department was confused about hiring practices and what programs and directives could continue given Trump’s broad definition of DEI.
A second HHS official said grants for hiring and research have been frozen, and all department staff are waiting to see what they can do next.
HHS and one of its subsidiary agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), award millions of dollars in federal grants to universities and researchers around the world to advance scientific research.
Agency officials feared that the DEI order could have an impact outside of government. One questioned whether grants that allowed labs to create more opportunities to hire minority scientists and health workers would now be axed.
An employee working for the Food and Drug Administration told the BBC that she had not received the email, but that all DEI-related activities had been suspended.
“The seniors told us to continue our work,” she said. “But there’s a sense of dread about how this will affect our work as a whole.”
