It has been two full years since the Trump administration outlawed “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies (DEI) in federal government hiring and contracting rules. How much has changed?
In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court found “race-conscious” quota systems in place at Harvard University and others were unconstitutional. In his first days in office in 2025, Donald Trump’s administration ended what it called discriminatory DEI programs in federal contracting and hiring practices. Simultaneously, the Trump administration began reviewing federal funds that had gone to universities where quota systems ensured a minimum enrollment of black students and other “underrepresented” people.
Two years on, how are these hotly contested changes progressing?
“I remember an interview with Harmeet Dillon, who’s with the Trump administration Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights,” says co-host Eric Eggers on the most recent episode of The Drill Down. He quotes her as saying “Look, one thing we’re committed to doing is playing offense on civil rights.” “And nothing is more — pardon the pun — offensive to some people than the executive order Trump issued on day one, in which he directed the Office of Management and Budget to terminate federal DEI offices.”
DEI policies have been in place for many years but accelerated in the frenzied response to the George Floyd riots in 2020. They are an upscaling of previous policies known as “affirmative action” that have been around since before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
The phrase “affirmative action” was coined in 1961 by a Black attorney named Hobart Taylor in John F. Kennedy’s administration back in 1961, pitched as a way to help minority job and college candidates who had previously suffered racial discrimination to get a leg up. Famously, as Schweizer recalls, it became less obviously a numbers game after the High Court’s Bakke decision in 1978 that outlawed direct quotas but did allow racial consideration in college enrollment.
Over the years, these programs expanded and widened, showing up in medical school enrollments and in military promotions. Schweizer notes that Trump fired the second Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who had declared he wanted to set racial percentage goals for fighter pilots.
“They wanted 67 percent white officers, down from 80 percent,” Eggers notes. “Seriously, it was the stated goal of the U.S. Air Force to get the number of white people in the military down.”
“They wanted 13 percent percent African American, up from 10 percent. They wanted 10 percent Asian, up from 8 percent, 7 percent ‘multiracial,’ and 1.5 percent Native American,” Eggers cites.
Schweizer doubts America’s adversaries are so fastidious: “I don’t know, XI Jinping might say, ‘Hey, we need more Uyghurs in the senior ranks of the Chinese military,’ but I kind of doubt it.”
In federal contracting, the Government Accountability Institute (GAI) has previously exposed corruption within the Small Business Administration’s minority set-aside contracting programs, finding that oftentimes those programs are ripe for corruption.
“We’ve all heard the stories about white guys who hire somebody of Alaskan heritage, give them fifty-one percent of the company so they can get minority set-aside contracts,” Schweizer says. “We’ve learned about those abuses.”
Still, the problems in those programs are that they create an ongoing constituency for continuing the DEI practices that these firms have profited under. “Let’s say you were one of those businesses who set up shop to pursue minority-only contracts,” Schweizer explains. “You would now be incentivized to want to keep the DEI practices in place because it limits the competition.”
Washington accumulated large numbers of such companies, competing for those set-aside contracts. “So, there’s huge financial incentive for people to have the old system to remain in place,” he adds.
How should people who don’t work for the government view this issue?
Even as the government has officially removed DEI policies, there are still plenty of large companies that are clinging to them. Costco, Apple Computers, and United Airlines still proudly commit themselves to race-conscious hiring and promotion efforts.
“United Airlines has a policy favoring [United Airlines] Academy candidates based on race and gender. CEO Scott Kirby recently reaffirmed the airline’s goal for ‘fifty percent of United Airlines Academy graduates to be women and people of color,’” Schweizer says. “Again, I don’t have a problem with whoever the pilot is, but when you say we’re going to fill slots based on their ethnicity, or their gender, rather than their skill set, that’s when I start to get a little a little jiggy.”
“This mindset of treating people differently based on their racial background or their sexual preference or whatever does have real implications, I would argue, when it comes to corruption and when it comes to enforcing the law,” Schweizer says.
He notes the recent raid on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s Washington home under a judicial search warrant obtained by the Department of Homeland Security. Omar has been controversial for her radical politics, but has also come under fire for questions surrounding how she came to be a naturalized American citizen and over irregularities in her required financial disclosure statements.
“The first thing she did was cry ‘racism,’” Schweizer says, before noting her ties to Somali fraudsters in the “Feeding Our Future” scandal in Minneapolis. “She has been ‘hands-off’ by federal law enforcement for a long time,” he says.
For more from Peter Schweizer, subscribe to The DrillDown podcast.
