The Trump administration sent an email to thousands of federal employees on Wednesday, ordering them to report any efforts to “hide” diversity initiatives in their agencies or face “adverse consequences.”
The request came after President Donald Trump banned diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices and programs across government.
Emails seen by the BBC asked workers to “report all facts and circumstances” to a new government email address within 10 days.
Some employees interpreted it as a demand to sell out their colleagues at the White House.
“We are really panicked and overwhelmed,” said a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) employee.
The Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal workforce, issued guidance requiring agency heads to send notice to their staff by 5 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday. It included a template email that many federal staffers ultimately received that evening.
Some employees, such as those at the Treasury Department, received slightly different versions of the email.
The Treasury Department’s email excluded warning about “adverse consequences” of not reporting DEI initiatives, according to a copy shared with the BBC.
In one of his first actions as president, Trump signed two executive orders ending “diversity, equity and inclusion” or “DEI” programs in the federal government and announced that all employees working in these roles would would do. 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, like Trump, argue that the practice itself is discriminatory because it takes race, gender, sexual identity or other characteristics into consideration.
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 “merit-based country.”
Critics of the DEI praised Trump’s decision.
“President Trump’s executive orders rolling back affirmative action and banning DEI programs are a major milestone in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and a crucial step toward building a colorblind society,” said Yukong Mike Zhao, President of the Asian American Education Coalition, in a statement. statement.
The group had supported a successful effort by the United States Supreme Court to strike down affirmative action programs at American universities.
But current federal employees, who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation, said the email they received seemed more like an attempt to intimidate staff than a attempt to make government fairer.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Trump has signed a torrent of executive orders since taking office, including a hiring freeze in the federal government, an order directing workers to return to the office, and an attempt to reclassify thousands of government employees to make it easier their dismissal.
The HHS employee who spoke to the BBC criticized the government’s DEI practices, saying that while it was important to build a diverse workforce and create opportunities in health and medicine , “identity politics has affected the way we function normally and this is not beneficial for the world”. workforce”.
“But that doesn’t mean I want my colleagues to be fired,” the employee added.
He described the impact of the DEI email and orders on his agency as “very calculated chaos.”
The employee division has been thrown into confusion, he said, with questions about upcoming hiring practices, as well as what programs and guidelines are allowed to continue, given the broad definition of Trump from DEI.
A second HHS employee said hiring and research grants had been frozen and the department’s entire staff was waiting to see what they could do next.
HHS and one of its subsidiary agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), provide millions of dollars in federal grants to universities and researchers around the world to advance scientific research.
Agency employees were concerned that the DEI order could also have an impact outside of government. One questioned whether grants allowing labs to create more opportunities to hire minority scientists and health professionals would now be cut.
An employee who worked at the Food and Drug Administration told the BBC that she did not receive the email, but that all DEI-related activities had been suspended.
“The elders told us to keep doing our work,” she said. “But there is a sense of fear about the impact this is going to have on our work in general.”
