Register for Slatest to receive daily analyzes, criticism and advice.
Only the second day of the second Trump administration, thousands of federal officials received a disturbing email from the heads of their respective departments. The directive, signed several times by the Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the State Department and the Acting Attorney General James Mchenry at the Ministry of Justice, obliged civil servants to undertake a personal mission of hunting and destruction for the ” contracts “and” projects “which could be secretly sympathetic to existing policies in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.
This new directive was not only a renunciation of Dei programs – it was a longtime promise and many messages. The language of the new orders explicitly threatened “harmful consequences” for anyone who would not report within 10 days of his knowledge on the secret and subversive sympathizers of the Deia. Certain emails called the Deia as “shameful” and “discriminatory” attempt to undermine “traditional American values” such as “hard work” and “individual success”. It was not just a call to the Narc. It was an express threat of punishment for anyone who would not quickly point out any person associated with allegedly hidden Deia programs.
The emails were obviously received by employees from all federal agencies, even independent agencies such as NASA, but the most exhaustive version came from Rubio in a four -page memorandum which cited seven different decrees signed by the presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden who were running. Strakened. Rubio has even included in his list of “concepts” prohibited as those which could be contained in the national plan to put an end to gender -based violence, we assume to correct the notion of Deia (and based on reality) according to which Women are disproportionately victims of violence on the part of men. .
The emails were welcomed with an astounding horror by their recipients, to judge only by the buzzing of my phone, while friends and customers (I did not even know that some were even federal workers) sent capture d ‘Screen screenshot of emails. People from the United States Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Labor, the Ministry of Justice and even an immigration judge contacted me.
The country is warned that this day could have happened since October 21, 2020, when Donald Trump published Decree 13957, which required that the heads of all federal agencies recommend positions in the Federal Public Service which could be reclassified as “Annex F . ”, Transforming thousands of federal workers into at will, depriving them of longtime protections against discrimination for a multitude of reasons, especially political. Trump lost the elections and this policy never had the chance to take root, then Biden quickly canceled it when he took office.
Only a few days before Trump’s second inauguration, Senator Tim Kaine, in an apparent attempt to prevent the re -emergence of Annex F, presented a Bipartisan bill called Saving the Civil Service Act, whose objective is declared is to protect the federal workforce from “politicization and corruption”. Political manipulation. But from the first day of his second mandate, Trump restored decree 13957, by only bringing a handful of essentially cosmetic changes, as the change in the “appendix F” designation in “time/career policy”.
Of course, Wednesday emails were sent to all Federal employees, whatever their use or function, but the theme was the same: Trump, fearing dissent and imagining enemies everywhere, once again reshapes the federal workforce to valorize not expertise but Loyalty, and is determined not to relive the errors of his first mandate. Term, when he was thwarted by the members of the cabinet and the civil servants whom he described as members of “the deep state” refusing to engage in all his whims, legal or other.
The most ironic here is that the ostensible base of this attack on the Deia is that “hard work, merit and equality” will exchange seats with politicians of the Deia, while it is clear that Trump N ‘ appreciates that loyalty and loyalty. “Fierce work, merit and equality” will become the victims in the coming days, not the prized values. As Kaine suggested during the presentation of his bill, the best talents will not join the American labor market “if they know that they can be dismissed on a whim according to their political opinions” . People who will be dismissed, whispered and denigrated? It will be disproportionately of people of color, who have been oriented towards Deia roles in their different agencies.
These emails, despite the inclusion of empty -meaning praise for meritocracy, are clearly designed to divide workers on the basis of loyalty. It would not be correct to call them “frightening”, because the obvious goal of these emails is not to silence, quite the contrary.
The emails seem to be designed to draw up federal workers against each other, granting carrots to the hooks and brandishing sticks against the silencer. The new administration essentially bypasses human resources for the benefit of global management of human resources. Mouches Lord Approach: Let the workers debate with each other of the first series of staff reductions, revealing conveniently which goats really want the conch and who, by their silence or because they have been denounced by their colleagues, are labeled as disloyal. ; Federal agencies will be emptied of their substance, not due to a significant measure, but because workers will turn against their colleagues, under penalty of reprisals, if they fail to eliminate an unknown offense based on the Deia .
This Machiavellian technique of revelation of loyalty could have concerned almost anything, but no problem probably corresponds better to the objectives of Trump than the DEIA, because it serves as an indicator of the preference of the party. Constraining workers to admit their membership of a party would be a clearer solution, but the law still prohibits it. For the moment, anyway.
As a relevant anecdote, it should be noted that “accessibility” has infiltrated, converting the pejorative use of “Dei” to “Deia”. Is the Americans with disabilitities act is the next target? Do the Republicans plan to demolish the ramps for wheelchairs in the libraries? Even if it still seems unthinkable, influential right -wing personalities such as Christopher Rofo and Charlie Kirk recently targeted sign language interpreters “occupying half of the screen” during a press conference on Los Angeles forest fires. .
The tacit idea at the heart of any anti-deia argument is that for each job, there is a more qualified person than anyone, and in this construction, it is the DEIA policies that prevent this person-infallibly a white man- to achieve its goal. own manifest personal destiny. The reality is that thousands of people can be qualified for any particular government position, and demographic groups tend to favor their own. Left to write their own code, white men made a kind of gender and race gerrymander. The fact that the federal workforce should not be disputed to generally reflect and resemble the people it serves. In force today, it is not only a subject of discord, it is a sin, to be found by rumor and murmur, to be punished by reprisals, tacit but always here.
Register for the Slate evening newsletter.
