(Former United States Attorney for the District of Columbia Jessie K. Liu looks on as D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser speaks during a press conference on Wednesday, February 6, 2019, in Washington, D.C. Photo by Salwan Georges, via Getty Images.)
Due to a new executive order from Donald Trump that bans federal training and education involving gender and race bias in the workplace, the Department of Justice has had to recommend that a program on gender diversity, featuring former US Attorney Jessie Liu, be canceled.
The DOJ Gender Equality Network (DOJ GEN), which advocates for gender equality and inclusion within the Justice Department, was forced to send an email to members of their organization last Friday afternoon, that notified members of the group of the cancellation of an upcoming previously scheduled event due to the restrictions created by the Trump administration. On Thursday, officials from the Justice Management Division of the DOJ, which is responsible for providing guidance on department policy, notified DOJ GEN and “advised DOJ GEN that [they] must cancel” the event that had been planned for more than a year.
The event, titled “Addressing the DOJ Gender Leadership Gap,” was scheduled during the workday on Oct. 21, and was set to feature Liu and acting ATF head Regina Lombardo discussing “ways to increase gender diversity in leadership positions at DOJ.” According to a flyer for the event, there were several departments within the DOJ who were supporting the lecture, including the diversity committees for the Civil Division and the Environment and Natural Resources Division.
(Advocate for the Department of Justice Gender Equality Network, Carmel Morgan, discusses the organization with with a prospective DOJ employee. Photo via DOJGEN website.)
The Board of Directors for the DOJ GEN responded to the DOJ Management Division (JMD) by advising that group leaders within their organization had actively been telling members, “that we did not believe our event would run afoul of the executive order (or OMB’s and OPM’s corresponding memos).” The email from the DOJ GEN Board went on to explain, “Through this event we hoped to learn more about the panelists’ backgrounds and how they achieved their career goals, solicit advice for current DOJ staff, and share recommendations to achieve greater diversity in leadership and management roles.” It’s worth noting that both Liu and Lombardo are Trump appointees.
While Trump’s order was signed on Sept. 22, the Justice Department did not suspend diversity and inclusion training for employees and managers until the week of Oct. 5. Now the DOJ has not only halted all trainings that suggests that implicit racial and gender biases exist in the workplace, according to a memo that was distributed to executive officers within the agency, it has also suspended any events or programs dealing with these topics.
(Donald Trump signs an Executive Order in the Oval Office, within the West Wing of the White House.)
The Trump Executive Order specifies that “it shall be the policy of the United States not to promote race or sex stereotyping or scapegoating in the Federal workforce or in the Uniformed Services…[and] in addition, federal contractors will not be permitted to inculcate such views in their employees.” The new DOJ guidance, that was sent out Oct. 8, now includes all work-related programs, activities and events that merely touch on diversity, despite the president’s executive order that limits only training aspects.
Additionally, the DOJ’s instructive memo said that managers must remove all diversity-related mandatory training requirements that have been assigned to employees from the department’s internal system. Managers were also ordered to suspend any related activities and events pending approval of all instructional materials by the DOJ Office of Personnel Management. The DOJ GEN does not speak with the press as a rule, and the Department of Justice has yet to comment on the these latest directions.
The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) sent memos concerning the implementation of Trump’s order to administration officials that included basic directions for how to proceed with compliance. According to The New York Times, the order “immediately caused confusion at some agencies, which were not sure how best to comply.” The new regulation also apparently threw longstanding relationships with government contractors and internal federal government groups that conduct diversity trainings into a complete tailspin.
(Attorney General William Barr waits to make an announcement in Detroit, Michigan, on December 18, 2019. Photo by Bill Pugliano, via Getty Images.)
The order coincides with comments made by Attorney General William Barr that suggest racism is not a wide-scale problem in the United States. Barr has made public claims that he does not generally believe that systemic racism exists within US police departments, despite the substantial and conclusive data showing otherwise. In September, Barr also criticized the Black Lives Matter movement by accusing those aligned with the movement of using Black people as props to advance a radical political agenda.
But, the latest instructions from the DOJ appear to take Trump’s order further, pushing past the scope of the directive, which focuses on department trainings. The Management Division of the DOJ has implemented interim guidance that suspends all diversity and inclusion trainings in addition to all programs, activities and events on the topic of gender inclusion “that employees are required or permitted to attend while on government-paid time.”
Division head, Lee Lofthus, a career official who has worked in DOJ since 1982 and was named assistant attorney general in 2006, signed the directive and advised in an agency-wide memo that all current and future DOJ training materials must be submitted for approval before use. Lofthus has also established a system, whereby one or more political appointees at the Justice Department will review and pre-approve any federally funded diversity and inclusion training, using Trump’s order and Office of Personnel Management (OPM) guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
(Ceremony at the Department of Justice for the commemoration of the 20th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act on July 23, 2010 in Washington, DC. Photo by Chip Somodevilla, via Getty Images.)
Last Friday, the DOJ GEN leaders said they told JMD officials they believed the division’s “concerns appear to stem from its own Oct. 8 interim guidance, which materially expands the scope of the White House’s directives to include not only diversity and inclusion-related ‘training,’ but also ‘programs, events, and activities.’” The email goes on to state: “We and other affinity groups are planning to approach DOJ leadership about the White House’s directives and DOJ’s implementation and expansion of them.”
Stacey Young, the president of DOJ GEN, sent an email to group members earlier this week that raised the possibility that the event could be cancelled. In her email she implied the innocuous nature and “plainly inoffensive agenda” and emphasized that the event consisted of “two celebrated speakers.” Young also expressed to members that the goal of the interim guidance “can only be described as censorship.”
Young went on to say, “We question the goal and impact of asking OPM—the agency charged with creating policies to protect the entire federal workforce from a deadly pandemic—to approve all trainings as well as programs, activities and events when it should be busy with other matters.”
(Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates speaks alongside Former FBI Director James Comey, as they attend an Implicit Bias Training program at the Department of Justice in Washington, DC, June 28, 2016. Photo by Saul Loeb, via Getty Images.)
Trump has initiated what can only be described as a war on education and training courses that assert that systemic racism is an issue. He has now encouraged employees to not only be aware of it, but to denounce such ideas as race and gender bias as part of a radical liberal agenda. Last month, he accused school boards of pushing a false narrative that “America is a wicked and racist nation,” by developing school curriculums that examined racism and how it has shaped the United States.
He also vowed at that time to “restore patriotic education to our schools,” saying, “Our youth will be taught to love America.” This executive order eliminated traditional diversity and inclusion training, and came only days after Trump’s pursuit to dismantle education concerning unconscious biases, and how race and gender can negatively affect people in the workplace.
His agenda has now grown to include federal agencies as well as public education. While these latest actions by the Trump administration are no doubt intended to appeal to a base of Conservative supporters leading up to a presidential election, the extensive work done over many years to gain awareness on race and gender bias is now at risk. With the stoke of a single Trump pen, discrimination protections within the workplace have now been set back decades.
Amee Vanderpool writes the SHERO Newsletter and is an attorney, published author, contributor to newspapers and magazines and analyst for BBC radio. She can be reached at avanderpool@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @girlsreallyrule.
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he's such a small-minded punk
I long ago stopped being shocked at the depravity and despicable nature of this odious Administration, but every now and then, it still manages to do something which leaves me agape.
Honestly, I have no idea how any women or minorities support him. How do they look themselves in the mirror? I mean, really--how do they do it?