The Trump administration sent an email to thousands of federal employees on Wednesday, ordering them to report any attempt to “mask” diversity initiatives in their agencies or face “adverse consequences.”
The request comes after President Donald Trump banned diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices and programs across the government.
Emails seen by the BBC instructed workers to “report all facts and circumstances” to a new government email address within 10 days.
Some staffers interpreted this as a request to sell their colleagues to the White House.
“We are really distraught and devastated,” said one 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 a notice to their staff by 5:00 pm ET on Wednesday. It included a template email that many federal officials eventually received that night.
Some employees, such as those at the Treasury Department, received slightly different versions of the emails.
The Treasury Department’s email excluded a warning about the “adverse consequences” of not reporting DEI initiatives, according to a copy shared with the BBC.
In one of his first moves as president, Trump signed two executive orders ending “diversity, equity and inclusion” or “DEI” programs within the federal government and announced that all employees working in those roles would 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 into account race, gender, sexual identity 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 “merit-based country.”
DEI critics praised Trump’s decision.
“President Trump’s executive orders ending affirmative action and banning DEI programs are a major milestone in the advancement of American civil rights and a critical step toward building a color-blind society,” said Yukong Mike Zhao, president of the Asian American Education Coalition. statement.
The group supported successful US Supreme Court efforts to overturn affirmative action programs at American universities.
But current federal employees, who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, said the email they received read more like an attempt to intimidate staff than an attempt to make the government fairer.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
President Trump has signed a flurry of executive orders since taking office, including a federal government hiring freeze, ordering workers back to the office and attempting to reclassify thousands of government employees to make them easier to fire.
An HHS employee who spoke to the BBC criticized the government’s DEI practices, believing that while it is important to build a diverse workforce and create opportunities in the health and medical fields, “identity politics has affected how we normally function, and that not useful for the workforce”.
“But that does not mean that I want my colleagues to be fired,” added the employee.
He described the impact of the DEI emails and orders on his agency as “very calculated chaos.”
The HR department has been thrown into disarray, he said, with questions about hiring practices going forward, as well as what programs and directives are allowed to continue, given Trump’s broad definition of DEI.
Another HHS employee said recruitment and research grants have been frozen and that the entire department staff is waiting to see what they do next.
HHS and one of its subsidiaries, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), issue millions of dollars in federal grants to universities and researchers around the world to advance scientific research.
Agency employees feared that the DEI order could have an impact outside the government. One asked if grants that allowed labs to create more employment opportunities for minority scientists and medical professionals would now be axed.
An employee who worked at the Food and Drug Administration told the BBC that she had not received the email, but all DEI-related activities had been paused.
“The elders told us to keep doing our work,” she said. “But there is a sense of fear about how it will affect our work in general.”
