To: Control
CC: Human
Content: Questions About New DEI Guidelines
Date: January, 31, 2025
Hello Management,
Thank you for the email alerting our workforce to the new federal guidance on “diversity, equity, and inclusion” ( DEI ) initiatives. Given the remarkable change in direction from the prior advice I just learned a few months ago, I had a few questions.
Prior to this new mandate, DEI was regularly communicated to the workplace as “relevant to everything we do.” DEI was eliminated from all elements of our labor. Commitment to DEI was officially included as important criteria when evaluating for hiring, advertising, and specific awards.  ,
We had to justify our actions during yearly effectiveness evaluations in order to support DEI. HR ( with management encouragement ) regularly sponsored and advertised DEI events to the workforce on such topics as unconscious bias, microaggressions, intersectionality, respecting pronouns, being an ally to LGBT coworkers, antiracism, BIPOC identity, neurodiversity, white privilege, and cisgender norms. A regular DEI email was distributed to all people, and our company maintained a site dedicated to DEI and a” DE I certification program.”
Management and HR’s official advice often urged the workforce to accept DEI, including including pronouns in email signatures. According to our knowledge, ignoring La initiatives could result in national laws like Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Failing to honor other employees ‘ preferred pronouns, it was explained, may be viewed as unfair, prejudiced, and a possible violation of the No Fear Act.  ,
Management and HR appear to be disapproving most, if not all of this, with just a few messages sent to the labor in late January. DEI will no longer be used to evaluate applications for jobs or incentives, according to information we have. We are informed that DEI will no longer be awarded monthly prizes. All La events have been postponed indefinitely, and money for DEI software has been allocated abroad. Both the DEI accreditation program and the regular DEI email have been canceled. The interior DEI website link no longer actually works.  ,
How does control describe this extraordinary about-face? A few months ago, senior leaders across our business, including not only appointees but many job employees, were constantly emphasizing the importance of La to our group’s goal and the necessity of implementing La to our group’s future success. Our leadership routinely told us DEI was about human rights, social justice, and our organization’s” core values”. Now those same leaders declare that, per the White House’s Jan. 20 executive order” Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing“, DEI has no place in the government.  ,
Has senior leadership’s opinion of DEI dramatically changed as a result of a recent occurrence in the new presidential administration? Or was leadership in its years-long campaign against DEI not really serious? Or, God forbid, is leadership, despite their personal convictions that DEI represents an extension of the civil rights movement, afraid to speak up?  ,
I sincerely hope it is not the last choice. For example, I have taken a few leadership courses as well as taking DEI training as an aspiring future manager. These seminars made it clear that supervisors should uphold a strong code of conduct that serves as an example for the workforce. I have always been told that we are the highest standards of professionalism and moral conduct as impartial, dispassionate federal employees who persist from one presidential administration to the next, and that we must uphold our principles regardless of the cost of our careers, federal retirement plans, or lucrative post-retirement contract work.  ,
Far from it, I’d venture to say that our senior leaders, who have dedicated their careers to the advancement of social justice and human rights, are so inept or, dare I say it, spineless. However, I have a deep misunderstanding about how those who so recently praised DEI now distance themselves from it as a result of an executive order.  ,
It seems to me that compliance with the new directives jettisoning DEI will be interpreted as capricious, perfidious, or cowardly. Indeed, refusing this executive order would provide ammunition to those who believe the federal workforce to be racial and activist ideologues is the worst. But does not unilaterally caving to the executive order paint leadership and HR as craven hypocrites, given their all-too-recent statements asserting that opposition to DEI made a person no different than a bigot, misogynist, or white supremacist?
I’m eager to hear your response to this question, and I’m hoping it will reveal how the federal workforce interprets what I can only reasonably assume is a flagrant violation of human rights based on your previous recommendations.
Respectfully,
A Confused Federal Employee
Casey Chalk is a senior contributor to The Federalist and a columnist for The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. He is the author of The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Territories.
