Hearing Wrap Up: DEI is Discriminatory and Illegal

WASHINGTON—Today, the Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses held a hearing titled “Combating DEI in American Institutions.” During the hearing, members analyzed how diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies are pretexts for illegal and unconstitutional discrimination, and how employers and other institutions routinely discriminate on the basis of race, sex, and national origin. Members also examined how the Trump Administration has been working to abolish illegal DEI policies that harm all Americans. 

Key Takeaways:

DEI policies are pretexts for illegal and unconstitutional discrimination.

• Mike Gonzalez, Senior Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, testified that “The ultimate goal is to structurally transform museums into anti-racist, multiracial, multicultural institutions in a transformed society. Which brings us to the question, ‘what is DEI?’ The initials stand for things we should want. However, the intention of these words has been distorted as they now mean the opposite. ‘Diversity’ is now an ‘identity-based approach’ that violates individual character, enforces intellectual conformity, and demands quotas in order to attain community professionalism. As for ‘equity,’ it means ‘equality of outcomes,’ which is a violation of equality before the law. It sounds like equality, but it now means it’s opposite. As candidate Kamala Harris demonstrated in November 2020 when she tweeted, quote, ‘there’s a big difference between equality and equity. Equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place,’ that is not the American ideal, but it marks this promise written in sand. Inclusion, meanwhile, means exactly its opposite—exclusion.”
  
• Inez Feltscher-Stepman, Senior Policy and Legal Analyst at Independent Women, testified that “The previous Obama Administration redefined the basic word used in the Civil Rights Act of 1964—’sex.’ Up until that point, from time immemorial, ‘sex’ had meant biological sex. And all of a sudden, under these administrations, it suddenly included gender identity, so-called as declared by the individual. That false definition was illegitimately substituted and used to transform all of anti-discrimination law in the United States without a single legislative vote.”
  
• Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits unlawful employment practices that discriminate against an individual “because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”

Employers and universities still discriminate on the basis of race, sex, and national origin.

• Inez Feltscher-Stepman also testified that “First, the enforcement of anti-discrimination law in admissions and in the workplace had become hypersensitive to mere statistical disparities in outcomes and alleged microaggressions while looking the other way, as universities and companies announced and then followed up on their intention to actively discriminate in favor of preferred racial categories and against disfavored ones. Second, and related the legal doctrine of disparate impact, imagining systemic racism as a kind of god of the gaps to be assumed anytime outcomes don’t come out perfectly racially balanced, even in the face of total lack of evidence of any animus, had become baked into our legal system in a variety of ways.”
  
• Michael Shires, Vice Chair of Education Opportunity and Higher Education at America First Policy Institute testified that “Today, this insidious ideology infects nearly every dimension of the academy, including hiring, promotions, tenure, admissions, and even academic publishing. Over the past four decades, I have watched this contagion metastasize on campuses. I’ve sat in university diversity committee meetings where I was personally scolded by my peers for the color of my skin. I’ve been asked to draft loyalty statements to this ideology in order to apply for jobs, and explicitly told to hire candidates because of their race or gender, and not because of their ability to do the job…The leftists who have co-opted America’s institutions tolerate only one perspective on campus, theirs undermining the very intellectual diversity needed for higher education to fulfill its primary public purpose. Unaligned speakers are canceled. Students who disagree are failed. Faculty are intimidated into silence or fired shout downs, heckler’s, vetoes, violence and even murder are used to silence dissenting voices.”
  
• The Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits racial discrimination in college admissions practices.

The Trump Administration is working to abolish illegal DEI policies.

• Mike Gonzalez also stated that “President Trump has tried to reverse this regime through executive orders that explicitly targets President Biden’s programs, directs federal agencies to eliminate DEI initiatives throughout the federal government, and calls for increased scrutiny of DEI practices in schools and universities that receive federal support. Most recently, [Office of Management and Budget] issued a new rule change that also fights DEI.”
  
• Inez Feltscher-Stepman also stated that “But now we’re in 2026, more than a year and a half into the second Trump Administration. On day one, this President declared that the federal government was actually going to enforce equality under the law, regardless of whether the thumbs on the scale benefited black Americans or white Americans or anyone else. The promises of the President’s roster of day one EO’s have taken some time, and I’m sure a lot of hard legal and bureaucratic work across disparate agencies to come to fruition. But now, this ideal that it’s illegal to use characteristics like race and sex to make important decisions about people’s lives and work, is being shaped in real time…The Trump Administration is, for the first time in decades, enforcing the Civil Rights Act and the Constitution equally for all Americans.”

Member Highlights:

Task Force Chairman Brandon Gill (R-Texas) asked aboutthe presence of DEI in university admissions. 

Task Force Chairman Gill: “[You] mentioned that a lot of colleges and universities, you expect, to fight DEI restrictions. Why is that? You said that there was an ideological component there.”

Ms. Feltscher-Stepman: “Right. I think my fellow witness [Dr. Shires], correctly referenced the idea of the oppressor and the oppressed. There’s this idea that all differences in culture disparities, outcomes, all of these are somehow immediately evidence of discrimination and some kind of unjust system. And so, there’s an ideological commitment to make sure that the kind of force the world to look the way that they think it ought to, and unfortunately, that’s both immoral, discriminatory, and fortunately for us, it’s illegal under the law of the United States.”

Task Force Chairman Gill: “Could you walk us through, practically speaking, what a DEI policy would mean for a college admissions process?”

Ms. Feltscher-Stepman: “It means that in practice, they place a thumb on the scale for applications that may have no more or, in fact, lesser qualifications than other applications purely on the basis of race. And by the way, we saw this in the data in Students for Fair Admissions. Harvard was discriminating against Asian and white applicants who were comparably situated to other applicants. And we know that universities have been doing this for decades.”

Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) inquired about the current state of DEI in workplaces and academia and the ways DEI is being rebranded to avoid public scrutiny.

Rep. Donalds: “Dr. Shires, thank you so much for being here. I want to pick up where you left off. In your view, what is the current state of academia with respect to DEI programs? Like, what’s actually happening in there today?”

Dr. Shires: “On most campuses? DEI is still in full force. You see institutions, for example, that require diversity statements for applications have eliminated that. But yet, every single website that helps you apply for a job has information on how to circumvent not having it, to make sure that they know that you are aligned with DEI.”

Rep. Donalds: “Are we seeing the same issue in some federal agencies, even though the Trump Administration obviously has put out executive orders to unwind DEI practices and federal agencies?”

Dr. Shires: “Absolutely. It’s important to remember that the universities and the academy are kind of the epicenter for our professional workforce. And so, as students graduate and have been indoctrinated in this ideology, they carry it with them into the workplace.”

Rep. Donalds: “What in these agencies and in, even in universities, what are some of the ways that they are rebranding DEI to try to basically kind of be in the shadows away from the eyes of the American people?”

Dr. Shires: “The most common one is if you see an ‘office of community belonging,’ it’s where all the people that were in the DEI office now are on campus.”

Rep. Donalds: “Point of clarification, what is ‘community belonging?’”

Dr. Shires: “Well, it’s what they call DEI offices now. It takes the inclusion part of DEI—diversity, equity and inclusion. And it talks about how you how you empower and enable students in these protected classes, to be on campus and to be engaged. But it’s really the same operation that was there before about dividing the campus.”

Rep. Brian Jack (R-Ga.) examined the history of DEI and where the initial idea to implement these policies originated.

Rep. Jack: “Mr. Gonzalez, I’d like to start with you. I’d like to learn a little bit more about the history of DEI and some of the initiatives we’ve seen in the corporate workplace. Could you help us understand what from where this emanated and who developed these initial ideas to implement these policies?”

Mr. Gonzalez: “Representative Jack, thank you for your question. So, they have been around for many years. Initially they were a response to the Civil Rights Act. They wanted, you know, throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s, they wanted to make sure that companies were doing the things that the government demanded first of contractors, government contractors, then of just any business. Very quickly these degenerated into practices and trainings that were part of a larger framework that saw America as being basically racist, and that’s when, especially since in the last 15 years, the acronym has become more defined. They began to look a lot more like the struggle sessions as practiced in the cultural revolution in China, which were meant to change the thinking of a whole society.”

Rep. Jack: “And I’m just curious, over those past 15 years, I mean, what’s really precipitated the acceleration of this? It seems like it’s commonplace now and something that we’re trying to identify. We’re having a congressional hearing on it today. Is there funding that’s going toward this? Are there groups that are trying to sow division and discord vis-a-vis this initiative?”

Mr. Gonzalez: “Yeah, you can see a lot of studies have been made on the use [of it] by newspapers and the academy of the terms of the whiteness, systemic racism, etcetera. And they begin to really spike in 2014, and I have associated that with the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013, the second in June of 2013, and then the Ferguson riots in 2014, when we really began to the country began to change enormously. And that obviously culminated in 2020, which is when really all, you know, diversity trainers were brought here to Congress. Robin D’Angelo met with members of one party, nearly all of the members of one party, and gave a training session. So you had two spikes, 2014, and then a huge spike in 2020.”

Click here to watch the hearing.