During President Trump’s first term, employees at the Education Department would regularly be reminded of the value of a diverse workplace from their highest-ranking leaders.
Orientation presentations for new employees devoted more than half a dozen slides to promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, and encouraged new hires to join affinity groups, become “diversity and inclusion champions” and support the department’s “diversity change agent” program.
These efforts, which had become ingrained in the department’s ethos, were not championed by career staff members or Democratic officials. They came at the urging of hard-line conservatives President Trump had appointed to run the agency, including the education secretary at the time, Betsy DeVos.
“Diversity and inclusion are the cornerstones of high organizational performance,” Ms. DeVos wrote in a 2020 memo to staff members, among a series of internal documents from that period obtained by The New York Times.
In Mr. Trump’s second term, those same principles are now forbidden lexicon — and the employees who supported them are targets.
At least 74 people in the Education Department have been put on administrative leave in a rolling crackdown by Mr. Trump aimed at eradicating D.E.I. from the federal government.
Nearly all, it appears, had volunteered on a committee tasked with diversity initiatives, attended trainings or otherwise engaged with D.E.I. programs in some way — some at the encouragement of their managers, according to the American Federation of Government Employees, a labor union that represents 800,000 public sector workers.
Through an executive order, Mr. Trump has put a bull’s-eye on programs and job titles tied directly or exclusively to what the administration has deemed “harmful” and “wasteful” initiatives aimed at reversing systemic barriers for women, minorities and people with disabilities. But the effort has been far-reaching, hitting employees who had just been marginally exposed to such programming in past years and penalizing those who have not engaged in any D.E.I. initiatives since Mr. Trump issued his order.
The sweeping dragnet has angered and frightened those who are now facing the prospect of losing their jobs. Some are preparing to take legal action.
Subodh Chandra, a lawyer representing several government employees placed on leave in the past three weeks, wrote in a letter to the Education Department’s lawyers that those who participated in anti-discrimination activities were squarely protected by federal civil rights and employment laws, which also prohibit retaliation.
“The path the department is on is a cruel and precarious one,” Mr. Chandra wrote.
In an interview, Mr. Chandra said one of his clients, an Iraq war veteran, was placed on leave on Jan. 31 for attending a “diversity change agent seminar” last year. Another client, a West Point graduate and an Army veteran who joined an employee D.E.I. council during Mr. Trump’s first administration, was also placed on leave.
“This operates like a classic bait-and-switch scam, where political appointees of the same president were the impetus for all of the activity for which these faithful public servants, including veterans, are now being punished,” Mr. Chandra said.
A spokeswoman for the Education Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In a statement, Ms. DeVos’s chief of staff, Nate Bailey, suggested there was a difference between what she had championed as secretary and what Mr. Trump was seeking to root out.
“Only the fake news could be so intentionally ignorant that you confuse diversity with corrosive D.E.I.,” Mr. Bailey said.
Speaking at her very first all-staff meeting in 2017, Ms. DeVos told employees that building a diverse workplace was intrinsic to effective policy-making.
“In building strong teams, embracing diversity and inclusion are key elements for success,” Ms. DeVos said. “Diversity may be viewed as cliché, but I believe that getting to know, working with, befriending and including people who are different from ourselves is enriching and expanding. And if we model it ourselves, how much easier will it be to encourage students to do the same?”
Multiple employees told The Times that they had signed up for D.E.I. programs or helped run them at the behest of their supervisors because such initiatives were important to Ms. DeVos, who would later resign from her post after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
As late as 2020, the last full year of Mr. Trump’s first term, his appointees were still taking volunteers for the department’s Employee Engagement, Diversity and Inclusion Council.
The committee’s stated mission was to promote an “environment where all employees, whatever their identities, are fully included, engaged, connected, respected, safe, satisfied and fulfilled as well as a workplace in which barriers to diversity and equal opportunity are removed,” according to its charter.
The charter for the committee — which the current Trump administration disbanded on its third day — was signed at the time by the department’s civil rights chief, Kenneth L. Marcus.
“I am committed to fostering a culture of diversity, inclusion and respect within our work force, as I believe the diversity of our work force allows us to better serve our nation’s students and families,” he wrote in a February 2020 email encouraging all employees to participate.
In June 2020, Mr. Marcus’s deputy, Kimberly Richey, followed up with members who had been selected to represent their offices, saying she was “eager” to have their first meeting, according to an email reviewed by The Times.
“As we work together to promote diversity, equity and inclusion in O.C.R., I want to urge you to keep E.E.D.I.C.’s mission statement at the center of our work,” Ms. Richey wrote, abbreviating the Office for Civil Rights.
Five years later, few other agencies have undertaken as aggressive a campaign against D.E.I. as the Education Department.
Ms. Richey, who as acting head of the department’s civil rights office in the final days of Mr. Trump’s first term issued guidance barring federal protections for transgender students, was recently nominated by Mr. Trump to return to lead the office. She did not respond to a request for comment.
In an interview this week, Mr. Marcus said it was “appropriate” for the Trump administration to review initiatives like his to make sure that they had not turned into vehicles for discrimination against groups who have not been underrepresented historically.
“It is sadly ironic that diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which seem to advance nondiscrimination, in fact often stand for the opposite principle nowadays,” he said. “If one wants to be consistent in eliminating bias and discrimination, one has to get rid of D.E.I. first.”
Facing senators during a confirmation hearing on Thursday, Linda McMahon, Mr. Trump’s pick to run the Education Department in his second administration, claimed that D.E.I. had led to the “segregating of our schools.”
“It was put in place, ostensibly, for more diversity, for equity and inclusion,” she said. “And I think what we’re seeing is that it’s having an opposite effect.”
The department has declined to say what will happen to the employees who were recently placed on leave. By rule, federal workers cannot typically be on investigative leave for more than 10 work days, but letters that staff members have received note the leave is not “disciplinary,” suggesting it could be indefinite. Department officials have not told union officials the fate of the workers, saying that information is not available.
Those who participated in the first Trump administration’s D.E.I. initiatives reject the notion that the original goals of those programs were later subverted.
Several of those placed on administrative leave this year had completed a two-day diversity training workshop during Ms. DeVos’s tenure, for which they received a certificate signed by Denise L. Carter, then an assistant secretary in the Office of Finance and Operations.
Ms. Carter, a close ally of Ms. DeVos, has been serving as acting secretary while Ms. McMahon goes through the confirmation process.
One employee who was placed on leave said she took the course nine years ago, and is on an internal list of hundreds of participants. The employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, said she was worried she would get an email any day informing her that she will be fired.
She described the recent actions as “modern-day McCarthyism,” adding, “We’re basically on a list, and we’ve been blackballed.”
The president’s current assault on diversity programs is a shift from language he used just five years ago.
In the final months of his first term, on Sept. 22, 2020, Mr. Trump signed an executive order titled “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping,” in which he appeared to endorse the same type of trainings that Education Department employees now find themselves imperiled for having attended.
“Training employees to create an inclusive workplace is appropriate and beneficial,” the order, bearing Mr. Trump’s signature, said. “The federal government is, and must always be, committed to the fair and equal treatment of all individuals before the law.”
The order did take issue with certain forms of “unconscious bias” training, which it said perpetuated “divisive concepts,” such as the notion that “the United States is fundamentally racist or sexist.”
Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist and writer who has worked to push conservatives further right on education policy, said in a written response to a recent inquiry from The Times that the salvo against diversity programs in the Education Department was part of a “counterrevolution blueprint” for a second Trump administration.
“We’ve dominated the war for public opinion, and now we’ve achieved the ultimate coup: abolishing D.E.I. in the entire federal government,” he said.