President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday directing all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices to be removed from the foreign service.
The order, which builds off previous DEI-related executive orders, directs Secretary of State Marco Rubio to remove any reference to DEI from the Department of State’s hiring and promotion practices. Instead, Trump said that the only hiring criteria should be merit.
“Over the last 4 years, divisive and discriminatory policies were systematically embedded into every part of the Federal Government, including hiring processes and employee performance evaluations in the Foreign Service,” the executive order said. “It is the policy of the Federal Government that hiring in foreign policy positions, like hiring in all other parts of the Government, shall be based solely on merit.”
The order said that Rubio should remove DEI from the Decision Criteria for Tenure and Promotion in the Foreign Service, a manual put out by the Biden administration that included DEI as a factor in the promotability of U.S. Foreign Service employees.
This manual stipulated that Foreign Service employees advance “diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion in words and actions” and focus on hiring “diverse” candidates for key roles.
Trump’s executive order stated that Foreign Service recruitment, hiring, and promotion should not consider a person’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
Additionally, the order said that all Foreign Service employees are prohibited from promoting a “discriminatory equity ideology” while in their official capacities. The Trump administration defined this ideology as treating “individuals as members of preferred or disfavored groups, rather than as individuals, and minimizes agency, merit, and capability in favor of immoral generalizations.”
Rubio and several other cabinet leaders including Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick and Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins are also directed in the order to determine if any current Foreign Service employees have purposely “engaged in unconstitutional or otherwise illegal discrimination based upon race or other protected characteristics, including actions motivated by discriminatory equity ideology.”
If so, they are told to take “appropriate action,” which was not directly specified.
Trump has already signed numerous DEI-related executive orders, including one to cut off funding for schools that push DEI and one to eliminate DEI preferences in federal contracting. On his first day, Trump signed an order stipulating that all federal hiring be based on merit, practical skills, and devotion to the Constitution.
