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President Trump has called for an end to what he calls illegal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. So he has revoked a 1965 executive order that has guided generations of federal contractors on how to comply with nondiscrimination laws. As NPR's Andrea Hsu reports, that's leaving federal contractors, who employ 1 in 5 workers in the U.S., scrambling.
ANDREA HSU, BYLINE: The end of Lyndon B. Johnson's Executive Order 11246 has kept Matt Camardella busy. His whole practice at the law firm, Jackson Lewis, is helping companies that do business with the government comply with that order and with other federal laws. Since Trump's return, he's been fielding questions nonstop.
MATT CAMARDELLA: This is pretty much all I've been doing for the last six weeks.
HSU: The 1965 executive order required most federal contractors to take steps to identify and address barriers to employment for anyone, but especially women and people of color. Camardella says his clients took those responsibilities seriously. Every year, they'd analyze their hiring and pay practices to try to figure out, for example, if women were getting paid less than men. They'd plan out how to recruit a diverse workforce so that their hires reflected the pool of available workers around them.
CAMARDELLA: There was real risk in not doing this properly, or at all, for that matter.
HSU: But now things have gotten complicated. Not only has Trump revoked Johnson's executive order and halted its enforcement, the president has also issued his own executive order requiring contractors to certify that they're not engaging in illegal DEI. A court has blocked that part of Trump's order for now. Still, Camardella says the problem is...
CAMARDELLA: Nobody really understands what illegal DEI means.
HSU: He says nothing about federal antidiscrimination law has changed. In fact, he believes there's nothing wrong with a company carrying on with what it had been doing - looking at its pay practices or its hiring or its outreach to ensure it's complying with the law.
CAMARDELLA: However, there may be a perception that somehow that smacks of illegal DEI.
JENNY YANG: I'm very concerned.
HSU: Jenny Yang headed the Labor Department office that enforced the 1965 executive order under President Biden. That office investigated employers in all kinds of industries - tech, manufacturing, construction. In 2020, Princeton University agreed to pay more than a million dollars in back wages and salary adjustments to about a hundred female professors after the government found pay disparities. The university denied it had discriminated against women but agreed to look more closely at its pay practices. Jenny Yang says the Office of Federal Contractor Compliance Programs, or OFCCP, can claim many successes.
YANG: So in the last decade, OFCCP recovered, for example, over a hundred million dollars for women who are victims of discrimination.
HSU: Now, under Trump, that office is expected to be largely dismantled since its primary task is gone. The Labor Department has not confirmed when that's going to happen. Trump says ending illegal discrimination will allow people to compete based on merit. But all of this has Wendy Pollack worried that her life's work - advocating for economic and racial justice - will be set back.
WENDY POLLACK: The end of the executive order sets the stage for a very dire situation for women and people of color.
HSU: Pollack is a lawyer with the Shriver Center on Poverty Law, but her first career was as a union carpenter. She overcame barriers to getting hired and attitudes once she was on the job. Through all of it, she recalls telling herself...
POLLACK: You know, I might not change your hearts and minds, but at least I have the law on my side.
HSU: Now, with diminished enforcement of civil rights laws, she wonders whether that will still be true. Andrea Hsu, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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