Diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, particularly at government-funded entities, have been hit with critical federal and legal roadblocks in recent years due to concerns that they violate civil rights laws prohibiting state-sanctioned discrimination.
Yet, despite sweeping court decisions and the Trump administration’s best efforts, DEI is far from dead, as schools, organizations, and businesses rebrand such initiatives to escape legal scrutiny. Amid the changing landscape, conservatives are embracing creativity in tactics targeting such initiatives, long viewed by most in the GOP camp to be little more than arbiters for discrimination that mistakenly equate natural disparities with darker inequalities.
An Open the Books analysis published earlier this year on DEI federal spending in educational institutions used dozens of keywords to capture grants and job titles that were relevant, a spokesman told the Washington Examiner. The group has found keywords uncovering DEI-like initiatives that would be hard to find given a cursory search, including federal grants approved to applicants that match a “broader impacts” criterion on the community, such as minority outreach.
The federal spending watchdog also probes for DEI-like programs by comparing payrolls year over year, examining the books to question how many people left the payroll versus moved to a new role or assumed a new title.
Open the Books is currently engaged in a probe investigating DEI and antisemitism across eight universities, including at the California Institute of Technology.
While a full report on the probe is still forthcoming, CalTech has already begun changing language on its websites after being pressed by Open the Books on the school library’s DEI terminology online, according to documentation first shared with the Washington Examiner.
Across the country, the Goldwater Institute is probing another school, this one boasting nearly 37,000 students. Earlier this month, the conservative think tank submitted a letter to Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman alleging that the state’s largest university was out of compliance with a recently passed anti-DEI legislation. While University of Kentucky President Eli Capilouto spearheaded and approved a net neutrality policy in accordance with House Bill 4, the Goldwater Institute, which played a key role in drafting the bill, says the institution remains out of bounds because of language in the law that it says requires the school’s board of trustees to approve the policy.
Stacy Skankey, the Goldwater Institute’s American Freedom Network Litigation director, told the Washington Examiner that, in addition to insider student and faculty alerts to initiatives accused of being illegal DEI efforts, the conservative organization relies on formally published documents, such as policy handbooks, to expose such priorities, including those targeted at the University of Kentucky.
“What we’re looking at — it’s actually fairly easy to spot this one, because this one requires them to publish their policy in a very accessible manner — it’s supposed to be the student handbook and faculty handbook,” she said. “So that’s an easy one for us to spot, if we’re not seeing it on the website public records requests, because these are public institutions are very helpful to kind of confirm that, and that’s what we did in this instance. And then the other thing is actually looking at the policies that are published or otherwise challenged in these institutions to look and see if they are mirroring up with the language that’s required under the law.”
Stankey added that much of Goldwater’s work “is reliant on people notifying us.”
“It’s hard to patrol every action and know what name changes are occurring, but it’s very often, you know, students will see these things, sometimes faculty will see these changes,” she said. “And so we’ll get different tips from people who are on the ground and dealing with this every day, and they’re often the ones most impacted by these particular changes.”
Do No Harm, a watchdog group that probes for DEI activity suspected of violating civil rights in the healthcare arena, similarly relies on over 30,000 members belonging to the organization to carry out its investigative work. DNH Medical Director Dr. Kurt Miceli said Friday that the tip line his organization primarily relies on to conduct DEI probes has been “extraordinarily fruitful,” and continues to grow, adding he thinks it “has really provided a lot of opportunity to help lead to positive change.”
“These are concerned citizens. They’re physicians, nurses, policy makers, all sorts of different folks,” Miceli said, explaining that members who may feel silenced at their own institutions and hesitant to speak out can call into the tipline and use DNH to “help focus medicine on doing what’s right for patients and not being focused on ideology.”
“It’s been very much a learning experience in terms of just garnering information as to what is going on, what is actually happening,” the DNH medical director said. “I’m only one person in one state and one location, so having the ability to speak with members, to connect with folks, again, whether anonymously or directly, provides just enormous insight into the realities of what’s going on in hospitals, medical schools, and such across the country.”
Aside from tiplines, groups like DNH that probe the healthcare system can use public records requests to carry out investigations, particularly admissions information for medical schools that includes data such as the MCAT scores of applicants and matriculants.
“We recently had a report come out that looked at MCAT data for school, which we were able to provide a public records request to actually get the MCAT data to understand what medical schools are doing in terms of admissions,” Miceli said, explaining DNH was able to garner the information from 23 institutions out of “90 or so medical schools that are out there.”
“It’s important, because you look at the behavior of what are the outcomes that an admissions committee will be coming to as determined by who is matriculating into medical school, and if is there evidence of possibly race-based practices and such that those can provide clues, and those can help one understand where to where to look, and conversely, for schools that perhaps aren’t doing those things and their data is telling a different story,” he said.
Aside from these tactics, sometimes fear is the best lever conservatives can pull against DEI, author Michelle Jolivet said during an interview on Friday.
“What we’ll see conservative groups do is create that fear of either litigation and or losing funding or dollars, or fear of, you know, someone coming after you, you know, or trying to create the media frenzy that this horrible thing is going on,” said Jolivet, who wrote the 2024 book, Is DEI Dead?
“They said, ‘We’re going to come at you and we’re going to have private citizens and or governments come at you and investigate you’ and create just the perception of litigation,” she continued. “ And that perception of litigation is costly, whether it’s valid or not….if they’re dependent upon federal funding or federal contracts and they have DEI programs, they can absolutely, legally pull their funding. And that’s where you see most institutions, certainly educational institutions, really having to change their programs because they’re dependent upon that funding.”
Conservatives’ battle against DEI isn’t likely to come to an end anytime soon, Jolivet said, because companies “do things because it’s profitable” and they’re looking to keep the platform around as a magnet to younger workers, whom she says have embraced the agenda.
“What we’re seeing is that about 76% of workers and 86% of Gen Z’ers want to work somewhere where there’s strong DEI initiatives,” she claimed.
Pew Research found last year that support for DEI among U.S. workers was on the decline overall. Compared with the year prior, workers were more likely to feel that DEI at work is “mainly a bad thing” and that their companies payed too much attention to increasing such initiatives. American voters in general are split on DEI according to a March poll, with a small plurality, 49%, agreeing that it should be eliminated, and 48% agreeing that it should remain.
Adding to her claim that young workers are seeking out DEI-focused companies, giving the companies a financial reason to keep such programs, Jolivet said, “As long as it’s the best thing for them to attract and retain top talent… they’re going to continue to have DEI initiatives, even if they reframe them or reward them so that it makes it a little bit more palatable for those that are more conservative or makes them less liable from a litigation perspective.”
Miceli, on the other hand, believes only a “small minority” of Americans support DEI.
Hunkering down on investigations examining such initiatives for potential civil rights violations is critical because they’re un-American, he argued, contending that targeting DEI is particularly urgent in health care, where patients want the “best and brightest” medical professionals who “need to really understand who that person is, and not be looking at folks in the context of a racial lens.”
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“Unfortunately, with DEI, it’s become more of a casting people into groups, and looking at people through a very different lens, and losing their individuality and the nature of who they are, and consequently, that takes us away from really what this country is about,” the DNH medical director said.
“What we found with DEI is that it can be terribly divisive,” he continued. “If you harbor a certain set of opinions, then that’s not desired. And so an ideology that is supposed to be inclusive actually ends up being very exclusive.”
