In the first days of his second term, Trump took several executive actions reflecting years of right-wing attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, issuing an executive order that removed DEI programs from the federal government and another to “combat illegal private-sector DEI preferences, mandates, policies, programs, and activities.” A third order prohibited hiring federal employees with the aim of increasing diversity in the workforce, and Trump further ordered that all federal employees who worked in DEI offices be placed on administrative leave.

Days after that initial barrage of activity, the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo purporting to freeze all federal funding — amounting to tens of billions of dollars — partially based on one of Trump’s anti-DEI orders. The memo, which aligned with the recommendations in Project 2025’s policy book, Mandate for Leadership, was later rescinded following a broad backlash and court challenges.

It’s already clear that in Trump’s first weeks in office he has moved to enact many of the proposals in Mandate, in some cases pushing even more extreme policies than those put forward by Project 2025. His attacks on DEI are no exception.

The Mandate for Leadership chapter on the U.S. Agency for International Development criticizes DEI programs and initiatives 14 times, including calls for all DEI-related activity to be shuttered and employees working in those areas to be fired.

“The next conservative Administration should dismantle USAID’s DEI apparatus by eliminating the Chief Diversity Officer position along with the DEI advisers and committees; cancel the DEI scorecard and dashboard; remove DEI requirements from contract and grant tenders and awards; issue a directive to cease promotion of the DEI agenda, including the bullying LGBTQ+ agenda,” the chapter reads. “It should eliminate funding for partners that promote discriminatory DEI practices and consider debarment in egregious cases.”

Trump has gone even further, not only dismantling USAID’s DEI apparatus but promising to “wind down” the entire agency and potentially bringing it under the purview of the State Department. The New York Times reported that the Trump administration planned to “reduce the number of workers” at the agency “from more than 10,000 to about 290 positions.” CNN previously reported that USAID had placed “dozens of senior officials” on leave and “thousands of contractors [had been] laid off."

In offering an explanation for why USAID should be effectively shuttered, the Trump administration leaned heavily on anti-DEI justification. In a February 3 statement, the White House criticized supposed agency programs that “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities;” allocate money to fund a “‘DEI musical’ in Ireland;” support a “‘transgender opera’ in Colombia” and a “‘transgender comic book’ in Peru;” and fund “sex changes and ‘LGBT activism’ in Guatemala.” (USAID did not fund the musical in Ireland, the opera in Colombia, or the comic book in Peru.)

This anti-diversity rhetoric seeded by Project 2025 and embraced by Trump helped to provide a partial pretext for mass layoffs at USAID that ultimately extend far beyond any DEI-specific programs.

Like the chapter on USAID, Mandate’s chapter on the Labor Department and related agencies leans heavily on anti-DEI, anti-“woke” rhetoric. The first entry in the “Needed Reforms” section reads: “Reverse the DEI Revolution in Labor Policy.” It calls on the next Republican administration to “eliminate every one of these wrongful and burdensome ideological projects,” without specifying exactly what that would entail.

The entire chapter is an attack on the working class, largely under the guise of combatting DEI. “​​The DEI revolution in labor affected not only the administrative state, but it has also targeted much of the private sector,” the chapter reads, adding that “much of American labor and employment policy has become institutionally oriented toward ‘woke’ goals. Retracting regulations that support this revolution is a good first step, but more is needed.”

From this foundational opposition to DEI, Project 2025 pushes extreme, anti-worker policies. It calls for a drastic roll back of overtime protections. It seeks to misclassify employees as independent contractors by reverting to a rule from Trump’s first term, thus denying them benefits and protections otherwise required by law. Project 2025 also looks to weaken child labor laws and create “employee involvement organizations” as employer-friendly alternatives to unions.

Mandate for Leadership takes specific aim at the National Labor Relations Board, which helped unions secure significant gains during the Biden administration, by demanding that the next Republican president immediately fire then-NLRB general counsel Jen Abruzzo, one of the most aggressive advocates for the working class in the federal government. Trump followed through and not only removed Abruzzo but also fired Gwynne Wilcox, the first Black woman member of the NLRB, who called her dismissal a “blatant violation” of the law. In a report headlined “Trump Ousts Top Labor Board Leaders Who Backed Broader Worker Rights,” Bloomberg noted that “a White House official described those fired as far-left appointees with radical records who don’t belong in a Trump administration.”

Project 2025 also calls for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which investigates violations of civil rights law in the workplace, to “prohibit racial classifications and quotas, including human-resources classifications and DEI trainings that promote critical race theory.”

Trump took the issue to heart. His choice to lead the EEOC, Andrea Lucas, describes her priorities as “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination,” according to The Washington Post. The Post wrote that Lucas, “a vocal critic of corporate DEI initiatives, will lead an agency that holds sway over policy for a vast swath of U.S. employers.”

Conservatives have attempted to dismantle public education for decades, and Project 2025 continues those efforts in its recommendations for the second Trump administration. The Department of Education chapter in Mandate for Leadership opens with the following sentence: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated."

One inescapable throughline in Project 2025’s attacks on the Education Department is criticism of DEI and the related right-wing boogeymen of “critical race theory” and what conservatives call “gender ideology." Mandate recommends, for example, that the president issue an executive order requiring an “accounting of how federal programs/grants spread DEI/CRT/gender ideology.” Elsewhere, Project 2025 recommends the next administration prohibit the federal agencies from requiring higher education institutions “to adopt diversity, equity, and inclusion policies."

The chapter is simultaneously a broadside against DEI and the two largest teachers unions — the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers — which are also two of the largest unions in the country. Project 2025 claims that the teachers union “promotes radical racial and gender ideologies in schools” and calls on Congress to “rescind the National Education Association’s congressional charter,” referring to it as a “radical special interest group."

On February 4, NBC News reported that Trump is considering issuing an executive order to “eliminate the Education Department,” thus fulfilling one of Project 2025’s central goals. Already, the Trump administration is using its opposition to DEI as a pretext to target workers. “Dozens of employees who attended a diversity training course that former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos encouraged during President Donald Trump’s first administration have been placed on paid leave as part of Trump’s targeting of DEI programs," according to another NBC News report.

The move echoes a recommendation Project 2025 makes in the chapter on the Treasury Department to “treat the participation in any critical race theory or DEI initiative, without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds, as per se grounds for termination of employment."

The Trump administration is attempting to lay waste to nearly every aspect of the federal civil service, and with it the government’s capacity to function. According to The Wall Street Journal, at least 40,000 federal workers took a buyout offered by the administration. Legal experts say the offer is likely illegal, and unions have sued to stop what they refer to as an “ultimatum to a sweeping number of federal employees: resign now or face the possibility of job loss without compensation in the near future."

Some federal workers are reportedly facing intimidation from outside groups as well. NBC News reported that a website called “DEI watchlist” posted the personal information of “mostly Black employees who work in agencies primarily within the Department of Health and Human Services” and referred to them as “targets.” The website is reportedly a “project of the American Accountability Foundation,” a conservative organization on the advisory board of Project 2025 known for its McCarthyite tactics. (Last June, The Associated Press reported that AAF was creating and planning to publicize a list of “100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a second-term Trump agenda — and ripe for scrutiny, reclassifications, reassignments or firings.”)

Trump’s attack on workers is already extending beyond federal civil servants. The National Science Foundation stopped issuing grant money to be in compliance with Trump’s federal funding freeze on DEI programs, sending some recipients into financial turmoil. Even after the funding was unfrozen, the NSF continued to review grants related to “discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI” initiatives.

Newly confirmed Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly issued a memo to Department of Justice staff instructing them to “target private-sector diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility initiatives for potential ‘criminal investigation,'" according to Slate.

The memo appears to echo a nearly identical suggestion from Mandate for Leadership. DOJ’s “Civil Rights Division should spend its first year under the next Administration using the full force of federal prosecutorial resources to investigate and prosecute all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers who are engaged in discrimination in violation of constitutional and legal requirements,” the policy book recommends.

Now, the Trump administration is going beyond Project 2025’s policy proposals and using its attacks on DEI programs to bolster a broader assault on the entire working class.