Dive Brief:
- A federal judge on Friday temporarily blocked major portions of President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders that attempt to dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the higher education sector and elsewhere.
- U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson — a Biden appointee — ruled that the groups that filed the lawsuit were likely to succeed in their arguments that the executive orders undermined free speech and were unconstitutionally vague.
- Abelson issued a preliminary injunction barring the Trump administration from ending all “equity-related” federal grants, requiring grant recipients to certify they don’t have any DEI programs, and bringing enforcement actions against wealthy universities to deter their DEI efforts.
Dive Insight:
Trump signed a flurry of executive orders in his first few days of office intending to stamp out DEI initiatives nationwide. In response, the American Association of University Professors and the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education helped spearhead a lawsuit against two orders aimed at diversity efforts at colleges and other organizations.
The first, signed during the first day of Trump’s second term, orders agencies to terminate all “equity-related” grants, though it doesn’t specify what kind of work that encompasses. According to the lawsuit, the order threatens the efforts of faculty members working on grants focused on equity, particularly those at medical schools.
Abelson sided with the plaintiffs, which also include the mayor and city council of Baltimore and a membership organization for restaurant workers. The executive order leaves the definition of “equity” unclear, Abelson wrote, risking the possibility of “arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement over billions of dollars in government funding.”
“If a university grant helps fund the salary of a staff person who then helps teach college students about sexual harassment and the language of consent, would the funding for that person’s salary be stripped as ‘equity-related’?” Abelson wrote.
The plaintiffs also took issue with another anti-DEI order signed Jan. 21. It directs federal agencies to require the recipients of their grants to certify that they don’t have any programs promoting DEI.
The lawsuit alleges that this provision undermines free speech — an argument Abelson said is likely to succeed.
“Plaintiffs, their members, and other federal contractors and grantees have shown they are unable to know which of their DEI programs (if any) violate federal anti-discrimination laws, and are highly likely to chill their own speech — to self-censor, and reasonably so — because of the Certification Provision,” Abelson wrote.
The lawsuit likewise took aim at the executive order’s mandate requiring all government agencies to identify up to nine potential investigations into corporations, associations, foundations or colleges with endowments valued at over $1 billion.
This provision leaves colleges and other entities with an “untenable choice,” the lawsuit argued, either to keep their DEI programs or to “suppress their own speech” by ending initiatives that the Trump administration may deem unlawful.
In his ruling, Abelson wrote that plaintiffs were likely to succeed in their arguments that this provision represents “unlawful viewpoint-based restriction on protected speech.”
“As the Supreme Court has made clear time and time again, the government cannot rely on the ‘threat of invoking legal sanctions and other means of coercion’ to suppress disfavored speech,” Abelson wrote.
The plaintiffs celebrated the ruling, including NADOHE.
“This ruling underscores that ensuring equity, diversity, and inclusion are the very goals of federal anti-discrimination law, not a violation of the law,” NADOHE President and CEO Paulette Granberry Russell said in a Friday statement.
However, conservatives pushed back on the order.
“DEI is illegal race-based discrimination in violation of the federal Civil Rights Act,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said Friday in a post on social media site X. “A judge cannot nullify the Civil Rights Acts and order the government to award federal taxpayer dollars to organizations that discriminate based on race.”
Abelson’s preliminary injunction only blocks the provisions of the two executive orders contested in the lawsuit. It does not pause other elements of the orders.
