Federal employees were left wondering what would be affected by President Donald Trump’s sweeping cuts to federal DEI programs Thursday, including workers at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Chicago-based Railroad Retirement Board.
It comes after Trump signed an executive order ending federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which he and conservatives have said are discriminatory and “undermine national unity.”
Letters sent to federal agencies by the Office of Personnel Management outlined plans to layoff all DEI employees by Wednesday, and said reports on what staff and programs were affected, along with plans to enact the rest of the order, were to be sent to the Office of Personnel Management by Thursday. A source told the Sun-Times an unknown number of employees had been asked to leave the Railroad Retirement Board office at 844 N. Rush St. Wednesday afternoon.
The employees would be paid through their administrative leave until management moved to terminate them at an undetermined date. It also set out a system for employees to report anyone trying to hide connections to DEI programs in contracts or other official writing.
“We are aware of efforts by some in government to disguise these programs by using coded or imprecise language,” states a letter to the Chicago-based Railroad Retirement Board obtained by the Sun-Times. “If you are aware of a change … to obscure the connection between the contract and DEIA or similar ideologies, please report all facts and circumstances to DEIAtruth@opm.gov within 10 days.”
The letter goes on to say failure to report the activity in a “timely” manner may result in “adverse consequences,” though the extent or details on those consequences were unknown.
Nicole Cantello — president of AFGE Local 704, a union representing 1,000 EPA workers in the Midwest — said there were many unknowns Thursday. She didn’t know still how many in her union would be affected, though she did say the process was heavily regimented, and could allow employees with seniority to remain in other positions depending on the circumstances.
However, the Trump administration wants to put merit above all other measures, so the fate of those employees is still up in the air.
“It’s very difficult right now to see exactly how it’s going to play out,” Cantello told the Sun-Times Thursday. “There will be lots of questions on what constitutes DEIA and what doesn’t.”
Among the remaining questions were how the EPA’s environmental justice programs, which bring federal resources to areas heavier hit by pollution, would be affected by the order. Federal employees in those programs were ordered to stop work Wednesday, but not given the same dismissals as other employees.
Little Village and Pilsen are both neighborhoods in which the EPA programs have focused on soil cleanups and air monitoring, among other measures. Cantello worried that important EPA online postings, such as those warning Chicagoans about lead in their drinking water, would be scrubbed off the internet in the same manner that the DEI sites were. As of Thursday afternoon, they remained.
“We are deeply concerned about this,” Cantello said. “It’s going to severely affect how we approach communities.”
But what was certain to her was the Trump team’s planning, as guidance for federal agencies to carry out orders, arrived just a day after the order was signed, when Cantello said it sometimes took previous administrations months to do the same.
She also said measures requiring government workers to report attempts to disguise DEI activity were unnecessary because employees self-censor. When Trump took similar measures during his first term, federal employees “self-censored” presentations that could be perceived as DEI-related, rather than attempting to mask them.
“It’s just unprecedented and shows a level of sophistication, planning and commitment that we haven’t seen before,” Cantello said. “This happened in the last Trump administration and it was shut down as soon as Trump said so. The federal workforce, in my view, will go overboard.”