One year after Donald Trump’s second inauguration, a pattern emerges. Across dozens of executive orders, agency memos, funding decisions and enforcement changes, the administration has weakened federal civil rights law and the foundations of the country’s racially inclusive democracy.
From the start, the U.S. was not built to include everyone equally. . . Congress .” These choices were not accidents. They shaped who could belong and who could exercise political power, and they entrenched a racial political majority that lasted for generations.
That began to change in the 1960s. After decades of protest and pressure, Congress enacted laws that , , , and .
Federal agencies were charged with enforcing those laws, collecting data to identify discrimination and conditioning public funds on compliance. These choices and , with the current Congress “the most racially and ethnically diverse in history,” according to the Pew Research Center. The laws did not eliminate racial inequality, but they made exclusion easier to see and harder to defend.
The first year of the second Trump administration marks a sharp reversal.
Cumulative retreat
Rather than repealing civil rights statutes outright, the administration has focused on disabling the mechanisms that make those laws work.
Drawing on over two decades of teaching and and my experience , I believe this pattern reflects not isolated administrative actions but a cumulative retreat from the federal government’s role as an enforcer of civil rights law.
Over the past year, the president and his administration have taken a series of connected actions:
• On its first day in office, diversity, equity and inclusion programs, including diversity officers, equity plans and related grants and contracts.
• Shut down or sharply cut funding for federal programs aimed at reducing inequality, including offices focused on , , , and .
• Warned schools that diversity programs could , offering scholarships to students protected under – the Obama-era policy providing deportation protection for undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children – and if their accrediting agencies consider diversity.
• Revoked security clearances and access to federal buildings for employees . and , .
• Issued a government-wide memo labeling common best practices in hiring, admissions and other selection and evaluation processes – such as compiling diverse applicant pools, valuing cultural competence, considering first-generation or low-income status and seeking geographic and demographic representation – . The memo warned that federal funding could be cut to schools, employers and state and local governments using such practices. Federal prosecutors reportedly investigated federal , characterizing such initiatives as fraud.
• Weakened enforcement against discrimination by . That kind of analysis identifies disparities in outcomes, assesses whether they are justified by legitimate objectives, . The , the , the and other agencies complied and dropped disparate impact analysis. Because algorithmic systems typically operate without explicit intent, eliminating disparate impact analysis reduces federal agencies’ ability to detect and address discriminatory outcomes produced by .
• that barred discrimination by federal contractors, required steps to ensure nondiscriminatory hiring and employment, and subjected contractors to federal compliance reviews and record-keeping. This weakened a key mechanism used since 1965 to detect and remedy workplace discrimination.
• Eliminated data used to track inequality, including rolling back guidance encouraging schools to collect data on racial disparities in and . The administration also removed data .
• Dismantled or sharply reduced civil rights offices across federal agencies, including , and . .
• , restored Confederate and , and barred schools and teacher training programs from including material .
• Declared English the nation’s only , repealed a requirement that federal agencies provide meaningful access to government programs and services for , and prompted and the , and other agencies to scale back language-assistance requirements and services.
• , and adopted practices that treat ethnicity and non-English accents as .
The pattern is hard to miss
Taken together, these shifts have practical consequences.
When agencies stop collecting data on racial disparities, discrimination becomes harder to detect. When disparate impact analysis is abandoned, unfair practices with no legitimate purpose go unchallenged. When diversity programs are chilled through investigations and funding threats, institutions respond by narrowing opportunity. When history and language are recast as threats to unity, truth and freedom of speech and thought are suppressed and undermined.
Administration officials argue that these steps are needed to prevent , , ensure “colorblind equality” and comply with a Supreme Court decision that . But that ruling did not ban awareness of racial inequality, or neutral policies aimed at reducing it. Many of the administration’s actions rely on broad claims of illegality without providing specific violations.
The selective nature of enforcement is also telling.
Books about racism and civil rights were removed from military libraries, while books praising Nazi ideas or claiming racial intelligence differences . The administration suspended admissions of refugees – – but then .
One year in, the pattern is hard to miss.
The administration is not simply applying neutral rules. It is dismantling the systems that once helped the U.S. move toward a more open and equal democracy. It is replacing them with policies that selectively narrow access to economic, cultural and educational participation.
The result is not simply a change in policy, but a fundamental shift in the trajectory of American democracy.
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