‘DEI IS DEAD’: Trump White House Touts Sweeping Rollback as McMahon Drives Education Crackdown

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump is declaring victory over diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the federal government, schools, and corporate America, with Education Secretary Linda McMahon emerging as one of the administration’s most consequential enforcers of the effort.

“DEI is dead,” the White House declared Tuesday in a sweeping review of actions taken during Trump’s first 21 months back in office, pointing to executive orders, federal investigations, university settlements, and billions of dollars in canceled or frozen spending.

Nowhere has that push been more visible than in education.

Under McMahon, the Department of Education has used its Office for Civil Rights to investigate alleged race-based preferences, challenge DEI programs at federally funded schools and universities, and move federal civil-rights enforcement toward what the administration calls merit and equal treatment under the law.

The department says it has removed more than 2,300 webpages and other materials associated with Biden-era DEI policies, canceled more than $350 million in contracts and grants connected to Regional Educational Laboratories and Equity Assistance Centers, cut more than $600 million in teacher-training grants, and terminated another $226 million in Comprehensive Centers grants it characterized as wasteful or ideological.

McMahon’s department has also rewritten the regulatory landscape.

In July, the department removed disparate-impact provisions from its Title VI regulations, arguing that demographic disparities alone should not establish a civil-rights violation absent discriminatory treatment or intent. The department said the change would prevent schools from engaging in racial balancing simply to avoid federal enforcement action.

Then in September, McMahon formally rescinded the Biden administration’s 2024 Title IX regulation and restored the first Trump administration’s 2020 rule. The department said the move returned Title IX enforcement to protections based on biological sex following federal court rulings that invalidated the Biden rule.

Higher education has been another major front.

The Trump administration reached settlements with Columbia, Brown, Cornell, and Northwestern, among other institutions, over civil-rights, DEI and antisemitism concerns. Columbia’s agreement included a $200 million payment to the federal government and commitments involving admissions, hiring and university programs. McMahon called the Columbia agreement a “seismic shift” in federal efforts to hold taxpayer-funded universities accountable.

The White House also points to changes outside government, including companies scaling back DEI terminology and programs, federal contractors facing new anti-discrimination requirements and universities eliminating diversity statements or DEI offices. The administration attributes much of that shift to Trump’s executive actions, though individual institutions and companies have cited varying legal and business considerations.

For McMahon, the campaign against DEI has become part of a much broader restructuring of federal education policy. She has simultaneously pushed authority back toward states, expanded school-choice initiatives and argued that Washington should focus federal involvement on core statutory responsibilities and civil-rights enforcement.

The White House may have supplied Tuesday’s most memorable line, declaring “DEI is dead.”

Inside America’s schools and universities, McMahon’s department has been doing much of the work intended to make that declaration stick.

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