They trained on diversity under Trump. Now he’s punishing them for it.

Employees who had completed diversity training in 2017 at the Education Department were gathered for a celebration, and the event’s printed program included a quote from the education secretary: “In building strong teams, embracing diversity and inclusion are key elements for success.”

The secretary was Betsy DeVos, who served four years in President Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

Now, in the opening days of Trump’s second term, dozens of employees who attended that diversity program – many during Trump’s first term – have been placed on leave because of it, according to union officials, affected employees and a person with knowledge of how the decisions were made. The suspensions came in response to Trump’s Day 1 executive order to eradicate DEIA – diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility – from the government.

Some of the workers who were put on leave are struggling to understand how a training they took with the encouragement of the first Trump administration could be jeopardizing their jobs under the second. “It’s the most ironic thing,” said one employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, “because Betsy DeVos supported it.”

In messages to the staff, DeVos and top aides spoke of the importance of building and acknowledging a diverse workforce – using terminology that Trump’s team has recently excised from the agency’s website and now uses as a barometer to cancel contracts and grants, according to more than a dozen documents obtained by the Washington Post.

“In order for ED to be a high-performing organization in the 21st century, we must constantly strive to foster an inclusive work culture and maintain an environment that embraces the diversity of our workforce,” DeVos wrote in a February 2020 memo to all department employees.

The memo specified that all people should be treated with respect, regardless of factors including race, age, sex, “transgender status” and gender identity.

In the new Trump administration, education officials spent their first day scrubbing the agency’s website for any mention of words including diversity, transgender, LGBTQIA and equity, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. On Friday, a directive sent to department employees said the agency would terminate programs, contracts, policies or media that mention transgender or “fail to affirm the reality of biological sex.”

The moves have come under heavy criticism.

“This is Kafkaesque, Orwellian,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank. “It is ridiculous to threaten professionals’ livelihoods because they attended a training. Most of America attended a DEI training in 2020. This policy by keyword search will lead to all kinds of dumb outcomes and, I hope, a real backlash.”

A spokeswoman for the Education Department, Madi Biedermann, defended the decisions to place the employees on leave as a part of the Trump administration’s shake-up of the federal civil service. “We are evaluating staffing in line with the commitment to prioritize meaningful learning ahead of divisive ideology in schools and putting student outcomes above special interests,” she said.

A changed GOP

The polar opposite messages in the two Trump administrations reflect the hostility that has built toward diversity, equity and inclusion among conservatives over the past four years.

Under DeVos’ leadership, the department regularly celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month. In July 2020, a training was offered to employees called “Unconscious Bias to Unleash Potential,” according to an email obtained by The Post.

And in October 2019, Kenneth L. Marcus, who headed the department’s Office for Civil Rights, sent a memo to “reiterate my commitment to fostering a culture of diversity, inclusion and respect within our workforce.” He said the office would not tolerate discrimination on the basis of factors including gender identity. A diverse workforce, he said, was “essential” to the mission.

Marcus, in a statement to the Post, said he has always fought against discrimination, harassment and bullying. “I see no contradiction between that position, which I made explicit to my staff through the first Trump administration, and President Trump’s recent statements opposing unlawful, discriminatory DEI policies,” he said.

DeVos’s chief of staff, Nate Bailey, declined to comment on DeVos’s statements or support for diversity and inclusion, calling this article “fake news about made-up controversies.”

The backlash to DEI began building after the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and the nationwide discussion of race that followed. Conservatives objected to discussions of systemic racism, saying they painted the country with an overly negative brush.

Some DEI opponents worked to spotlight programs and policies, particularly those dealing with race, they found offensive. That included programs such as a training session in Seattle that separated employees by race and delivered a lesson on “our complicity in the system of white supremacy” to the white workers; a Smithsonian museum chart that was included (and that it later apologized for) in an online discussion that described values such as “hard work” as white traits; and an effort in San Francisco to rename schools, including Abraham Lincoln High School, because of perceived racism in their eponyms’ pasts.

Others argued that DEI had been innocuous or positive but transformed into something they found militant and offensive.

Ideas that may have had merit had been “captured and distorted,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. He said many conservatives concluded that “the only sensible course is to rip them out.”

DEI supporters contend that Republicans are cherry-picking outlier programs to attack the entire field for political gain.

‘A cadre of committed change agents’

On his first day in office, Trump ordered federal agencies to end all DEI work. The following week, emails began arriving in Education Department workers’ inboxes informing them they had been put on administrative leave.

American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents 2,825 Education Department employees, said 74 of its members were put on administrative leave for supposed ties to DEIA. About 25 managers who are not in the union were, as well, according to Sheria Smith, president of the local.

And something else unites them, too, Smith said. After requesting demographic data from the department on everyone placed on leave, Smith found that the majority are women of color.

A few of them did work related to DEI, but many were flummoxed because their jobs had nothing to do with that, according to interviews with many of those put on leave and union officials. Only later, when the staffers compared notes, did they discover a common thread: A large number had participated in the department’s Diversity Change Agent training program.

Their suspicions were confirmed when a person with knowledge of the process told the Post that workers from the U.S. DOGE Service, Elon Musk’s team tasked with slashing the government, had combed through employees’ files to uncover and target staffers who had taken single diversity trainings, sometimes years before. Not all participants in the program were put on leave; the person said it was not clear why some were chosen and others were not.

The Diversity Change Agent program was a departmentwide initiative aimed at fostering an inclusive culture. The goal was to “establish a cadre of committed change agents to help lead efforts to educate and train our workforce about diversity and inclusion,” according to training materials prepared by FranklinCovey, a leadership coaching company that ran the program for the agency.

Goals included increasing “individual awareness and understanding of diversity,” developing “deeper trust among employees,” creating “specific action plans to drive diversity and inclusion” and improving “employee ability to communicate effectively,” according to the material. (A spokesperson for FranklinCovey declined to comment.)

One former senior official who was involved with the program at the time said it was enthusiastically supported by DeVos and Denise Carter, who is acting secretary of the Education Department.

Carter did not respond to requests for comment.

On a slide deck about the program, a full page is devoted to DeVos, featuring her portrait alongside a message attributed to her: “Diversity may be viewed as cliché, but I believe that getting to know, working with, befriending and including people who are different from ourselves is enriching and expanding.”

During the two-day training sessions, conversations revolved around the idea that everyone sees the world through a different lens and that it can be difficult to understand how people in disparate situations think and feel, according to participants who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing their jobs.

“There was no gender bashing, no culture bashing,” said one participant who did the training in 2017. “It was just, ‘People are different. Accept it. And the quicker you can accept it and acknowledge it, the better working relationship you can have,’ which would mean a better bottom line.”

She recalled that the facilitator asked them to group themselves based on identities. At first, the groupings were obvious – race and gender, for instance. But then they joined with others based on factors like family background and education. The lesson, she said, was, “You may think you are different, but you are more alike than different.”

A second staffer who also participated during the first Trump administration recalled that attendees were asked to consider their own prejudices and to imagine how it might affect students if teachers or principals behave in a biased or prejudiced way.

In another portion of the training, this person said, participants talked through how they would handle various scenarios: What would you do if your child came home and said they were gay? What would you do if your daughter was dating a much older man with tattoos?

After completing the training, newly minted “change agents” were encouraged to return to their offices and try to “create change,” participants said.

Some people formed office-level diversity councils. Others planned events celebrating different cultures. Still other change agents beefed up the department’s celebrations of various observance months, such as Black History Month or Pride Month.

One participant in the program said her group decided to work on cross-cultural awareness and wound up hosting a conversation about different places in the world where employees had traveled. She also helped plan a Lunar New Year celebration.

By 2017, 207 employees had taken the training. The goal was a total of about 400 by 2020, documents show. As of January 2025, at least 300 people had taken the change agents training departmentwide, one staffer said.

The employees put on leave are still receiving pay and benefits, though they are locked out of their work email accounts. It is unclear whether the administration will fire them as a way to make good on its promise to stamp out DEIA.