ELLIOT: Hi, I’m Elliot (ph). I’m 14, and I’m from Maine. Currently, I’m getting ready for my midterms at school. This episode was recorded at…
SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
1:07 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, January 22, 2025.
ELLIOT: So things may have changed by the time you hear this. But hopefully, I’ll have my midterm results back. Wish me luck. OK, here’s the show.
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SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: Hey, good luck.
MCCAMMON: I have a feeling you’re going to do great.
DANIELLE KURTZLEBEN, BYLINE: Keep your grades up, kiddo.
DAVIS: I love Maine. Not right now, not at this time of year – it’s a little cold for me. But generally speaking, Maine is great.
MCCAMMON: So I’m glad somebody’s teenagers are listening to me even if mine are not.
DAVIS: (Laughter).
MCCAMMON: Hey, there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.
KURTZLEBEN: I’m Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the White House.
DAVIS: And I’m Susan Davis. I also cover politics.
MCCAMMON: Today on the pod, more executive actions from President Trump aimed at reshaping the federal government and its policies. Some of his recent actions mean big changes to federal DEI initiatives, something Trump nodded to in his inaugural address.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.
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TRUMP: We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based.
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MCCAMMON: So let’s start there. Danielle, what has the president ordered regarding DEI?
KURTZLEBEN: Let’s start with some super basics. When we say DEI, what that stands for is diversity, equity and inclusion. Now, that’s not a term with any sort of strict legal definition as it’s usually used. In the business world, it refers to, for example, attempts to address discriminatory hiring practices, past practices, to try to solve pay inequity. It can refer to antibias trainings. It can refer to all sorts of things. But, of course, it’s become deeply politicized as a term – DEI – in recent years.
But three orders, to my mind, that Trump has signed really center around DEI. There are two that he signed on Monday. One, as he puts it, would end, quote, “radical and wasteful government DEI programs.” There’s another to reform the federal hiring process – again, those are his words – which would attempt to, as the order puts it, try to get the most qualified people into government. That order suggests that, because of DEI, the government hasn’t been hiring the most qualified people.
And then there’s this one from overnight called, quote, “ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity.” That one rescinds further past executive orders aimed at promoting diversity, promoting equality/equity in the government. That order really also tries to take aim at the private sector as much as an executive order can.
MCCAMMON: What do we know about it?
KURTZLEBEN: It rescinds a few executive orders, and one of the executive orders that it rescinds is one from LBJ, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and that LBJ order, interestingly, really took aim at federal contractors. It said that contractors, you know, can’t discriminate based on race, creed, color, national origin, but it also said contractors will, quote, “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and that employees are treated during employment without regard to race, creed, color,” etc.
And so you have an executive order that is calling for some sort of affirmative action, which is another sort of dirty word, or couple of words, in the conservative movement right now and has been for a while. This is an executive order that Reagan tried to rescind and failed after he got some pushback from the business community and within his own cabinet, including the labor secretary at the time.
But what is also really interesting about this order is how much it tries to impose some sort of power on the private sector, not just the federal government. One of the things it requires is that the recipients of any government contract or grant cannot operate programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable antidiscrimination laws. Now, that is unclear, and that is one reason why it’s going to take a while for us to understand what this order means because determining what exactly it means to promote DEI – who knows right now? And this order doesn’t lay that out.
But to say, if you want to receive a government grant or contract – and there are a lot of companies and millions of people employed by those companies – for those companies to receive federal awards and to not be able to, quote, “implement DEI” – what does that mean? Who knows? But that is really a huge effort to try to impose power upon private companies.
DAVIS: Although, I also think we should note – and I think in the broader context of this, just take a step back – this backlash has been happening in the private sector already. In the past year or more, there was extensive reporting about big companies who embraced and expanded initiatives following the 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis at the hands of police. There was a robust national and corporate movement to feed and fuel these programs, and we’ve seen the backlash to that happening organically in corporate America. You saw even just recently with Meta’s executive Mark Zuckerberg announcing all – the end of all DEI initiatives there.
I think part of this movement is being fueled on the right by the Supreme Court challenge that ultimately ruled against affirmative action, race-based admission practices in education. And it’s part of a broader conservative push to sort of eliminate – I think we say DEI, but I think prior to that, we would probably say affirmative action or affirmative-action-like programs, throughout government, and use activist pressure to make the private sector follow suit.
MCCAMMON: Danielle, what is Trump directing federal agencies to do here?
KURTZLEBEN: Well, the Office of Management and Budget, often called OMB for short, is directing U.S. agencies to put staff in DEI roles on paid leave, and they’re also saying that all federal DEI program offices should be shut down. Now, furthermore, that order has told different agencies to come up with a plan to get rid of those DEI workers.
DAVIS: And I think that’s a good point that raises some of these complicating questions we’re talking about because many of these federal workers are protected by civil union protection, so it’s not necessarily super-easy to just say, oh, you worked in DEI, you’re fired. I would note, however, that if you are federal workers who work in this space – that this is your career specialty – if you are being told that the federal government no longer wants these services, I think part of the hopeful effect from the Trump administration’s point of view is that some of these workers will willingly quit or leave and get at that reduction in force by any means necessary.
MCCAMMON: I mean, do we know how these changes are actually going to work? I mean, some of these policies and programs have been around for a while, haven’t they?
KURTZLEBEN: The long story short is that a lot of these executive orders, the devil is in the details and in what the knock-on effects are. For example, do different agencies of the government decide they want to change regulations, and how? Regulations take a while to change. Besides that, some of these executive orders call for, for example, the attorney general or the head of this department or that department, within 120 days, to please submit a report on XYZ. So some of these, we’re going to have to wait for those 120 days to pass before we know what’s going to happen.
DAVIS: I think it’s worth noting here that there isn’t much of a robust response right now coming from the Democratic Party. I think the opposition party is still reeling a bit from an election in which, depending on who you talk to in the party, have varying degrees of blame towards identity and gender politics for costing them this election. And I don’t think that there is sort of a unified front in the Democratic Party to push back on this or defend these programs. They’re trying to figure that out. And in the absence of robust opposition, I think that the Trump administration is even more emboldened to push as far as they can if the opposing party isn’t willing to fight it with as much force, which they don’t seem all that inclined to do right now.
MCCAMMON: OK, we’re going to take a quick break, but we’ll be back in just a moment.
And we’re back. And NPR religion correspondent Jason DeRose is joining us now. Hey, Jason.
JASON DEROSE, BYLINE: Hello.
MCCAMMON: So I want to talk to you about the prayer service yesterday at Washington’s National Cathedral. The first and second families were there in the pews, and part of the sermon from Bishop Mariann Budde drew attention, as well as the ire of President Trump.
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MARIANN BUDDE: In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people – the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat-packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals – they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors.
MCCAMMON: Jason, we’re going to talk about what she said there, but first of all, just who is Mariann Budde?
DEROSE: Well, Budde is the episcopal bishop of the diocese of Washington, D.C., which means she is the pastor to the pastors of the diocese there. So she was elected in 2011 and has overseen all of the clergy in that diocese, which is not just Washington, D.C., itself but sort of parts around Washington, D.C., as well.
MCCAMMON: Now, this post-inaugural service – it’s a tradition. It’s not necessarily the kind of thing that always grabs headlines, but how does this work? I mean, the preacher there isn’t usually someone associated with the cathedral, right?
DEROSE: Well, usually, the incoming president has a lot of say into who is talking at that service. So if you think back to the Biden service, Reverend William Barber, the leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, was one of the preachers, and he gave a sermon that, you know, really lifted up what Biden had been talking about during the campaign. However, this year, the National Cathedral said that it wanted to depoliticize the service, and so it took control over who was preaching at the service. And so it would make sense that the Episcopal Diocese of Washington would have its bishop preach at that service.
MCCAMMON: And we heard those words from the bishop directed to the president. What do we know about what the reaction was like at that moment inside the cathedral?
DEROSE: Well, he was sitting in the front pew, and during her sermon she looked right at him and said, you. She used the word you several times. And I think that that was – you know, I would call that a confrontation. Now, it may not have been a physical confrontation, but it’s definitely a confrontation. You know, I don’t know if you’ve ever been called out from a pulpit, but…
MCCAMMON: I think I would have sunk into the pew.
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DEROSE: Well, I have not been called out from a pulpit, at least while I was sitting in the church, and, you know, it’s probably quite alarming for anybody that happens to. So, you know, you could see a little discomfort in the front pew and in the pew behind him, where some of Trump’s family was also sitting – some side-eye, some looking back and forth. But there wasn’t any sort of outspoken rebuttal. I mean, there wouldn’t be a rebuttal to a sermon in a worship service.
MCCAMMON: Right. But, Danielle, the president did eventually respond, right? What did he have to say?
KURTZLEBEN: Yeah, well, he and his allies are upset, as you might guess. Trump’s response came on social media overnight, and it is very Trumpy (ph) in tone. He calls the bishop a radical left, hard-line Trump hater, and he says, quote, “she was nasty in tone and not compelling or smart,” nasty being a word we have heard from him before. He finished it off saying, she is not very good at her job. She and her church owe the public an apology.
But he’s not the only one who has responded. Among others is Georgia Republican Representative Mike Collins, who yesterday posted on social media network X, quote, “the person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.” I mean, it’s just – it’s really gotten people very fired up and very angry.
DAVIS: Although, to be fair, I don’t think in any situation where you have a pastor speaking at such a high-profile political event – to me, the pastor is always sort of inherently a political figure. And by that, I would include the pastors that spoke at Trump’s inaugural ceremonies in the U.S. Capitol, in which many made what I think people could interpret as political comments supporting the president and it being God’s will that Donald Trump won again.
And I think that she had an opportunity, and she used it in a political way. I don’t say that in a negative regard. I think that’s just a fact. She had a national platform to do it. I think she knew what she was going to do. She went and also did media interviews after, where she acknowledged that, yes, she wanted to send a message directly to the president. So I think she knew full well what it would provoke, and I think that was by design.
And I would just say this – I do think, when it comes to Donald Trump, obviously, he has a huge amount of support among the evangelical movement, especially among white evangelicals. But on the issue of immigration, which the pastor in this scenario raised, I do think the overlap between religious activism and immigration policy is going to be a very real tension point in the Trump administration because so many of the people advocating for and helping – like, hands-on helping undocumented and immigrant communities are faith-based organizations and are very much opposed to what the Trump administration is trying to do. And I think that she was maybe just drawing the first battle line in what is going to be a number of clergy sort of criticizing the Trump administration, which, as we speak, is about to unroll dramatic and vast deportation forces.
MCCAMMON: Yeah, and those faith-based groups come from across the religious spectrum and include, in some cases, evangelical groups who, in some cases, have pushed back against Trump’s statements about immigrants in the past.
KURTZLEBEN: That’s very true. I mean, as we talk about this, I think about this conversation I had way back in 2016, ahead of the Iowa caucuses. I was in northwestern Iowa, which is really the most conservative, white evangelical-heavy part of the state. And I was at a campaign event, and I talked to a pastor, and the pastor told me, I am the head of a very conservative church. It was – it’s a white evangelical church.
And he said, my entire congregation loves Trump. They love Ted Cruz, the Texas senator who, at the time, was running for president, also on an anti-immigration platform. And the pastor said, I just don’t agree with my congregation, and he invoked a Bible verse about welcoming the stranger. It’s a verse from one of the gospels. And that is a way that many Christians – clearly not all, but many Christians – do feel about immigration.
MCCAMMON: You know, this points, I think, to a larger and really longstanding divide in religion and politics. Sue mentioned the inaugural ceremony. Trump himself said that he feels he was saved by God from his first assassination attempt in order to make America great again. And then last year, when he was promoting the sale of that Bible, the one he attached his name to, he said he wanted to bring God back to the public square and that Christians should, quote, “not allow the media or the left-wing groups to silence, censor or discriminate against us.” And you know, Bishop Budde’s message of loving your neighbor, of compassion, of caring for those on the margins – that is also part and parcel of a lot of religious thought. Trump is now calling on her to apologize for that. So how do you sort of square that circle?
DEROSE: He mostly spends time listening to the fact that, you know, 80% of white evangelicals voted for him. But among other faith groups, it’s much less lopsided. It’s not 50/50, but there is still a large percentage of people on the political left who are people of faith. So I think that he can’t just simply say that people of faith feel one way, although his greatest support is from people who feel one way about their religion.
But, you know, in thinking about – especially around immigration and refugee issues, if you look at the organizations that resettle refugees in the United States, almost all of them are faith-based organizations, and almost all of them are going to have to lay off a lot of people if he shuts off the flow of refugees into the country. So these are issues that churches, faith-based organizations, are deeply, deeply involved in across the political spectrum, but I would not be surprised if the religious left started to be more vocal, like Bishop Budde was with their comments yesterday.
MCCAMMON: One more question for you, Jason. As I mentioned, the president has called on Bishop Budde to apologize to him. Does he have any oversight over the National Cathedral? Is there any way in which he could retaliate against her?
DEROSE: He has no oversight over the National Cathedral. It may be called the National Cathedral, but it’s really just the Episcopal Cathedral of the Diocese of Washington, D.C, there. It’s not run by the United States. It’s run by the Episcopal Church. And so, you know, she was duly elected and will serve until she chooses to retire. I would actually be surprised if she apologized, considering she has gone on multiple TV shows to talk about why she said what she said and to defend it.
MCCAMMON: All right. NPR’s Jason DeRose, thanks so much for your reporting.
DEROSE: You’re welcome.
MCCAMMON: And that’s all from us today. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.
KURTZLEBEN: I’m Danielle Kurtzleben, I cover the White House.
DAVIS: I’m Susan Davis, I also cover politics.
MCCAMMON: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
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