Trump to prioritize ‘patriotic Americans’ for federal jobs and scrap DEI-based hiring with new playbook
WASHINGTON, DC: It looks like President Donald Trump just took a flamethrower to the federal bureaucracy.
In a sweeping new move to reshape the federal workforce, the Trump administration dropped a bold plan on Thursday, May 29, to slash government red tape, eliminate DEI-based hiring, and ensure that only “patriotic Americans” get to work for Uncle Sam.
The White House and the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) unveiled a radically revamped hiring memo that transforms the entire recruitment philosophy across departments, Politico reported.
Future job-seekers to answer essay questions and undergo loyalty tests
According to the memo authored by Vince Haley, assistant to the president for domestic policy, and Charles Ezell, acting OPM director, future federal job-seekers will have to do more than just upload a resume.
The new “merit hiring plan” now demands applicants to write short essays explaining how they’ll personally uphold Trump’s agenda.
That includes responses to prompts about their “commitment to the Constitution,” how they will “improve government efficiency,” and how they will “advance Trump’s executive orders and policy priorities.”
Forget about elite credentials giving you a leg up. The "overly complex Federal hiring system overemphasized discriminatory ‘equity’ quotas and too often resulted in the hiring of unfit, unskilled bureaucrats," the memo states.
Now, the focus shifts away from “elite universities and credentials” and moves toward institutions like “state and land-grant universities, religious colleges and universities, community colleges, high schools, trade and technical schools, homeschooling groups, faith-based groups, American Legion, 4-H youth programs, and the military, veterans, and law enforcement communities.”
Donald Trump administration scraps racial quotas, no more DEI
Donald Trump’s team is reportedly scrapping the use of any racial, ethnic, or gender-based quotas in the federal hiring pipeline.
The memo orders agencies to "cease using statistics on race, sex, ethnicity or national origin, or the broader concept of ‘underrepresentation’ of certain groups” in any hiring or promotion decisions.
It also tells agencies to stop reporting on the racial, ethnic, or religious composition of their workforces altogether.
The move, which is part of a broader campaign to wipe out DEI infrastructure, aligns with Trump’s repeated promise to “obliterate the deep state” and root out what he sees as activist bureaucrats working against his agenda.
The hiring memo makes clear that this administration is seeking ideological alignment. Furthermore, Trump’s goal is to get the federal hiring timeline down to under 80 days.
Senior executives in Donald Trump's crosshairs
On day one of his administration, Donald Trump declared that top-tier federal career executives must “serve at the pleasure of the President.” Now, he’s backing it up with a massive overhaul of the way SES employees are selected and trained.
The memo torches the current SES process as “broken, insular” and rife with misconduct. According to the memo, SES hiring has led to the placement of "executives who engage in unauthorized disclosure of Executive Branch deliberations, violate the constitutional rights of Americans, refuse to implement policy priorities, or perform their duties inefficiently or negligently.”
“Previous qualifications for SES hiring included unlawful ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ (DEI) criteria for hiring Federal executives," it noted.
To build a future pipeline of top talent, OPM is launching a brand-new “aspiring executive development program”—an 80-hour intensive course that’s “grounded in the Constitution, laws, and Founding ideals of our government, and will provide training on President Trump’s Executive Orders.”
According to the memo, the program will be "designed to equip aspiring leaders with the skills, knowledge, technical expertise, and strategic mindset necessary to excel in senior leadership roles.”
