DEI Is Not Fraud: How the Trump Administration’s Rhetoric Erases Decades of Research

In the months since returning to power, the Trump administration has launched an aggressive campaign to rebrand Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives as nothing more than government fraud, waste, and abuse. This shift in terminology isn’t merely cosmetic; it is ideological. It delegitimizes decades of peer-reviewed scholarship, criminalizes marginalized communities, and reframes public investment in equity as a national threat. In a March 2025 address to Congress, former President Trump declared: 

“We found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud... $101 million for DEI contracts at the Department of Education. Nothing even like it has ever happened.” 

Statements like this lay the groundwork for a broader narrative: that DEI isn’t about ensuring equal opportunity. It is about siphoning resources to undeserving causes. Trump also called out “$8 million to promote LGBTQI+ in Lesotho,” as if international LGBTQ+ human rights work were self-evidently absurd. 

  These speeches were quickly followed by Executive Order 14151, which not only abolished DEI offices across federal agencies but also instructed departments to fire staff associated with diversity efforts. Agencies were told to delete website archives related to women, LGBTQ+ history, and racial equity initiatives. What’s happening is not a budgetary audit; it is a cultural erasure. Nowhere is this clearer than in the testimony of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. On June 11, 2025, Hegseth defended the use of 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines in Los Angeles during protests against mass deportations. The protests were led largely by Black and Brown communities, queer organizers, and student coalitions advocating for immigrant rights, many of whom have historically aligned with DEI values. Hegseth said plainly: 

“The troops were deployed to protect ICE and law enforcement. Isn’t that obvious?” 

But when asked to cite a legal statute for military deployment on U.S. soil, Hegseth could not. The implication is clear: military power is now a legitimate response to civil resistance, especially when that resistance is led by marginalized groups fighting for dignity and inclusion. In a Senate hearing that same week, Sen. Dan Sullivan asked Hegseth whether he would “rip the Biden woke yoke off the neck of our military.” Hegseth replied: 

“They want to focus on lethality and warfighting and get all the woke political prerogative out of the military.”

  What is the “woke prerogative”? In Hegseth’s view, it includes any policy that values diversity in hiring, acknowledges structural racism, or protects LGBTQ+ servicemembers. It includes funding trans healthcare, supporting Black veterans, and conducting sexual harassment prevention training. In short: evidence-based DEI work. This political project to conflate DEI with dysfunction, and to frame historically excluded people as threats to competence, isn’t new. But under the current administration, it has found legal, rhetorical, and militarized expression. And it is working. DEI researchers are being labeled ideological extremists. Trans students are being cast as symptoms of national decline. Professors of gender and ethnic studies are being accused of “indoctrinating” students when they’re simply teaching from peer-reviewed literature, empirical evidence, and decades of work inside their disciplines. 

 My thesis is simple: trans people are not frauds. Grant funding for marginalized students is not a waste. And my ethnic and gender studies professors are not abusing me or anyone else by teaching the truth about power, identity, and history. To call DEI “abuse” is to deny the abuse it was designed to address. This isn’t just an attack on programs. It’s an attack on epistemology, on how we know what we know, on who gets to ask questions, and who is allowed to answer them. If we let “DEI” be rewritten as “fraud, waste, and abuse,” we won’t just lose jobs or funding, we will lose the language to describe inequality at all.