US equality chief fired by Trump condemns 'demonization of the term DEI'
Source: The Guardian
Sat 8 Feb 2025 08.00 EST
Last modified on Sat 8 Feb 2025 08.03 EST
Seven days after Donald Trump was inaugurated, Jocelyn Samuels received a message from the White House saying that the president – who had first appointed her as a commissioner to the US government agency tasked with fighting workplace discrimination – now wanted her gone. Like so many other officials Trump has axed since retaking office, Samuels was informed she was being terminated from the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) because of her “support for radical Biden administration guidance, DEI initiatives and a refusal to defend women against extreme gender ideology”.
The order appeared to fly in the face of the legal precedent governing her appointment to the commission, but Samuels also sees her firing as part of a greater strategy to create a Republican majority on the five-member commission that will roll back protections for transgender employees in particular, and retaliate more generally against businesses that attempt to address inequity in their workforce.
“What I observed from the outside is that there is a real desire to decimate the federal government’s ability to provide the level of services that it has to the American people,” Samuels told the Guardian as she sat in a cafe earlier this week across the street from the White House, where her firing was orchestrated.
“With regard to the EEOC, I think that these terminations were in service of the administration’s agenda to eliminate whatever they mean by DEI programs, and to erase the existence of trans people, because those are issues that fall directly under the EEOC jurisdiction, to the extent that they result in discrimination in the workplace.” A longtime civil rights lawyer who has been a senior official in the departments of justice and health and human services, Samuels was appointed to the commission during Trump’s first term, and then reappointed by Joe Biden.
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/feb/08/jocelyn-samuels-eeoc-dei-trump
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