The Battle Over DEI Policies from PBC to Washington D.C. – Top 3 Takeaways – April 25th, 2025 - Driven By Braman Motorcars
Takeaway #1: Bye, bye DEI
It’s been a bad week for DEI policies. From Palm Beach County to Washington D.C., they’ve been dying. As they should be. While seeing that the federal government DOGE’d millions of dollars of DEI contracts with LinkedIn yesterday, I thought back to what I said after Election Day. On November 7th I said that the three biggest losers of the election were a corrupt Washington establishment, the GSS media and DEI. Specific to DEI I said this: <<The lowest form of the political condition is identity politics. I cannot think of anything more intellectually insulting than someone telling you that you must vote a certain way because of the color of your skin, your ethnicity, or your gender (even if to you that’s fluid). Yet that’s exactly what Barrack Obama told black men to do. That’s exactly what Kamala Harris and the entire Democrat apparatus told women to do. That’s exactly what Americans rejected. The fact of the matter is far more minorities, and far more women voted for an old white man four years ago (Joe Biden), than voted for the younger Black woman this time around. Donald Trump doubled his Black support and increased his support with women and Hispanics by about 7%. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said... I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. DEI is the antithesis of Dr. King’s dream. In fact, DEI programs are inherently bigoted and discriminatory. This was the election cycle the average American saw DEI for what it is. Anti-American. Bye-bye, DEI.>> Corporate America reacted right away. 60% of America’s largest companies have scrapped DEI programs since Election Day with more examples of this by the day. Also, have you noticed that you can also watch ads on TV without every ad containing homosexuality? Advertising trends have changed in a big way since Election Day as cultural trends have shifted for more in line with the reality of our society. But importantly what we’ve seen this week is...
Takeaway #2: Real policy transformation
On Wednesday President Trump signed the executive order “Reinstating Common Sense School Discipline Policies”. The stated purpose of the order: The Federal Government will no longer tolerate known risks to children’s safety and well-being in the classroom that result from the application of school discipline based on discriminatory and unlawful “equity” ideology. The order notes that among other issues DEI policies have made schools less safe. That’s because DEI policies had permeated every aspect of our public schools, a la what I illustrated yesterday where from hiring practices, to vendor considerations and even auditing procedures had become DEI driven. Discipline in schools had been DEI’d too. About that, in Trump’s executive order it states a Federal Commission study on School Safety finding: schools ignored or covered up — rather than disciplined — student misconduct in order to avoid any purported racial disparity in discipline numbers. That’s fun. Anyway, President Trump being elected President of the United States is why the Palm Beach County School District doesn’t have DEI policies in place today. What’s happened this week locally is great insight into the importance of much of what you hear day to day in the news. You might hear that the Trump administration is withholding funds from Harvard over its discriminatory policies, or sanctuary cities for being sanctuary cities, etc. and it may not mean much to you because it doesn’t have a local impact to you (other than potential taxpayer cost savings). Instead, just as we’ve seen, the federal government’s threat to withhold $300 million from the Palm Beach County School District, unless they dropped their DEI policies, which violated the Civil Rights Act, prompted extensive policy change. But of course, those fighting from the Left, including the education establishment itself, never give up easily.
Takeaway #3: The legal battle begins
It obviously wasn’t just the Palm Beach County School District that WAS affected by the U.S. Department of Education’s directive to end DEI policies or lose federal funding. That applied to every school district in the country with similarly discriminatory policies. On Thursday, in a lawsuit brought by the largest teacher’s union, the National Education Association and the ACLU, an Obama-appointed judge in New Hampshire issued a temporary stay of the administration's efforts to end DEI policies in public schools through the loss of federal funding. As we know this has become the tactic the Left has come to use in the current incarnation of their Anti-American resistance movement. The movement that seeks to keep policies that violate the Civil Rights Act in place. It’s possible that this is yet another case that’s eventually decided by the Supreme Court too. Next week’s a big week on that note. Including a case the Supreme Court is hearing about school choice programs that could impact Florida’s universal school choice program too. We’ll talk more about it then. But what this development means is that it’s especially important for you to let your school board representative know you want them to vote to permanently end discriminatory DEI policies in our schools. The vote on Wednesday was only a temporary 90-day halting of the DEI policies to allow for public comment to occur. You need to make sure your voice is heard because regardless of what happens with that case, or when it happens, the appropriate thing to do is to permanently end DEI policies in our schools and society generally. It’s time to say bye, bye to DEI for good.