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Trump's Justice Department expected to challenge diversity

policies as discriminatory

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Legal challenges may target university admissions and

racial

equity programs

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Civil rights advocates fear rollback of diversity

commitments

due to scrutiny

By Andrew Goudsward

WASHINGTON, Dec 10 (Reuters) -

President-elect Donald Trump is set to challenge policies

aimed at boosting diversity at companies and universities when

he takes office next month, throwing the weight of the U.S.

government behind growing conservative opposition to such

practices.

The Justice Department and other federal agencies are likely

to start investigations and bring lawsuits over diversity,

equity and inclusion policies as they argue that many of those

practices violate anti-discrimination laws.

"DEI is unlawful discrimination," said Mike Davis, the

founder of the Article III Project, a conservative advocacy

group, who has advised Trump on legal issues. "It's illegal for

the government to do it. It's illegal for universities to do it.

And it's illegal for companies to do it."

The plans would turn the power of the Justice Department's

Civil Rights Division -- created in 1957 to enforce laws aimed

at stopping discrimination against Black people and other

marginalized communities -- against policies designed to benefit

those groups.

Trump signaled his intent late on Monday when he tapped

lawyer Harmeet Dhillon as his pick to oversee the division as an

assistant attorney general, saying that her career highlights

included "suing corporations who use woke policies to

discriminate against their workers."

Proponents of DEI policies say they are needed to address

longstanding racial inequities in U.S. society, while opponents

argue that many of the policies are exclusionary and focus on

race and gender at the expense of individual merit.

Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which forbids racial

discrimination in programs that receive federal funds, could

empower the Justice Department to challenge university

admissions practices and racial equity programs in healthcare.

"The argument is going to be to the extent that there's a

consideration of race in any context by any entity that receives

federal funds, that's a problem under Title VI," said Danielle

Conley, the head of the anti-discrimination practice at law firm

Latham & Watkins.

UNIVERSITIES IN FOCUS

Trump vowed in a campaign video to direct the Justice

Department to pursue civil rights investigations into

universities, saying they had been captured by the "radical

left."

"We are going to get this anti-American insanity out of our

institutions once and for all," Trump said in the video, posted

in July.

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for

comment.

Legal challenges could include claims that universities are

not following the U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 ruling barring

consideration of race in college admissions. The Justice

Department under Democratic President Joe Biden has defended an

exemption allowing U.S. military academies to continue using

affirmative action policies, a stance Trump could reverse.

During Trump's first term, the Justice Department sued Yale

University alleging that its admissions practices discriminated

against Asian American and white applicants. The lawsuit was

later dropped under the Biden administration.

A BROADER CAMPAIGN

Even in situations where the Justice Department does not

have direct enforcement authority, the government could still

weigh in on existing cases to argue that its interpretation of

civil rights laws aligns with others challenging DEI policies.

America First Legal, a conservative group founded by Trump

adviser Stephen Miller, has brought 15 lawsuits since 2022

targeting major companies like Facebook and Instagram owner Meta

Platforms ( META ) and Amazon.com ( AMZN ) over their diversity efforts.

Seven of those cases, including the complaints against Meta

and Amazon ( AMZN ), have been dismissed after judges found that the

person or group suing did not suffer harm that would allow them

to sue. America First Legal has appealed some of those

decisions.

America First Legal did not respond to requests for comment.

'BETRAYAL OF THE MISSION'

The America First Legal cases are part of a larger effort to

pressure companies to scrap practices aimed at boosting racial

and ethnic representation in the workplace.

Many of their legal challenges were brought on behalf of

white men using laws passed during the post-Civil War

Reconstruction era and the civil rights movement of the 1950s

and 60s designed to support Black Americans.

"It would be a betrayal of the mission of the Civil Rights

Division to turn it into a legal force that protects primarily

the interests of white men," said Thomas Healy, a Seton Hall

University law professor who has written about civil rights

issues.

DEI opponents note that federal anti-discrimination laws are

race neutral and generally apply to all forms of exclusion based

on race or gender.

Civil rights advocates fear that even the threat of

government scrutiny will cause companies to back away from prior

commitments on diversity.

"The risk I see is that employers may be worried about

getting sued and roll back their programs," said Amalea

Smirniotopoulos, a senior policy counsel at the NAACP Legal

Defense Fund. "At the heart of these attacks is fundamentally an

attempt to hoard opportunity for a limited group of people."

Walmart ( WMT ) in late November became the latest major U.S.

corporation to scale back its DEI efforts, following JPMorgan

Chase ( JPM ) and Starbucks ( SBUX ).

About half of the American public believes that federal and

state governments and powerful U.S. institutions need to do more

to address inequities caused by structural racism, according to

an October Reuters/Ipsos poll. One in three disagreed with the

idea, the poll found.

Anti-discrimination lawyers said many DEI policies may be

able to withstand legal scrutiny if they're focused on measures

that do not involve explicit consideration of race, such as

expanding employee recruiting and setting aspirational goals for

diversity.

"It is not pre-ordained what the outcome of the various

challenges will be," said Debo Adegbile, head of the

anti-discrimination practice at law firm WilmerHale.

LEGAL OBSTACLES

The Justice Department will face some obstacles in any

effort to combat DEI policies. Its Civil Rights Division does

not enforce federal laws banning racial discrimination in hiring

and contracting against private employers, according to experts

in discrimination law.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is the only

federal entity empowered to sue companies over employment

discrimination. The five-member EEOC is expected to have a

Democratic majority until at least 2026, which could stymie some

of Trump's plans.

But the Civil Rights Division can bring employment

discrimination cases against state and local governments.