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Federal employees who left ‘DEI’ roles still fired under Trump administration purge, lawsuit claims
Mahri Stainnak got the call the day after President Donald Trump took office: the Office of Personnel Management’s human resources office was putting them on administrative leave “effective immediately,” while the agency “investigates your radical and wasteful DEI activity.”
Stainnak was surprised by the news. Before the Trump administration, they served as OPM’s deputy director of the governmentwide Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility. But now they worked as the director of OPM’s talent innovation group, a human resources job focused on recruiting and retaining talent across the federal government.
“I said, ‘Wait a minute, I’m not in diversity, equity and inclusion.’ I started a new role in a job that has nothing to do with diversity, equity and inclusion.’ So I felt incredibly shocked and confused,” Stainnak said.
The second call came 48 hours later: Stainnak, a nonbinary person who had worked in the federal government for more than 16 years, received a reduction in force notice, as part of the Trump administration’s plan to root out DEI programs across the federal government.
Stainnak is now part of a class-action lawsuit filed this week in the D.C. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The lawsuit, led by the American Civil Liberties Union of D.C., claims the Trump administration unlawfully targeted and fired federal employees perceived to be associated with DEI work — even if their current jobs had nothing to do with it.
Mary Kuntz, an attorney at the law firm Kalijarvi, Chuzi, Newman & Fitch, P.C. who is representing the former employees, said the administration’s actions “clearly” violate the Civil Service Reform Act, because employees like Stainnak were fired for previous work in DEI positions.
“You can’t RIF somebody from a position they’re not in,” Kuntz said. “They sought to punish Mahri [Stainnak] for previous DEI work. That’s a violation of the First Amendment.”
Kuntz said the lawsuit claims that the administration’s push to “eviscerate” DEI programs also had a disproportionate impact on people of color, women, non-binary individuals, and violates Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“The DEI folks were working on behalf of people with disabilities, people who are non-native speakers of English. They were advocating for protected groups,” she said.
On the campaign trail last year, President Donald Trump pledged to “eliminate all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the entire federal government,” and characterized these programs as promoting “un-American” ideology.
On his first days in office, Trump signed executive orders that directed agencies to create lists of employees associated with DEI going back to Nov. 5, 2024 — the date of the presidential election. The complaint says agencies were directed to remove those employees, “regardless of their current roles or duties.”
“President Trump’s directives did not merely represent a change in presidential priorities — a normal occurrence when presidential administrations change. Rather, they were targeted actions intended to punish perceived political enemies, as well as to eliminate from the federal workforce women, people of color, and those, like plaintiffs, who advocated for or were perceived as advocating for protected racial or gender groups,” the complaint states.
The complaint says agencies set competitive levels for the RIFs so narrowly that federal employees were unable to compete for retention, and that those impacted by RIFs were not considered for reassignment to other jobs.
“I absolutely feel targeted on the basis of what the Trump administration believes my beliefs are, because I was not working in a diversity, equity and inclusion role in any way at the time when the new administration came in, or at the time I was placed on administrative leave,” Stainnak said.
For all the Trump administration’s actions to strip DEI out of the federal workforce, Kuntz said the president’s executive orders don’t go into any detail to define DEI.
“He characterizes them as illegal and discriminatory and various other things … but does doesn’t define them,” Kuntz said. “You can’t decide that somebody is a different party than the party in the White House and decide to fire them on that basis.”
The lawsuit states that the total number of federal employees impacted by the DEI rollback fis unknown, but says news reports suggest it could be “potentially in the thousands.”
The complaint states that at least 40 women or non-binary individuals, and more than 40 people of color received layoffs in connection with the Trump administration’s directives.
Stainnak and their colleagues filed an appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board in March, but Kuntz said that appeal and similar cases brought before the Office of Special Counsel and agencies’ Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) offices, have stalled.
In their last role, Stainnak helped agencies recruit top talent into the federal workforce. But they said the Trump administration’s purge of DEI workers has pushed out individuals who worked on bipartisan projects.
Former federal employees leading the lawsuit include a former operations manager at the Department of Veterans Affairs who “helped ensure that veterans were not inhibited from accessing earned benefits due to cultural or socioeconomic barriers,” a Department of Homeland Security Employee who led language competency efforts at the border to advance intelligence gathering and the safety of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
“By illegally targeting people based on the Trump administration’s assumptions about our political beliefs, or by targeting us based on who we are, this administration actually is hurting the people who work and live in this country, because now these dedicated, hardworking federal servants are not in their jobs providing the critical services that they do, whether it’s responding to emergencies like hurricanes and making sure folks have drinking water and shelter, or making sure our transportation systems are safe and timely. This action is really hurting the people who live in this country,” Stainnak said.
The post Federal employees who left ‘DEI’ roles still fired under Trump administration purge, lawsuit claims first appeared on Federal News Network.
© The Associated Press
