By Mark Wallace

Written by Mark Wallace

Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

The Trump Administration is attempting to defund an entire host of federally-funded programs, generating fierce opposition from those who have their snouts firmly planted in the federal trough. For them the taxpayer-funded gravy train is coming to an end, a prospect they view with great alarm.

They’ve responded by running into federal court and obtaining a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction barring the Trump Administration from terminating their gravy train. Naturally, America’s taxpayers have no seat in the courtroom, no say in the matter.

Most recently, a federal judge in Massachusetts (where else?) ruled that the Trump Administration’s attempted termination of federal grants for Diversity Equity and Inclusion (“DEI”) studies addressing topics such as health disparities in the black and LGBTQ communities was an instance of racial discrimination. “I’ve never seen racial discrimination like this” is the exact quote (New York Times, June 19, 2025 at page A15, “The Reagan-Appointed Judge Fast Tracking Trump to Trial”).

There is a severe deficit in basic logic here, which goes to the very heart of the matter.

What was racially discriminatory was the creation of these federally funded studies and projects in the first place, not the termination of their funding. A close and logical examination of the issues shows why DEI is a total and complete fraud and is itself a perpetuation and enlargement of the very racial discrimination it seeks to end.

“Health disparities” likely refers to a situation where people in a particular racial or ethnic group receive less health care or have more unfavorable health outcomes than the population as a whole. But if there is a study of health disparities in the black population, why not a study of health disparities in the Pacific Islander-American population? Or the South Asian-American population? Or the North Asian-American population? Or the Scandinavian-Americans? Or the Italian-Americans? Or Portuguese-Americans? Or Hispanics? Why are these studies seemingly always limited to black and LGBTQ populations?

Here’s the main point: the very selection of the population to be studied and the limitation of the studies to those selected groups and only those selected groups is itself discrimination. Terminating federal funding for these programs is not discrimination, but the end of discrimination. 

The federal judge in the aforementioned case has it exactly backwards: the Trump Administration’s curtailment of federal funding is a big step toward the ending of existing discrimination; it is not an advancement of discrimination.

DEI is now and always has been a fraud. It is a fraud because, in the DEI calculus, only certain favored groups qualify for its benefits. If you are white, no DEI for you. If you are Jewish or Christian, no DEI for you. If you are straight, no DEI for you. DEI is the most transparent case, if there ever was one, of a famous statement right out of a George Orwell novel (specifically, Animal Farm): “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. had it right: our society should be a society where people are judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin. The way to end discrimination is to end any program, plan, policy, or study that uses skin color in any way as a factor. You can’t end discrimination by creating more of it through DEI. If you want to stop discrimination, stop discriminating.

DEI is immensely harmful not only to people in those groups not selected for its benefits but also to countless people in the selected groups themselves. Millions, maybe tens of millions, of people in the selected groups can make it on their own under a purely meritocratic system and don’t need the discriminatory favoritism of DEI. For them, DEI is a millstone around their necks, creating a usually incorrect assumption that they couldn’t make it on their own without that favoritism. It’s a huge insult to those people. In effect, what DEI tells them is “we know you can’t make it on your own, so we are giving you an unfair advantage solely based on your sexual orientation or skin color.”

It’s time to restore fairness and merit. It’s time to stop discriminating based on skin color or sexual orientation. It’s time to end DEI once and for all and to eradicate every trace of this cancer from our society.

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