On Feb. 21 in Baltimore, District Judge Adam Abelson temporarily blocked a key section of Donald Trump’s executive orders aimed at ending programs supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion. In his ruling, Abelson concluded that the orders likely violate several constitutional rights, including the right to free speech.
According to NPR, the plaintiffs, which includes the City of Baltimore and various higher education groups, argued earlier this month that the Trump Administration’s executive orders are unconstitutional and a blatant overreach of presidential authority, in addition to creating a chilling effect on the freedom of speech.
The Trump Administration, meanwhile, defended its use of the executive orders as a means to target DEI programs that were in violation of federal civil rights laws, with attorneys for the administration arguing that federal spending should align with the priorities of a president.
In his ruling, Abelson indicated that the executive orders actively discourage businesses, organizations, and other public entities from supporting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
“The harm arises from the issuance of it as a public, vague, threatening executive order,” Abelson stated to the court during the hearing.
Later, he would expound on this statement in his written opinion. Abelson wrote that the orders are constitutionally vague, and leave federal contractors “no reasonable way to know what, if anything, they can do to bring their grants into compliance.”
To illustrate the quagmire that the executive orders placed institutions like the public school system in, Abelson created a hypothetical situation where the Department of Education funded an elementary school for technology access and a teacher used a computer to teach about Jim Crow and another scenario where a road construction grant covered the cost of filling potholes in a low-income neighborhood but not a wealthy one, Abelson then asked rhetorically “does that render it ‘equity-related’?”
According to the argument from the plaintiffs in their complaint, the efforts from the Trump Administration to end the diversity, equality, and inclusion programs, seemingly done in an arbitrary manner, will cause widespread harm.
“Ordinary citizens bear the brunt,” they wrote. “Plaintiffs and their members receive federal funds to support educators, academics, students, workers, and communities across the country. As federal agencies make arbitrary decisions about whether grants are ‘equity-related,’ Plaintiffs are left in limbo.”
According to NBC News, Abelson also responded to this argument in his ruling.
“Plaintiffs have amply established a likelihood that they will succeed in proving that the Termination Provision invites arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement over billions of dollars in government funding,” Abelson wrote.
He continued, “According to a recent case, ‘approximately 20% of the nation’s labor force works for a federal contractor. The Termination Provision leaves those contractors and their employees, plus any other recipients of federal grants, with no idea whether the administration will deem their contracts or grants, or work they are doing, or speech they are engaged in, to be ‘equity related.’”
The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, along with several other nonprofits and Brandon Scott, the mayor of Baltimore, argued in their suit that Trump was “seizing” Congress’ role in determining how funds are parceled out.
In addition, they argued that by not adequately defining what constituted DEI, that would have allowed the attorney general to exercise “carte blanche authority to implement the order discriminatorily.”
Furthermore, the organization declared in its suit, “In the United States, there is no king. In his crusade to erase diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility from our country, President Trump cannot usurp Congress’s exclusive power of the purse, nor can he silence those who disagree with him by threatening them with the loss of federal funds and other enforcement actions.”
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