Impact of Trump Administration Anti-Dei Actions

Floor Speech

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Ms. STANSBURY. Mr. Speaker, among the daily assaults on our communities, on our economy, and the daily distractions and absurdities that we see from this administration and from my friends across the aisle in this Chamber, it can be easy to lose track of the bigger picture of what is happening across our country right now and the historical inflection point on which we stand.

If Members zoom out and look at the bigger picture and the larger movement of this moment, my colleagues can see the ways in which this administration is trying to roll back the clock on American history, to redefine whose histories count, whose languages count, whose cultures count, whose identities count, whose personhood counts, whose very civil rights count, and who belongs in this great country.

We see it in this Chamber this week with a GOP that is trying to roll back the voting rights of Americans across the country, and we see it in the insidious rollback of civil rights across the administration, in our workplaces, in our schools, and all across this country, as the administration has armed itself with Project 2025 and has sought to redefine American society and roll back advancements of the civil rights era.

We see it in the executive orders that Donald Trump signed in his first days in office, terminating diversity, equity, and inclusion across our Federal agencies, putting thousands of Federal workers on leave, shuttering offices and freezing Federal funds, and scrubbing websites of American history.

We see it in the military in the treatment of our veterans, firing one of the highest-ranking generals serving on the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the first females in military leadership across multiple armed services divisions, the banning of our trans and LGBTQ+ servicemembers from serving openly, the scrubbing of DOD websites trying to erase the history of our veterans with 26,000 images and web pages of our history to be erased including the Tuskegee Airmen, Jackie Robinson, and the Navajo Code Talkers. Republicans even want to delete a picture of the Enola Gay airplane because it contains the word ``gay'' in it.

We have seen the termination of the Commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a memo from the Department of Justice that would investigate, eliminate, and penalize those who engage, both in the private sector and universities, in diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility for our communities who live with disabilities, claiming that they will unleash the law and criminal proceedings on private companies, unleash the FCC, threatening to block mergers of companies like Disney and ABC. Federal contractors are being told that they cannot have contracts with the Federal Government if their boardrooms engage in diversity and inclusion. They are engaging in trying to stifle and chill the telling of American history by putting the Vice President in charge of a commission, just last week, to erase history from our Smithsonian Institution as well as attacking our schools.

Across the United States, there are 98,000 public schools. Last week, the Trump administration issued a letter to those schools saying that they must certify that they will end the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion in our public schools, or they will have their Federal funding cut.

Imagine that in schools across every community. These are schools in your neighborhoods. They are the schools that I attended. They are the schools that your children attend. Their Federal funding will be cut if they teach history, if they teach language, if they teach culture, and if they celebrate the multiple cultures and diversity of this country.

The administration is trying to dismantle Tribal schools, which were created because of our trust and treaty responsibilities, trying to turn them into a voucher program and school choice. There are no choices in many of our rural and Tribal communities. The choice is to keep our Tribal schools open, which provide multicultural programs, language, and other programs that are the root of these communities.

Mr. Speaker, we cannot give in. We will not allow them to roll back the clock. We must keep fighting for the future of this country. We will not give in to the politics of despair because the time is right to always do right. We must stand up and fight back and we will.

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