(DCNF)—After four years of the Biden administration embedding diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) into nearly every aspect of government, the incoming administration has plenty of work ahead to make good on President-elect Donald Trump’s promise to uproot “woke” ideology.
The Trump administration will need to address everything from agency hiring practices and internal trainings to grant funding decisions, legal experts and DEI opponents told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
Gail Heriot, law professor at the University of San Diego, told the DCNF that the Trump administration needs to begin by “withdrawing Biden’s executive orders embedding DEI in every nook and cranny of the executive branch of government.”
President Joe Biden’s day one executive order established a “whole-of-government equity agenda,” directing every agency to conduct an equity assessment. His June 2021 executive order on DEI in the federal workforce required agencies to implement training programs for employees informing them about systemic racism and implement DEI principles into hiring and promotion practices.
Trump can also reinstate his Sept. 2020 executive order, which was reversed by Biden, “combatting race and sex stereotyping.”
The ideas promoted through DEI trainings “may be fashionable in the academy, but they have no place in programs and activities supported by Federal taxpayer dollars,” the order stated.
Another early target could be ending DEI employment policies within federal agencies. DEI opponents also argue Trump needs to cut programs and grants that doll out funds based on identity.
“First and foremost the Trump administration needs to use its power over federal agencies and programs to enforce existing rules against discrimination in funding, grants, and contracting,” William Jacobson, Cornell Law School professor and founder of the Equal Protection Project, told the DCNF. “Many of the DEI practices violate the anti-discrimination laws and rules already on the books.”
Some programs, such as those run by the Minority Business Development Agency (MBDA), have already encountered legal roadblocks as a result of lawsuits filed by conservative groups. A federal judge held in March that the MBDA’s mission to help minority-owned businesses access capital and government contracts was unconstitutional, writing it cannot vet applicants “based on race.”
A recent report released by Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz revealed more than ten percent of grant spending by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the Biden-Harris administration went towards research projects that promote DEI.
DEI: President Trump’s new Secretary of Education is going to be busy. By threatening to withhold accreditation and student loan funding the administration could eliminate DEI and racist admissions policies in US colleges. The process will take a minimum of eight months if there… pic.twitter.com/7NA2xaMVvv
— @amuse (@amuse) November 11, 2024
Going On Offense
While rooting out internal DEI programs, the Trump administration could also target similar programs in education and corporate America.
“While the Trump administration considers the elimination or reorganization of the Department of Education, it should insist that DoE’s Office for Civil Rights act on complaints of DEI discrimination promptly and forcefully,” Jacobson said. “Our Equal Protection Project (EPP, EqualProtect.org) has filed approximately 50 OCR complaints against colleges and universities in the past 18 months, but OCR has been slow to act in many cases.”
Since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in higher education last year, the EPP has filed complaints against universities for tuition reduction programs, scholarships and fellowships that include race in their eligibility criteria.
The DOJ’s Office of Civil Rights should target “schools, employers, and nonprofit programs that give resources on the basis of race,” GianCarlo Canaparo, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, told the DCNF.
“Much good can be done by suing high-profile targets, but small targets should be sued too because there are more of them, and the signaling effect that ‘you’re not too small to escape anti-discrimination law’ will be powerful,” he said.
Under Biden, the OCR has sued police and fire departments over hiring standards it deemed discriminatory due to the outcome. Maryland’s police department agreed to an over $2 million settlement after females performed worse than men on the physical test and black applicants passed the written test at a lower rate than white applicants.
Congressional Action
The most lasting changes must be made by Congress.
“At some point in the future, Democrats are going to control all those agencies again, and if these tools are on the table, they’re going to use them,” Canaparo said.
Canaparo said Congress should repeal the law he argues helped create DEI: the 1991 Amendment to Title VII.
The amendment makes implementing policies that have a disparate impact on minorities illegal, even if the policy is neutral on its face.
DEI policies in our federal government have led to divisive, wasteful programs that undermine merit and fairness—principles Americans have fought for over generations.
The Dismantle DEI Act will restore accountability by eliminating DEI offices, removing mandates on federal… pic.twitter.com/0oIlhmL2iT
— Congressman Michael Cloud (@RepCloudTX) November 20, 2024
Heriot argued Congress must remove incentives colleges and universities have to offer race-based preferences, such as stripping accreditors of their authority to dictate the racial composition of student bodies and ending federal programs that fund institutions with higher percentages of minorities.
Colleges have attempted to circumvent the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling by considering “adversity” scores or implementing admission essay questions about aspects of potential students’ “identity.”
In June, Vice President-elect J.D. Vance introduced the “Dismantle DEI Act of 2024” with Rep. Michael Cloud, which would eliminate all federal DEI programs and prohibit federal grant funding and contracts from promoting DEI. The legislation passed out of the House Oversight Committee on Thursday.
“If Trump is successful in his campaign to end woke discrimination, he’ll go down in history as one of the greatest presidents for the promise of racial neutrality in America,” Canaparo said.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
