President Donald Trump clearly made it a mission in his second go-around in the White House to make larger institutional changes to the way the federal government does business.
He clearly intended not only to make the government more efficient, but to change institutional power structures that embolden the permanent bureaucracy. Some of those efforts, like the Department of Government Efficiency, received a good deal of media attention.
However, a number of departments and individuals have been particularly aggressive in carrying out Trump’s counterrevolution, especially in terms of weeding out DEI and other forms of left-wing social engineering.
It’s worth noting the efforts of a few of the significant, but perhaps overlooked people who are making things happen.
Harmeet Dhillon
Harmeet Dhillon, who was selected by Trump in December to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, has been nearly the opposite of her Biden administration predecessor.
Former Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke, who led the civil rights office before Dhillon, was one of the most aggressive in weaponizing the DOJ against political opponents, especially pro-lifers.
Dhillon achieved some notoriety before being appointed to office. Her California law office took up a few high-profile cases in the last decade, including that of James Damore, the Google employee who said he was fired because he criticized the company’s diversity policies.
“While the Civil Rights Division prosecuted pro-lifers, Dhillon has represented pro-life journalist David Daleiden, who exposed Planned Parenthood staff who sold aborted-baby body parts,” my colleague Tyler O’Neil wrote in December.
Dhillon has not only stopped the persecution of pro-life activists but has initiated DOJ investigations into states that have endangered women while violating civil rights law, like California.
She announced in May that her department was investigating whether California is violating Title IX by allowing males to compete in women’s sports.
“Title IX exists to protect women and girls in education. It is perverse to allow males to compete against girls, invade their private spaces, and take their trophies,” Dhillon said in May. “This Division will aggressively defend women’s hard-fought rights to equal educational opportunities.”
Andrew Ferguson
Federal Trade Commissioner Andrew Ferguson began his time at the agency with a call to investigate Big Tech censorship.
“Big Tech censorship is not just un-American, it is potentially illegal. The FTC wants your help to investigate these potential violations of the law,” he wrote in February. He put out a public inquiry to “help the FTC better understand how these firms may have violated the law by silencing and intimidating Americans for speaking their minds.”
He created a portal for Americans to report to the agency cases in which they feel they’ve been censored by Big Tech companies.
But more than just aiming at ending Big Tech’s censorship practices, Ferguson and the FTC have launched a project to uncover companies that engage in deceptive practices to foist gender ideology, puberty blockers, and harmful procedures on children.
“Under the Federal Trade Commission Act, the FTC is provided broad authority to protect consumers from unfair and deceptive trade acts and practices,” a May memo from the FTC reads, according to the Daily Wire. “There is now considerable reason to believe that the doctors and medical providers pushing [gender-affirming care] on minors are knowingly deceiving parents by exaggerating [gender-affirming care’s] ‘benefits’ and downplaying its harmful side effects.”
According to the Daily Wire, citing Fishbowl, the FTC aims to “investigate the doctors, therapists, hospitals, and others who deceptively pushed gender confusion, puberty blockers, hormone replacement, and sex-change surgeries on children and adults while failing to disclose strong evidence that such interventions are not helpful and carry enormous risks.”
Andrea Lucas
From the moment she stepped into her role at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, acting chair Andrea Lucas has been at the forefront of bringing civil rights lawsuits against schools and businesses that have illegally discriminated—often openly so—in the name of DEI.
She has been at EEOC since 2020 when Trump appointed her at the end of his first term in office, but she has been empowered since Trump returned to the White House.
GianCarlo Camparo and Dan Mauler, legal fellow and general counsel for The Heritage Foundation, respectively explained how much impact Lucas has already had in her short time at the EEOC. They wrote for The Daily Signal on Friday:
Lucas has forced major law firms to stop using DEI to discriminate based on race. She has ordered the EEOC to be evenhanded in its enforcement priorities, rather than picking and choosing winners based on their characteristics. She has made it easier for employees to report DEI discrimination. She has made it a priority to protect Americans from religious discrimination. And she has used what limited powers she currently has to protect women from the dangerous effects of gender ideology.
Lucas has put intense pressure on Harvard University. She delivered a message to the school in April that since 2018 it is possible that the school has violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act “by engaging in a pattern or practice of disparate treatment against white, Asian, male, or straight employees, applicants, and training program participants in hiring, promotion (including but not limited to tenure decisions), compensation, and separation decisions; internship programs; and mentoring, leadership development, and other career development programs.”
As Camparo and Mauler noted, however, to ensure that Lucas continues her work she needs to be reconfirmed by the Senate and Trump needs to appoint another commissioner to the five-person committee that runs it so that there is a quorum.
Russ Vought
Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought returned to his post after holding the same office during the first Trump administration and carried on where he had left off. He’s been relentless in rooting out the deep state from the executive branch and ensuring that the president, and not bureaucrats, is in charge of White House policymaking.
For that he has drawn the enmity of the Left.
Vought’s been instrumental in bringing the recent rescissions package before Congress that would save taxpayers $9.4 billion. But it’s not just about the money saved. What’s notable is that this money is coming mostly from left-wing projects that have been on autopilot.
It will drain money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, U.S. Agency for International Development, and other foreign aid programs that have been directed toward social engineering rather than American interests. By pulling funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, this will accomplish the long-standing conservative goal of divesting from NPR and PBS.
These two publicly funded media organizations have veered far to the Left in recent decades and have shown obvious partisan bias in recent years. Both NPR and PBS have become particularly obsessed with issues about race and gender. Their coverage of Republicans is almost entirely negative, and coverage of Democrats is broadly positive.
The Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez noted that a Media Research Center study determined “congressional Republicans saw 85% negative coverage, while congressional Democrats saw 54% positive coverage on PBS’s flagship News Hour program. Another cited Media Research Center study found that PBS news staff ‘used 162 variations of the term ‘far-right,’ but only six variations of ‘far-left.’”
