A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
On his first day in office, President Trump revoked several executive orders related to racial equality, environmental justice and discrimination against LGBTQ people. Here's how the president put it in his inaugural address yesterday.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.
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MARTÍNEZ: Trump's move upends many of Joe Biden's policies put in place at the start of his term. To talk about what this might mean for federal agencies, I'm joined now by Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley. She's a 30-year diplomat and former U.S. ambassador to the Republic of Malta. And she served as the first diversity, equity inclusion and accessibility officer at the U.S. State Department for two years, ending in 2023. So President Trump has said he's getting rid of diversity programs in order to forge a society that is, quote, "colorblind and merit-based." Ambassador, how do you respond to that?
GINA ABERCROMBIE-WINSTANLEY: Good morning. Well, the intent is exactly the same with the DEIA programs. I believe too many people misunderstood and worked from fear and responded with fear, thinking that DEIA was simply to put another group at the top of the pyramid. DEIA is designed to level the playing field to ensure that merit-based decisions and merit-based advancement is what happens in federal agencies.
MARTÍNEZ: So if the intent is the same, does it matter then that President Trump said what he said?
ABERCROMBIE-WINSTANLEY: You know, in some ways, it doesn't because every employee - and study after studies show - want to belong to an organization that does base its decisions on merit, that is an inclusive organization that gives them an opportunity and confidence that their abilities, not their race or their gender or their social background, is going to allow them to get ahead. However, by putting out this executive order, and all the things that have come up to this, strikes fear in people's hearts so that they may not choose to make the right decisions to help all employees as opposed to just ones that are within the in group, as it were, or look like them, or in this case, may be of European American background.
MARTÍNEZ: But are diversity programs, are they still needed?
ABERCROMBIE-WINSTANLEY: I believe so, yes. But programs that actually raise awareness that the issue is out there, that make clear when you have a percentage of positions in an agency - senior positions - that are over 80% for one group, that that's not merit-based. Statistically, women and minorities are not less capable or intelligent than majority American men, and therefore something else has gone into that result.
MARTÍNEZ: Are we not clear on that, though, Ambassador? Are all those things you just mentioned, are we not clear on those things?
ABERCROMBIE-WINSTANLEY: Well, we may be clear on it, but we haven't resolved it. We haven't put in place things that allow merit-based decisions as opposed to our internal biases that lead us to choose people that we understand easily or that remind us of ourselves - or that have been in this place, they look like what we're used to seeing, and so we don't look further.
MARTÍNEZ: One last thing, Ambassador. I mean, are DEI program's going to be on a sort of cycle where if there's a Republican in the White House, it'll likely go away, and if a Democrat wins, it may return?
ABERCROMBIE-WINSTANLEY: Yeah, I don't think so because I think everybody, as I said, wants to belong to an organization that is inclusive. So even if the name changes, the work is going to continue. People will walk into rooms, and if they don't see a level of diversity, they will know the right people are not in the room.
MARTÍNEZ: Ambassador Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley is the former chief diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility officer at the U.S. State Department. Ambassador, thanks lot.
ABERCROMBIE-WINSTANLEY: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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