[Congressional Record Volume 171, Number 62 (Monday, April 7, 2025)]
[House]
[Pages H1426-H1427]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            IMPACT OF TRUMP ADMINISTRATION ANTI-DEI ACTIONS

  (Ms. Stansbury of New Mexico was recognized to address the House for 
5 minutes.)
  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

[[Page H1427]]

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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