The email demanded US government employees report on the DEI program

The Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal workforce, issued guidelines requiring agency heads to send notices to their staff by 5 p.m. eastern on Wednesday. This included an email template that many federal staffers eventually received that night.

Some employees, such as those at the Treasury Department, have slightly different versions of email.

A Treasury Department email issued a warning of “adverse consequences” for not reporting the DEI initiative, according to a copy shared with the BBC.

In one of his first acts as president, Trump signed two executive orders ending the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” or “DEI” program in the federal government and announced that employees working in those roles would be immediately placed on paid administrative leave.

Such programs are designed to increase minority participation in the workforce and educate employees about discrimination.

But critics of DEI, like Trump, argue that the practice itself is discriminatory because it requires race, gender, sexual identity or other characteristics into consideration.

Trump and his allies often attacked the practice during the campaign.

In a speech Thursday at the World Economic Conference in Davos, Switzerland, Trump said he was making America “a nation based on merit.”

DEI critics have praised Trump’s decision.

“President Trump’s executive order rescinding affirmative action and banning the DEI program is an important milestone in the progress of American civil rights and a critical step in building a color-blind community,” Yukong Mike Zhao, president of the Asian American Education Coalition, said in a statement.

The group has supported a successful effort in the US Supreme Court to overturn affirmative action programs in US universities.

But a current federal employee, who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the email he received felt more like an attempt to intimidate staff than to make the government fairer.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

President Trump has signed a torrent of executive orders since he took office, including a hiring freeze in the federal government, orders for workers to return to work and efforts to reclassify thousands of government workers to make them easier to fire.

HHS employees who spoke to the BBC criticized the government’s DEI practice, believing that although it is important to build a diverse staff and create opportunities in the health and medical fields, “identity politics has played into how we function normally and it is not beneficial for the workforce” .

“But that doesn’t mean I want my colleagues fired,” added the employee.

He described the impact of the DEI emails and orders on his agency as “very calculated chaos”.

The employee division has been confused, he said, with questions about future hiring practices, as well as what programs and directives are allowed to continue, given Trump’s definition of DEI.

A second HHS employee said hiring and research grants have been frozen and all department staff are waiting to see what they can do next.

HHS, and one of its subsidiary agencies, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), dole out millions of dollars in federal grants to universities and researchers around the world to advance scientific research.

Agency employees fear that the DEI order could have an impact outside of government as well. Those who question if grants that allow labs create more opportunities to hire minority scientists and medical professionals will now get the ax.

An employee working at the Food and Drug Administration told the BBC that he had not received the email, but that all DEI-related activities had been paused.

“We have been told by the elderly to keep doing our work,” he said. “But there are fears about how it will affect our work in general.”