February 22, 2025
Federal Judge Temporarily Blocks Portions Of Trump’s Anti-DEI Executive Orders
In his ruling, the judge concluded that the orders likely violate several constitutional rights, including the right to free speech.
On Feb. 21 in Baltimore, District Judge Adam Abelson temporarily blocked a key section of President Donald Trump’s executive orders to end programs supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion. In his ruling, Abelson concluded that the orders likely violated several constitutional rights, including the right to free speech.
According to NPR, the plaintiffs, which include the City of Baltimore and various higher education groups, argued earlier this month that the Trump administration’s executive orders are unconstitutional and a blatant overreach of presidential authority. They also created a chilling effect on freedom of speech.
The Trump administration defended its use of executive orders to target DEI programs that violate federal civil rights laws, with administration attorneys arguing that federal spending should align with a president’s priorities.
In his ruling, Abelson indicated that the executive orders actively discourage businesses, organizations, and other public entities from supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
“The harm arises from the issuance of it as a public, vague, threatening executive order,” Abelson stated to the court during the hearing.
Later, he would expound on this statement in his written opinion. Abelson wrote that the orders are constitutionally vague and leave federal contractors “no reasonable way to know what, if anything, they can do to bring their grants into compliance.”
To illustrate the quagmire that the executive orders placed institutions like the public school system in, Abelson created a hypothetical situation where the Department of Education funded an elementary school for technology access and a teacher used a computer to teach about Jim Crow and another scenario where a road construction grant covered the cost of filling potholes in a low-income neighborhood but not a wealthy one, Abelson then asked rhetorically “does that render it ‘equity-related’?”
According to the plaintiffs’ argument in their complaint, the Trump administration’s seemingly arbitrary efforts to end the diversity, equality, and inclusion programs will cause widespread harm.
“Ordinary citizens bear the brunt,” they wrote. “Plaintiffs and their members receive federal funds to support educators, academics, students, workers, and communities across the country. As federal agencies make arbitrary decisions about whether grants are ‘equity-related,’ Plaintiffs are left in limbo.”
According to NBC News, Abelson also responded to this argument in his ruling.
“Plaintiffs have amply established a likelihood that they will succeed in proving that the Termination Provision invites arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement over billions of dollars in government funding,” Abelson wrote.
He continued, “According to a recent case, ‘approximately 20% of the nation’s labor force works for a federal contractor. The Termination Provision leaves those contractors and their employees, plus any other recipients of federal grants, with no idea whether the administration will deem their contracts or grants, or work they are doing, or speech they are engaged in, to be ‘equity related.’”
The National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education, along with several other nonprofits and Brandon Scott, the mayor of Baltimore, argued in their suit that Trump was “seizing” Congress’ role in determining how funds are parceled out.
In addition, they argued that not adequately defining what constituted DEI would allow the attorney general to exercise “carte blanche authority to implement the order discriminatorily.”
Furthermore, the organization declared in its suit, “In the United States, there is no king. In his crusade to erase diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility from our country, President Trump cannot usurp Congress’s exclusive power of the purse, nor can he silence those who disagree with him by threatening them with the loss of federal funds and other enforcement actions.”
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