As we reported earlier, the Trump administration ordered all federal employees who work in diversity, equity, and inclusion roles to be placed on paid leave starting today.

In a memo issued by the Office of Personnel Management, agency supervisors are also asked to submit a written plan by the end of the month for dismissing the employees.

It's part one of the administration's efforts

to upend DEI efforts nationwide. Jeff Green covers DEI efforts for Bloomberg News and joins us now.

Jeff, welcome to the News Hour. Thanks for being with us. Thanks for having me. So the memo tells

agencies to put these staffers on paid leave by five o'clock today, a plan to fire them.

They need to have by next Friday. Just in the way of one example, there's a watchdog group

called American Transparency that says the Department of Health and Human Services alone

employs 294 DEI staffers. But Jeff, do we know how many federal employees we're talking about here?

We don't. It's one of the things we're trying to figure out as well. The scope of this is not

completely clear, but it is likely to be, as you said, hundreds of employees. It's not a small number.

And why don't we know those figures? Because it wasn't immediately available in how the order was structured.

And it's not something that's something we've really been tracking in terms of how many DEI employees

there are in the federal government. As of the same in the corporate America, we really don't know

how many of these people are employed in that specific role. We know there's been some effort to

try to gather some of this data in the Biden administration, right?

There was an executive order back in 2021 that mandated all agencies to have a diversity plan to

start to track the data on hirings and promotions.

In their first DEI report in 2022, they had demographic data for the federal workforce that said it was about

60% white, 55% male overall. At the senior executive level, more than 75% white, more than 60% male.

But Jeff, this is not just about the federal workforce, is it? This Trump order directs

agencies to make sure contracts and grants

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