Records show how DOGE planned Trump’s DEI purge — and who gets fired next
A DOGE team plans to fire federal workers who are not in DEI roles and employees in offices that protect equal rights, internal documents show.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/02/15/doge-fire-federal-employees-trump-dei/
A team of workers from the U.S. DOGE Service developed step-by-step plans for carrying out President Donald Trump’s order to purge diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives from the federal government — and over the next six months intends to expand that campaign dramatically, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post. DOGE aims to target staffers who are not in DEI roles and employees who work in offices established by law to ensure equal rights, internal DOGE documents show.
In the coming weeks, the documents show, DOGE has planned for the Trump administration to trim staff from dozens of offices across the executive branch, including those that protect employees’ civil rights and others that investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace. Among the groups targeted are a Veterans Affairs office that works to ensure all veterans receive equal access to care and an office within Health and Human Services that provides information about the health of minority populations.
The DOGE team is also looking to place on leave, and ultimately fire, scores of government employees who do not work in DEI roles but who perform functions that DOGE determined were related to DEI, the documents show. It is unclear precisely how DOGE intends to decide whether employees’ jobs are tied to DEI. Such a strategy will push, if not violate, the law and could draw legal challenge, team members wrote in the documents.
See inside DOGE’s playbook for eliminating DEI
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2025/doge-playbook-dei-trump/?itid=cb_box_X5HHZCQEYJDWBC7D3BMZOFZZV4_1The internal documents reveal the scope, speed and ambition of DOGE’s work. Over the past three weeks, DOGE has torn through one federal agency after another, gaining access to sensitive data and winning control of the flow of federal cash. In a blitz that has shaken parts of Washington, DOGE team members have identified swaths of jobs and programs to eliminate that do not match Trump’s ideological views.
Trump campaigned against DEI, calling it divisive and destructive, and has in recent days celebrated its demise under his administration. DEI “would have ruined our country, and now it’s dead,” the president said last month.
But even before Trump took office, a DOGE team that included Elon Musk’s top aides — who have links to his companies but little to no government or political experience — was planning actions far beyond DOGE’s original remit of reducing the government’s size and spending.
In the weeks leading up to the inauguration, DOGE positioned and envisioned itself as the executor and enforcer of Trump’s executive order against diversity.
OGE staffers developed a three-part plan for Trump’s anti-DEI campaign, internal documents show. “Phase 1” marked the first day of Trump’s presidency, when Trump signed an executive order stating that all DEI offices, positions and programs within the executive branch must be terminated within 60 days. The DOGE plan laid out how, on Inauguration Day, all federal agencies should begin placing DEI workers on paid leave and shutting down DEI websites and social media accounts. Those changes transpired almost exactly as DOGE laid out.
The nation is now in DOGE’s “Phase 2,” which is scheduled to last until Wednesday, according to the documents. In this stage, DOGE planned for the Trump administration to place on leave some employees working at statutorily required offices. The administration is also supposed to cancel “DEI-focused” federal contracts and grants. And the administration is meant to identify workers across the government who hold non-DEI jobs but who can be tied to diversity initiatives through unspecified other means, according to the DOGE planning documents.
“There are DEI-focused personnel embedded throughout divisions that do not have any identifying DEI criteria in their name,” one document states. “Phase 2/3 will be focused on identifying these employees and putting them on administrative leave.”
At least some of Phase 2 appears to be underway, particularly at the Education Department. The department last month placed on leave nearly 100 employees in non-DEI roles after DOGE staffers unearthed personnel records showing most took a diversity training during the first Trump administration, The Post reported. As of this week, DOGE representatives at the department have directed the agency to cancel 29 “DEI training” grants at the department totaling $101 million, according to a post on X from DOGE.
It is unclear whether any federal workers assigned to DEI roles in offices required by law have been placed on leave.
DOGE’s “Phase 3” starts later this month, on the 31st day of the administration, and lasts until the 180th day, which is in mid-July, according to the documents. That stage moves from placing workers on paid leave to calling for large-scale firings, the documents show. Ultimately, DOGE intends for the Trump administration to terminate all DEI-linked employees via a Reduction In Force (RIF) action — the federal form of layoffs — including some who work for legally mandated offices.
Goals for Phase 3 are listed in brief bullet points in the DOGE document.
“RIF the Phase 1 offices in their entirety,” one bullet point reads, referring to offices dedicated to DEI. That process is already underway: The Office of Personnel Management last month directed agencies to submit written plans for firing all DEI office workers and encouraged agencies to begin issuing termination notices immediately.
A second bullet point states: “RIF the Phase 2 offices’ corrupted branches,” referring to what DOGE has determined are DEI elements of offices required by law. The bullet point concludes: “We are exploring options for this.”
One such option emerged this week. On Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order paving the way for federal agencies to reshape or terminate offices legally mandated to exist.
Asked a series of questions about DOGE’s planning efforts, the Trump administration said the team had the president’s full backing.
“The White House’s position is that we are ridding the federal government of DEI, full stop,” a White House spokesman said Friday. “DOGE is there as a collaborator ensuring that we get rid of waste, fraud and abuse. And if DEI is waste, fraud and abuse, it’s gone.”
Members of DOGE, including those involved in the planning, did not respond to questions or multiple requests for comment.
Under what authority’
DOGE has maintained a veil of secrecy, refusing to disclose the names of staff, what positions they hold or how much they are being paid. But The Post has reported that more than 30 people work closely for or with DOGE, about half of whom have ties to Musk or his companies.
In the first days of 2025, a subgroup of the DOGE team began sketching out how to implement a government-wide elimination of DEI employees and programs, internal DOGE documents show.
In early January, DOGE staffers started filling out spreadsheets tracking various diversity-related elements of the government, including DEI offices, contracts and spending, records and documents obtained by The Post show.
The records show a handful of DOGE team members active in workshopping the plan: Stephanie Holmes, a former Jones Day lawyer who now runs human resources at DOGE; Anthony Armstrong, a banker who advised Musk on his acquisition of Twitter; Brian Bjelde, a 20-year SpaceX employee; and Noah Peters, an attorney who once worked at the Federal Labor Relations Authority. Holmes was the creator of many of the documents and spreadsheets, according to metadata reviewed by The Post.
Armstrong, Bjelde and Peters have been heavily involved in DOGE’s work reshaping the Office of Personnel Management, The Post and other outlets have reported. Another frequent contributor to the planning was Adam Ramada, a DOGE team member whom Business Insider has identified as a Miami venture capital investor with a stake in a SpaceX supplier. Ramada has recently been active in efforts to slash spending and staff at the Education Department, according to records obtained by The Post.
Holmes, Armstrong, Bjelde, Peters and Ramada could not be reached or did not respond to requests for comment.
The DOGE team identified 131 agencies within the federal government, then assigned one of at least 30 reviewers to examine all the agency’s sub-offices and employees. DOGE staffers searched each agency’s structure and personnel for the terms “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” “DEI” and “justice.” Reviews were often completed within a day or two, records show.
The group also compiled two lists, titled “DEI Grants to Eliminate” and “DEI 10 Contracts to Eliminate,” detailing roughly $380 million in spending from NASA, the Labor Department, the Defense Department and Health and Human Services. Most of the contracts were for DEI training, professional development services or workplace climate surveys. Grants marked for cancellation included a $22.2 million “Nursing Workforce Diversity” program at the Health Resources and Services Administration, meant to encourage nursing careers for racial and ethnic minorities, and a $8.35 million “Fair Housing” initiative to promote racial desegregation, including by ending neighbor harassment based on race.
And, citing an article from the conservative media outlet Daily Wire as their inspiration, DOGE team members analyzed more than 800 federal job postings with DEI responsibilities on usajobs.com to determine that 50 had been filled in 2024, the documents show.
“The employee names are not [available],” one DOGE spreadsheet reads, “but included below is as much information available about each of the jobs, so we can find the hired employees in Phase 2.”
The documents also detail scripts for what Office of Personnel Management staff should say in calls to interim agency heads explaining the president’s anti-DEI executive order, as well as what those interim agency heads should say in calls to employees tasked with carrying out that order. The first set of calls were supposed to last 15 minutes each; the second were supposed to last 20 minutes, the scripts show. The guides for agency heads included the instructions: “It is important that we implement these changes swiftly, but always with care and respect for our employees.”
The DOGE documents further include suggested versions of the email agencies could send to inform employees in DEI roles that they were being placed on administrative leave.
The emails sent to such employees in January matched a DOGE draft email nearly word for word, a Post examination found.
A FAQ that DOGE created for agency heads showed that the team members did not always feel confident in the powers they were assuming.
In one version of the draft FAQ, the second question — posed from the perspective of an agency head — asks, “Under what authority are you directing us to do this?”
Beneath the question is one word highlighted in yellow: “EO,” referring to Trump’s executive order. Next to the acronym, in a set of brackets, there is a single character apparently questioning whether such an order would be sufficient: “[?]”
Corrupted branches’
Over the course of about three weeks, the DOGE team outlined a plan to radically reshape the government — including proposing shutting down offices required by law — but it also occasionally toned down its ambitions, according to the records obtained by The Post.
A DOGE document dated Jan. 9 identifies 225 DEI-related offices and councils across the federal government. Forty-two of these should be shuttered immediately under Trump’s day-one executive order, the document states. The rest — including civil rights and employment discrimination offices mandated by law — should be terminated later.
“The remaining offices require closer analysis for potential statutory protection and will also be eliminated, wherever possible, Day 2-30,” the document states.
But a later document, dated Jan. 13, walked that back. Under the revised plan, the DOGE team reduced the number of targeted DEI offices to 76. DOGE also shifted the plan: The aim would be to cut staff from offices required by law, rather than eliminate those offices outright.
The Jan. 13 document listed 38 “statutorily mandated offices (EEO / Civil Rights)” that “have been corrupted with new DEI divisions.” The new plan, the document shows, was to “identify the non-statutory branches / DEI employees and place them on administrative leave.”
By Jan. 17, DOGE had reduced its goals still further, naming 33 offices protected by law that should be trimmed down to eliminate DEI elements. The list includes offices of equal employment opportunity at agencies including the Agriculture Department, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It also includes 100-plus staff from the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Justice and Equity.
As of last month, the total number of employees DOGE planned to cut in its DEI purge was at least 583, according to a spreadsheet — but is likely far more, since the DOGE staffers stopped filling out employee tallies for targeted offices a third of the way through the document.
The ultimate goal is to fire all employees identified as doing DEI-related work, the documents make clear.
DOGE staffers worked through several iterations of how they could do so without running afoul of the law, the records show.
One January planning document lays out DOGE’s vision for how to terminate employees in direct DEI roles. It includes a table analyzing the pros and cons of three possible options for “handling the employees who work out of each DEI office.” One option was to fire DEI staffers immediately — but that brought the “highest risk of challenge and potential injunction,” the document noted. Another option was to reassign DEI staff to a new office; but that would delay their goal of overall staff reductions, according to the document.
A third option, labeled “DOGE ... Recommended,” suggested placing DEI employees on 10-day paid administrative leaves, then firing them. According to the document, this approach was best because it was “difficult to challenge”; “reasonable legal authority exists to extend beyond 10 days”; and it allows “time for legal preparation to anticipated challenges.”
This appears to be the option agencies across the federal government are following.
“Phase 3” of the Trump administration’s DEI purge is slated to begin Wednesday, according to the documents. That period lasts until July 19, or the 180th day of the presidency. Throughout this period, DOGE has large ambitions to cull staff, the documents show, but — as of mid-January — team members were not yet sure how to accomplish the firings.
The “Phase 3” period is supposed to include “three workflows,” per a DOGE planning document. First, the Trump administration will identify and place on leave “additional DEI-related employees” who do not work in a DEI office but are “dispersed through normal operating divisions.” Second, the administration will lay off DEI offices “in their entirety.” Third, the administration will lay off the “corrupted branches” of statutorily required offices that work on civil rights and employment discrimination: “We are exploring options for this,” the document reads.
A set of bullet points headlined “Next Steps Underway” shows that DOGE staffers were actively looking for legal arguments to justify the planned firings.
A spreadsheet from Jan. 17 suggests a path.
There, under the heading “Broad Ideas,” is a proposal for presidential action: Trump could issue an executive order “to re-focus [Equal Employment Opportunity] offices on their statutory mandate, removing DEI from them.”
The executive order Trump signed this week may serve that goal.
The order calls on federal agency heads to develop “reorganization plans.” Within 30 days, agency heads are supposed to produce a report identifying the laws that created their agency, as well as every agency office that is required by law.
The order concludes: “The report shall discuss whether the agency or any of its subcomponents should be eliminated or consolidated.”
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