OPM Halts Diversity and Inclusion Trainings Pending Mandatory Review

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) released a memo Friday pausing all diversity and inclusion trainings in the federal government until they are review by OPM. The move comes following several Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memos aimed at eliminating certain trainings that have been labeled divisive and anti-American, as well as a presidential executive order to the same effect.

On September 4, 2020, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released a memo stating that critical race theory training “run[s] counter to the fundamental beliefs for which our Nation has stood since its inception [and] also engender[s] division and resentment within the Federal workforce.”

When this memo was released, it received both stakeholder support and opposition.

Chad Hooper, President of the Professional Managers Association (PMA), told Federal News Network (FNN)  “We as leaders in this new normal, and this new moment, need to be able to talk about dismantling the systemic racist structures that exists in our workplaces, in our society.”

On the contrary, Senior Fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research Horace Cooper told FNN, “This [critical race theory] program masquerades as promoting tolerance, masquerades as promoting diversity, when actually what it does is the very kind of thing that happened at the beginning of the 20th century in the United States of America. And we refer to it as Jim Crow policies that singled people out on the basis of their race as a way of deciding who would be rewarded and who would be penalized.”

On September 22, 2020, President Trump signed the Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping. In this order, federal agencies were directed to review trainings for federal employees and contractors in order to “combat offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating.”

A few days later, on September 28, 2020, OMB released another memo on Ending Employee Trainings that Use Divisive Propaganda to Undermine the Principle of Fair and Equal Treatment for All. In the memo, OMB dictated, “These divisive trainings constitute a malign subset of a larger pool of Federal agency trainings held to promote diversity and inclusiveness. [They] sow division among the workforce by attempting to prescribe and impose upon employees a conformity of belief in ideologies that label entire groups of Americans as inherently racist or evil.”

The Office of Personnel Management released a memo on October 2, 2020 outlining a plan to implement the review process brought up in the executive order.

The memo cites the provision in the executive order stating that “all training programs for agency employees relating to diversity and inclusion shall, before being used, be reviewed by OPM for compliance with the requirements of section 6 of this order.” Thus, while federal agencies are still able to continue training on diversity and inclusion, they must have each training approved by OPM before use.

The executive order applies to both old and new diversity and inclusion training programs and to all departments, agencies, boards, and commissions in the executive branch of the federal government. OPM will require agencies to submit all of their training materials as one complete submission. Submissions will be evaluated on a first-come, first-serve basis, and the review process can be expedited if agencies review and improve their own trainings before submission.

Agency submissions should be uploaded to the agency-specific section of the Diversity and Inclusion Training Collection.