JUSTICE DEPT. SUSPENDS ALL DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION TRAINING

WASHINGTON » The Justice Department suspended all diversity and inclusion training for its employees and managers, complying with President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to eliminate any training that suggests that implicit racial and gender biases exist in the workplace, according to a memo distributed to the department’s executive officers.

The guidance, sent Thursday to Justice Department leaders, seemingly goes further than the president’s executive order — which pertains only to diversity training — to include work- related programs, activities and events that touch on diversity.

The memo, reviewed by The New York Times, said that managers must remove all diversity- related mandatory training requirements that have been assigned to employees from the department’s internal system, and they must suspend any related activities and events until materials can be approved by the Office of Personnel Management.

The Justice Department, which has more than 115,000 employees, did not respond to a request for comment.

In the run- up to the election on Nov. 3, Trump has waged a war against education and training courses that assert that systemic racism exists and that encourage employees to be aware of it, denouncing such ideas as part of a radical liberal agenda.

Last month, he said that school curriculums that examined the way racism had shaped the United States pushed a false narrative that “America is a wicked and racist nation,” and he vowed to “restore patriotic education to our schools.”

“Our youth will be taught to love America,” the president said.

Days later, Trump signed an executive order to end the federal government’s use of traditional diversity and inclusion training, which supports the idea that people have unconscious biases around race and gender that can negatively affect how employees are treated.

The order dovetailed with comments that Attorney General William Barr has made that suggest racism is not a wide- scale problem in the United States.

According to the Justice Department’s memo, senior political appointees would have to approve any future spending on diversity and inclusion training.