By Daniel Wiessner
(Reuters) – A group of federal employees filed a class action complaint with a U.S. labor board on Wednesday claiming they were fired for their involvement in implementing diversity, equity and inclusion policies, in violation of their constitutional rights.
The complaint was filed with the federal Merit Systems Protection Board in Washington by Mahri Stainnak, the former deputy director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s DEI office. Three other federal workers will join the case after their terminations take effect in April, according to the complaint.
President Donald Trump in January ordered federal agencies to shut down DEI programs and barred federal contractors from adopting diversity policies that may be discriminatory. He also directed agencies to investigate DEI policies adopted by companies, schools and nonprofits.
DEI programs have been part of workplace efforts to ensure fairer representation for groups seen as historically marginalized. Advocacy groups say DEI programs help uplift marginalized communities by addressing historic inequities. Trump and his allies say the programs are discriminatory and erode merit-based decision making.
Stainnak argued that targeting federal employees for termination based on their perceived political views and affiliations violates their rights under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, and disproportionately affected workers who are not white men.
Stainnak, who uses they/them pronouns, says they were fired in January despite recently moving from OPM’s DEI office to a talent acquisition job that was not DEI-related.
“This administration was not attempting to reset priorities but to punish those it perceived supported its political opponents,” Stainnak’s lawyers wrote in the complaint.
Stainnak is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington, D.C. affiliate, among other groups and law firms. Scott Michelman, the ACLU affiliate’s legal director, said Trump was punishing workers whose values clash with his “extremist agenda.”
“President Trump can’t drag us back to a dark chapter in history where the government targeted people simply for their views or values,” he said in a statement.
The White House in a statement said: “Protecting the civil rights and expanding opportunities for all Americans is a key priority of the Trump Administration, which is why he took decisive actions to terminate unlawful DEI preferences in the federal government.”
The merit board hears federal workers’ appeals when they are fired or face other discipline. Cases are first heard by administrative judges, whose decisions are reviewed by a three-member board that currently has one vacancy.
Trump is attempting to remove Cathy Harris, the lone Democrat on the merit board who is currently still serving pending a legal battle.
The board has been inundated with more than 8,100 new cases since Trump took office in January and his administration initiated efforts to radically shrink the federal workforce.
The merit board can hear cases on a classwide basis, but typically only does so for groups of workers at a single agency who were affected by the same employment decision.
The complaint proposes a class of all federal workers who were fired or placed on leave “because the government associated them with the concepts of ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion.'” The complaint said it was not clear how many people could be included in the class.
(Reporting by Daniel Wiessner in Albany, New York and Kanishka Singh in Washington, D.C.; Editing by Deepa Babington and Stephen Coates)
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