The Environmental Protection Agency is fully complying with President Trump’s executive order barring race-related trainings, the agency’s inspector general said Tuesday.
The EPA has met all aspects of the September executive order, including ensuring agency trainings didn’t teach “divisive concepts” and reporting all such trainings to the White House Office of Personnel Management for approval, the EPA Office of Inspector General said in a brief report. EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler requested the agency’s watchdog assess its compliance with the executive order.
Trump’s directive bars certain types of diversity trainings focused on race and gender that the order describes as “blame-focused” and “un-American.” After Trump signed the executive order, the EPA canceled a speaker series on racism, according to Politico, and a virtual LGBTQ pride event, according to HuffPost.
Trump’s order has drawn some criticism from EPA employees, however. In a November letter, 80 staffers in the EPA’s Office of General Counsel slammed Trump’s order as an “attempt to distort and suppress honest attempts to grapple with these central issues in our country.”
The EPA staffers added Trump’s order is “punitive and demeaning to federal employees, contractors, and grantees — especially those who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.”
