Erasing Equity: Trump’s Executive Order 14148 and the War on the Marginalized
One signature. Dozens of protections gutted. Millions left behind.
On his first day back in office, Donald Trump signed a flurry of executive orders. Most headlines fixated on the spectacle—cabinet appointees, press chaos, scattered protests. But buried in the bureaucratic pile was a single order with massive consequences: Executive Order 14148.
Its sterile name—“Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Actions”—belies the damage it delivers. With a single stroke of the pen, Trump erased years of equity, inclusion, and civil rights protections for millions of Americans.
EO 14148 undoes eight of Biden’s key executive orders, which collectively advanced racial equity, safeguarded LGBTQ+ rights, protected students from discrimination, and promoted diversity in the federal workforce. It took Biden over two years to roll out these protections, but Trump erased them with one stroke of a pen.
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Here’s what got scrapped:
These weren’t symbolic measures. Each Biden-era order had a tangible impact. EO 13985, for instance, mandated that federal agencies assess whether their programs were reaching historically underserved communities. That one directive sparked changes across nearly every department, from making FEMA disaster response more inclusive to ensuring USDA resources reached rural, multilingual, and Indigenous communities. EO 14035 created hiring pipelines for people with disabilities and aimed to remove barriers for veterans and first-generation professionals in the federal workforce.
EO 13988, which prohibited discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation, empowered federal agencies to apply civil rights laws in ways that actually protected LGBTQ+ Americans, not just in theory, but in schools, hospitals, workplaces, and housing programs. The same was true for EO 14021, which offered LGBTQ+ students explicit protection from harassment and exclusion in federally funded schools.
And yet, with EO 14148, these safeguards are gone. Not paused. Not reviewed. Rescinded.
Who Does This Hurt?
This isn’t just about DEI programs or “woke” language in agency training materials. It’s about whether the federal government serves everyone or just a select few. The very first executive order that Trump revoked—EO 13985—defined its beneficiaries as:
“People of color, and others who have been historically underserved, marginalized, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.”
That includes:
People of color
People with disabilities
Women and children
Seniors
The poor
Rural and geographically isolated communities
Non-English speakers
In short, everyone this administration considers expendable.
The rescinded orders were never about giving special treatment; they were about leveling the playing field. Instead, it was about ensuring a Black woman didn’t get ignored by federal maternal health programs, guaranteeing a trans veteran could apply for a federal job without getting shoved aside, and promising a poor kid in Appalachia had the same chance to learn as a kid in the suburbs.
Now, none of that is guaranteed. And that’s the point.
We have extensively covered the attacks on incluvisity. See some of that reporting here:
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Erasure by Design
We’ve already seen how this administration uses bureaucratic silence to carry out ideological revolution. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is hollowing out agencies from the inside—cutting staff, redirecting funds, burying oversight roles, and rerouting public engagement through X (formerly Twitter), a platform increasingly hostile to the very communities most affected.
EO 14148 is the ideological companion to that bureaucratic sabotage. It signals to agencies and political appointees: You don’t have to care anymore, not about equity, outreach, or civil rights. Just serve the boss and toe the line.
Without Starlink, we can’t work in rural towns. We can’t write. We can’t stay in touch with family. That’s the state of broadband here. And now the same people who made connectivity dependent on Elon Musk have rescinded the only federal orders trying to change it.
This isn’t an accident. It’s a roadmap. One that restores a vision of government where the only people who matter are wealthy, cisgender, heterosexual men. Preferably white. But if you’ve got the billions, they’ll let that slide.
The people left out—poor Black families in Mississippi, aging Latinas in New Mexico, queer kids in Texas schools, disabled veterans in coal country—are being systematically written out of federal concern.
The Human Cost
These aren’t abstract issues. In 2022, LGBTQ+ youth were four times more likely to attempt suicide than their peers. Many cited bullying, harassment, and fear of being outed at school. EO 14021 was written with them in mind. Now, it’s gone.
Rural communities, already struggling with depopulation, poor infrastructure, and limited healthcare access, benefited from new outreach efforts inspired by Biden’s equity agenda. Broadband projects, telehealth pilots, mobile job centers—these programs are now being “reevaluated” under a new, stripped-down DEI-free framework.
Trans service members who rejoined the military under EO 14004? Now the Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Trump’s EO 14004 ending service members who are transgender from participating in military service. This ruling flies in the face of the military’s own recommendation that transgender service members do not harm unit cohesion, that they are capable of performing their roles in the military, and that they do not increase the cost of health care.
And then there are the agencies themselves—places like HHS and the Department of Education—where internal equity offices are already being shuttered or silenced.
These measures are being challenged in court, but justice is often a slow, painful process. See a recent update here:
What’s Next?
EO 14148 is not just a rollback. It’s a declaration: the government will no longer try to be fair.
This fits a long pattern of performative cruelty paired with strategic policy. Trump has always used executive orders not only to enact policy but to send signals—who’s in, who’s out, who counts. This time, the signal is loud and clear: if you’re not part of the MAGA elite, you’re on your own.
We’ll continue covering the fallout from EO 14148 and related moves. That includes:
Legal challenges from civil rights groups
Internal agency turmoil as equity officers are pushed out
Impacts on LGBTQ+ families, schools, and service members
The shifting landscape for rural and disabled Americans
Because this isn’t just a fight about policy. It’s about whether the idea of a government “for the people” still means anything at all.
This is what fascism looks like in the fine print.
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Bibliography
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This is why I don't like EO's. They are so easily signed and so easily rolled back. They make me almost think of them along the same lines as a proclamation by a king. I think that there should be some type of legislation that reigns in the wholesale use of EO's.