A Dangerous New Supreme Court Case Could Open the Door to Prosecutions for DEI
Source: Slate
A Dangerous New Supreme Court Case Could Open the Door to Prosecutions for DEI
By Leah Litman
March 13, 20254:48 PM
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The Trump administration has used various levers of governmental power to attack recent efforts to diversify institutions. The federal government has culled documents and policies to erase any mention of DEIA (sometimes leading to perverse results, such as the Occupational Safety and Health Administration dumping worker safety policies). The Department of Education circulated a “Dear Colleague” letter that (illegally) threatened schools that receive federal funding with the loss of federal funds if they maintain DEIA programs. The president issued (another legally dubious) executive order that threatened the federal funds of institutions that provide gender-affirming care for transgender individuals. The Department of Education (again, illegally) canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in federal contracts with Columbia University based on the administration’s claim that Columbia has failed to combat campus antisemitism. The Department of Defense canceled policies that prohibited contractors from running segregated facilities and ended programs on cultural awareness.
That’s only a partial list. But as these examples suggest, the administration has often relied on federal funding as its weapon of choice in the fight against diversity and inclusion. That is a powerful tool: Every major educational institution receives large amounts of federal funds, and threatening those funds exerts considerable coercive pressure over schools. The same is true for health care facilities, many of which receive federal funds.
Yet many companies and corporations may not depend on federal funds in the same way that schools and health care facilities do. To get those entities in line, the administration will need something else, such as the threat of criminal liability. Strikingly, the new attorney general issued a memo on her first day ordering line prosecutors to look into potential “criminal investigation” of companies and institutions with DEIA policies, while the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia threatened Georgetown University over its supposed use and teaching of DEIA. Of course, these efforts do not currently pass constitutional muster.
That’s where the U.S. Supreme Court comes in. The court has before it a low-profile case, Kousisis v. United States, that could, if it goes the federal government’s way, offer the federal government a plausible path to criminally threaten some number of individuals and entities that maintain DEIA policies and practices.
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Read more: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/03/supreme-court-analysis-trump-bondi-dei-prosecutions.html
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The general reasoning is that diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives constitute wire fraud.