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Floor Speech

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Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, it has been 4 days. It seems like it has been longer than that, but it has been 4 days since President Trump took the oath of office as the 47th President of the United States. We have seen a flurry of activity since that time, which you would expect from President Trump. He has been waiting for that day for some time now and has worked really hard to get there. But from securing our borders to securing protections for women in sports, it is abundantly clear that President Trump is not letting any dust gather under his feet.

I am particularly pleased to see him dismantling the Biden-Harris administration's DEI regime throughout the Federal Government. Some people may be asking: Well, why would the President waste his time on that? What could be wrong with having a diverse workforce?

Well, the truth is that, while DEI--or diversity, equity, and inclusion--may sound like a benign or a nice thing, the dystopian reality is that there is nothing inclusive about DEI programming. On the contrary, it is quite divisive. In practice, DEI initiatives do the exact opposite of what they purport to do, and they fly directly in the face of everything that America stands for.

On Monday of this week, we celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday. In what was perhaps Dr. King's most famous speech, the ``I Have a Dream'' speech, he said:

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but [rather] by the content of their character.

To me, that is the ideal.

At the heart of the civil rights movement was a desire for everyone, regardless of race or gender, to compete on a level, merit-based playing field.

What is so misguided about these DEI initiatives is that they do the exact opposite of what Martin Luther King spoke about. Instead of judging people on the content of their character, the DEI regime would have us assign points to people based on characteristics like skin color and gender and give preferential treatment to people on that basis. These are immutable characteristics, not something any of us can control. So it is profoundly unfair to decide that one person in a job candidate pool gets more weight put on their application because of something that was an accident of their birth. I think most people, if they understand what DEI is all about, would agree that this amounts to an unfair hiring practice. It treats people differently based on gender or the color of their skin or some other immutable characteristic.

President Trump's Executive order does not just affect Federal hiring; it also directs Agencies and Department heads to eliminate DEI practices in grants and contracts as well.

I think this would be a great opportunity for the Department of Government Efficiency to take a look at it as well, as there is a lot of room to eliminate waste and inefficiency in Federal grants and contracts.

According to the Government Accounting Office--GAO--the Federal Government spent $759 billion on Federal contracts in 2023, which represents roughly 12.5 percent of Federal Government spending for that fiscal year. A significant number of these contracts are for the Department of Defense. With billions of dollars and our national security on the line, it is critical that these contracts are awarded to contractors on merit, not based on some DEI-centered criteria. We owe it to the taxpayers to be selecting the best and the brightest and the most effective people for a job, not picking the consulting firm that simply racked up the most DEI points.

One of the downstream effects of DEI requirements in Federal contracts is they create an incentive structure for these divisive practices to bleed into the corporate world. This goes all the way back to then-President Richard Nixon, who implemented affirmative action requirements for private companies that contract with the Federal Government.

Since that time, there have even been instances of companies committing outright fraud in order to qualify for contracts that were prioritized for minority-owned businesses by claiming that an employee is a 51-percent owner in order to qualify for minority-owned status and thus get preferential treatment.

Now, some of the folks in the media not surprisingly are framing this action by President Trump as a reversal of the progress we have made in America in the civil rights era, but nothing could be further from the truth.

What we have to keep in mind is that the reforms of the civil rights era were enacted to address particular problems that our Nation was going through at that time; namely, segregation and widespread racial discrimination. Of course, these practices of racial discrimination that were so widespread during that time were far from our finest moments as a nation. I am thankful--thankful--that our country has been able to move forward from that era, and I applaud the men and women who went to great lengths and risked everything to help us turn the page on that chapter as a country.

But today, with rights granted to everybody, regardless of race, color, or creed, by law, we have a different situation where the law and the policies that were intended to end racial discrimination have evolved into the modern DEI apparatus, creating a new kind of discrimination--something we sought to avoid but which has now crept back into our country.

So the policies that were enacted to address one problem back during the civil rights era have been turned on their head--not to accomplish their original purpose but to do something entirely different, which is to enact preferences based on race, gender, and other immutable characteristics.

In fact, while the Civil Rights Act was being debated right here on the Senate floor, one of its architects, Senator Humphrey, expressed direct opposition to what is now part of the DEI bureaucracy. He said:

If the Senator can find in Title VII any language which provides that an employer will have to hire on the basis of percentage or quota related to color, race, religion, or national origin, I will start eating the pages one after another, because it is not there.

So I think it is fair to say that President Trump's actions earlier this week are not a reversal of the progress we have made since the civil rights movement. They are better understood as the righting of the ship back to what Congress and the Nation intended to accomplish: a nation where all people have a chance to succeed or fail based on their merit and not on race.

So this action by President Trump, rather than reversing progress, is a return to the ideal that the United States of America should have always stood for but unfortunately did not, which is the equal dignity and equal treatment of every American under the law. That is our goal, and I am glad to see that President Trump has returned us to that original ideal since the civil rights era rather than to somehow paper over this effort to treat people differently based on their race, gender, or other characteristics.

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