On Tuesday evening, a federal government employee was shocked to find a watchlist that included the names, photos and work history of 57 mostly Black employees from a number of healthcare agencies. Many of the people listed have worked in health equity roles. “It’s just really scary,” said the federal worker, who works in a different industry and asked to remain anonymous out of fear that she may end up on a similar list. “I think it’s a way to continue to sow that fear, that angst, in the culture at a lot of these agencies.”
As someone who was placed on administrative leave in January for previously working in a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) role, she sees the watchlist as an attempt to purge government employees who wanted to “make the government work better and now that’s suddenly demonized”. The list, which was published online, has the potential to harm people’s careers, she said, jeopardize their safety and take a psychological toll on them.
DEI practices and policies ensure that people who have been marginalized, such as women, people of color, people with disabilities and veterans, are given equal opportunities. The framework dates back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned discrimination in workplaces and segregation in public places. In recent years, DEI has come under attack by conservative activists, and Trump has signed several executive orders aimed at unraveling inclusivity in the federal government.
The American Accountability Foundation (AAF), the conservative watchdog group that published the healthcare watchlist on 28 January, is on a mission to target the senior civil servants in the federal government who push the “pernicious influence of the DEI ideology” in their agencies, said the organization’s president, Thomas Jones. He added that the government workers listed on the website could not provide any examples of how their lives had been threatened: “What it really is is a cowardly way to change the subject.”
The watchlist of federal employees in healthcare is the third such catalogue that the group has published in the past four months, Jones said, following one on Department of Homeland Security workers, and another on Department of Education employees. The Heritage Foundation, the organization behind Project 2025, a rightwing manifesto for overhauling the government, has funded some of AAF’s work. Jones said his group plans to continue adding more federal employees to the healthcare watchlist.
AAF targeted workers focused on health equity initiatives, which deliver equal health treatment for all populations. James, a federal employee on the watchlist who is using a pseudonym due to fear of retaliation, said of the list: “What AAF does not understand is that health equity is key to ensuring that cancer patients from all backgrounds all have the best possible chance to beat this terrible disease.”
Critics of the watchlist say that it is part of a longstanding trend in the US to harass and silence people with ideologies outside of the white, male-dominated status quo. In recent years, online harassment has increased along with the rise in political violence, said Rachel Carroll Rivas, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s interim director of Intelligence Project, particularly now that the lines between mainstream media and alternative social media platforms have been blurred. Ultimately, the current administration labeling anyone who supports DEI as their enemies will disproportionately harm the historically disadvantaged groups that the framework was designed to help in the first place, said Marcus Board, an associate professor of political science at Howard University.
“It shuts people down and it silences them, it disempowers them,” Board said, adding a warning that complacency may lead to devastating effects on civil rights, the economy, and the environment. “We have to figure out how to stand up for ourselves without reverting to the same types of fascist group-think habits that you see on stages and platforms everywhere.”
For the federal employee who fears being added to the list, DEI is about rooting out bias and evening the playing field so that everyone has the opportunity to succeed. “There’s this huge misconception about DEI out there, and frankly, a lot of these attacks are very racist,” she said. “Black people in this country, to get anywhere, had to work 10 times harder.”
‘Exclusion as a baseline for politics’
The tactics used by groups that seek to oust federal workers now are similar to ones used during the McCarthyism era in the late 1940s and 50s, otherwise known as the Second Red Scare, said Board. At the time, the US senator Joseph McCarthy spearheaded a fear-based campaign that targeted leftwing people accused of being communists or spies during the cold war between the US and the Soviet Union. Federal employees and film stars were investigated by Congress and some artists were put on blacklists that nearly ended their careers.
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Racial politics in the US also relies on an insider and outsider dynamic that puts white people at the top of the racial hierarchy and Black people at the bottom, said Board. “There’s this challenging reality in the United States of exclusion as a baseline for politics and with these exclusionary practices, it essentially is saying that unless you accept the system and the order as it is, then you will be pushed out, and will have no recourse,” he said. “They’re trying to reinforce the order as it is, as it benefits them, which is very capitalist, very militaristic, and fascist.”
The modern-day trend of including people on lists that are “manipulative propaganda in a way that results in harassment” began with the rightwing group Turning Point USA’s professor watchlist, said Carroll Rivas. In 2016, the group released a list of nearly 200 educators who were attacked for espousing what it considered “leftist propaganda”. The watchlist led to harassment and death threats against some professors.
She also sees the current attack on DEI in the federal government as an outgrowth of anti-inclusivity efforts in education at the local school board level pushed by the conservative group Moms for Liberty in 2021. During this movement, parents attacked educators for using school curricula that mentioned race and ethnicity and mobilized bans on books about gender or sexuality. “Those things were intimidating, and they pushed educators out of the school system,” Carroll Rivas said.
As a precautionary step after learning that he was included on the DEI watchlist, James said that he froze his credit reports to prevent fraudulent activity if anyone tried to assume his identity. He said that he and several other targeted government employees were now working together with law firms and are considering filing a class-action lawsuit.
Landing on the watchlist has not deterred James or others he has spoken to from remaining in their roles. “If anything, we are more dug in in staying in our jobs until we are fired, riffed, or otherwise,” he said. “But if the goal is to get us pushed out, or to strike fear, it’s doing the opposite effect.” He added that he had one message for AAF: “You are a bunch of morons and if it is a fight you want, game on.”
