Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg’s replacement continued President Donald Trump’s evisceration of “wokeism” from the federal government with an order to end all observances celebrating diversity at the department.
Sean Duffy, the former U.S. representative from Wisconsin and Real World: Boston reality star, announced the move on X.
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“Effective immediately, the Department of Transportation will no longer participate in celebrations based on immutable traits or any other identity-based observances,” Duffy wrote on Saturday. “These distractions do nothing to keep planes in the air, trains on the tracks, or ports and highways secure.”
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“From now on, everyday [sic] of every month we celebrate transportation, beautiful infrastructure, and safety,” Duffy added.
Effective immediately, the Department of Transportation will no longer participate in celebrations based on immutable traits or any other identity-based observances. These distractions do nothing to keep planes in the air, trains on the tracks, or ports and highways secure. In…
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) February 2, 2025
The order is in tandem with similar moves eliminating cultural observances at other agencies across the federal government, including for Juneteenth, Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Black History Month, Holocaust Days of Remembrance, and Pride Month.
Intelligence officials are starting to leak to me now too. Here’s a memo Defense Intelligence Agency personnel received instructing them to suspend observances including: – Holocaust Remembrance Day – MLK Day – Juneteenth
— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein.bsky.social) January 29, 2025 at 4:24 PM
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The announcement follows Duffy’s authorization last week of actions “advancing President Donald Trump’s agenda to rescind woke policies” among other goals at the department. The “harmful” policies of the Biden-Harris administration “prioritized far-left agendas over practical solutions,” the memo stated.
In an order titled “Woke Rescission,” Duffy directed staff to identify and eliminate all Biden-era programs, policies, activities, rules, and orders that promote “wokeism” in the department.
Predictably, those included Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, racial equity, and gender identity policies that Duffy labeled “partisan.”
Also on Duffy’s list of so-called “woke” and “partisan” activities and goals: “climate change activism” and “environmental justice.”
President Trump has called climate change a hoax and withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord a second time on his first day in office. He campaigned on a pledge to unleash American energy with the mantra, “Drill, baby, drill.”
Included in Duffy’s memo was an announcement rescinding a Biden-Harris administration’s rule requiring state transportation departments to measure and establish declining targets for carbon dioxide emissions on federally supported highways.
Transportation is responsible for about 28% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States, making it the largest contributor to GHG emissions in the country.
“If we care about climate change, we have to make transportation part of the solution,” former Secretary Buttigieg said in 2022.
While Duffy claimed Buttigieg and the previous administration prioritized politics over “practical solutions” at the DOT, his own guidance rolls back real-world solutions addressing the climate crisis and advances administration goals that have nothing to do with the department’s remit.
Buried under “diversity” distractions in Duffy’s memo are goals associated with the administration’s own political agenda, including giving “preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”; to “prohibit recipients of DOT support or assistance from imposing vaccine and mask mandates”; and “require local compliance or cooperation with Federal immigration enforcement and other goals and objectives specified by the President of the United States or the Secretary.”
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