Trump Administration Moves to Hold Accreditors Accountable for Pushing Racial Discrimination

Today, President Trump issued an executive order targeting accreditors for injecting discriminatory DEI ideology into medical education. 

The order, titled Reforming Accreditation to Strengthen Higher Education, empowers the Secretary of Education to “hold accountable, including through denial, monitoring, suspension, or termination of accreditation recognition, accreditors” who promote discriminatory DEI programs.

The order explicitly singles out medical education accreditors and medical schools, empowering federal agencies to “investigate and take appropriate action to terminate unlawful discrimination by American medical schools or graduate medical education entities that is advanced by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education or the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education or other accreditors of graduate medical education.” 

The order further expands on its decision to target medical education accreditors, recounting their discriminatory requirements and mandates.

The Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which is the only federally recognized body that accredits Doctor of Medicine degree programs, requires that an institution “engage[] in ongoing, systematic, and focused recruitment and retention activities, to achieve mission-appropriate diversity outcomes among its students.” The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, which is the sole accreditor for both allopathic and osteopathic medical residency and fellowship programs, similarly “expect[s]” institutions to focus on implementing “policies and procedures related to recruitment and retention of individuals underrepresented in medicine,” including “racial and ethnic minority individuals.”  The standards for training tomorrow’s doctors should focus solely on providing the highest quality care, and certainly not on requiring unlawful discrimination.

“We applaud President Trump for taking this crucial first step towards dismantling accrediting bodies’ divisive influence over medical schools,” said Stanley Goldfarb, MD, Chairman of Do No Harm.

“By promoting accreditors’ accountability, the executive order gets rid of schools’ pretext for pushing discriminatory programs themselves,” said Dr. Goldfarb. “This is a great step towards restoring integrity to American healthcare.”

The executive order follows on the heels of Do No Harm’s report exposing education accreditors for injecting DEI mandates into their standards.

Do No Harm’s report identified 10 accrediting bodies for graduate medical and healthcare education programs that reference the value of “diversity” in their accreditation standards and/or impose DEI requirements on the programs they accredit. These standards range from explicit requirements to maintain DEI offices and programs to more indirect encouragement of efforts to achieve certain diversity-related outcomes.

Moreover, the order follows legislation recently introduced in Congress by U.S. Representative Burgess Owens. That legislation, known as the ACE Act, prohibits accreditors from mandating colleges adhere to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) standards as a condition of accreditation.

For the future of medical education to be protected, it’s essential that accreditors cannot impose their own ideological agenda onto medical schools.