Editors at National Review Online tout a new congressional effort targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion measures.

Last week, Senator J. D. Vance and Representative Michael Cloud introduced the Dismantle DEI Act. It immediately attracted 20 cosponsors in Congress. We hope the momentum picks up.

The bill would bar school-accreditation agencies from requiring DEI in schools, and stop financial agencies like Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange from instituting diversity requirements for corporate boards.

The bill would also effectively rescind President Biden’s June 25, 2021, executive order, which pushed DEI requirements and ideas into “all parts of the Federal workforce.”

That executive order alone helps to sustain an entire private industry of DEI consultancies and lobby groups, by giving all federal agencies the power and the mandate to contract for “diversity and sensitive trainings.” First of all, it’s wrong for such politically charged content to be in the federal government’s training and development programs. But more importantly, the government’s practice here isn’t just about the several million employees of the executive branch. The norms it sets also become a template for private-sector employers and HR groups who want their workplaces to avoid Title VII lawsuits.

Divisive ideologies like those that underlie diversity, equity, and inclusion have trouble surviving without sponsorship and promotion by the government. No sane entrepreneur thinks that his or her cleaning service, car dealership, parts company, or office management group is the proper forum for adjudicating and correcting man’s inhumanity to man stretching back into millennia of history. But if the government can inflict such mandates on their own employees, states are only footsteps behind in doing so for the private sector.

Vance’s Dismantle DEI bill is a blow against government overreach, against crony-ideological sponsorship, and against the politicization of the workforce and everyday life. Even though there is no chance of Biden signing it into law, passing it now sends a salutary message about Republican priorities under a new administration.