Sponsor
Thomas Hawley Tuberville
Senator · R-AL
Senator · R-AL
Removes multiple statutory DEI duties in title 10, repeals the DoD Chief Diversity Officer statute, and eliminates selection-board diversity representation mandates.
Official title: Eliminate statutory provisions relating to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the Department of Defense.
Introduced June 17, 2025 by Thomas Hawley Tuberville · Last progress June 17, 2025
The bill trades modest administrative and cost savings and a narrower, performance-focused personnel approach for reduced diversity oversight, fewer mentoring supports, and weakened ability to detect and remedy disparities—raising risks to equity, morale, and long-term personnel effectiveness.
Military personnel: selection boards and personnel policies will prioritize traditional performance criteria over meeting statutory diversity/representation requirements, which could streamline promotion and assignment decisions toward merit metrics.
Taxpayers and federal employees: elimination of the Chief Diversity Officer position reduces administrative overhead and federal staffing costs associated with a dedicated diversity office.
Underrepresented service members (women, racial/ethnic minorities, and others): reduced collection and attention to race/gender/ethnicity data and narrowing of selection-board representation will weaken the ability to detect and correct disparities, increasing the risk of unequal promotion outcomes.
Underrepresented service members (women, racial/ethnic minorities, people with disabilities): removal of statutory diversity and mentoring programs and elimination of the Chief Diversity Officer will likely reduce targeted mentoring and career-development supports, harming retention and advancement.
Military and civilian personnel who receive training: limiting human-relations training to four broad values may exclude instruction on inclusion and bias mitigation, reducing cultural competency and the workforce's ability to manage diversity effectively.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Deletes and narrows multiple Department of Defense statutory requirements and offices related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). It removes explicit DEI duties, repeals the Chief Diversity Officer position, strips statutory rules requiring selection boards to represent force diversity, and repeals several prior NDAA and U.S. Code provisions that established DEI planning, metrics, mentoring, and related personnel practices. The bill restructures DoD personnel policy language to eliminate enumerated demographic data collection and representation mandates and replaces some detailed DEI requirements with truncated, non-specific text. The changes affect military personnel policies, personnel boards, DoD human capital offices, and diversity reporting and metric systems; they eliminate statutory authorities created by recent NDAAs and related U.S. Code provisions rather than creating new funding or program authorizations.