Deep State: ATF worked around Trump’s DEI orders by changing job titles for chief diversity officer

By
Suzanne Downing
-
48

It wasn’t professional journalists who uncovered that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) was defying President Donald Trump’s orders to end diversity-preference hiring. It was citizen journalists.

What these citizens discovered was that after Trump ordered agencies to eliminate all positions dedicated to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI), the ATF simply changed the job title of its chief diversity officer, Lisa Boykin.

Must Read Alaska investigated the claim and confirmed its validity. Indeed, Boykin is now listed as “Senior Executive, Office of the Director.” However, on Jan. 20 — before Trump’s directive — her title was “Chief Diversity Officer.”

With this new title, it will likely be more difficult to terminate her position and refocus the agency on its essential mission.

Trump’s executive order states, in part:

Each agency, department, or commission head, in consultation with the Attorney General, the Director of OMB, and the Director of OPM, as appropriate, shall take the following actions within sixty days of this order:
(i) Terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and “environmental justice” offices and positions (including but not limited to “Chief Diversity Officer” positions); all “equity action plans,” “equity” actions, initiatives, or programs, “equity-related” grants or contracts; and all DEI or DEIA performance requirements for employees, contractors, or grantees.

Read the full executive order here.

Citizen journalists are posting instances of such bureaucratic defiance on X. While anything posted on X must be carefully verified, this case checks out.

One year ago, Senators Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst revealed that the ATF was reclassifying positions within the agency. Specifically, the ATF was unlawfully classifying administrative positions as “law enforcement” roles and had been doing so for decades. This practice violated the law and wasted millions in taxpayer dollars, the senators claimed.

“ATF for years turned a blind eye to classification errors, even after whistleblowers brought it to management’s attention as early as 2018. This maladministration resulted in up to $20 million in overpayments to at least 91 employees who erroneously received enhanced law enforcement salaries and benefits while performing human resources, administrative, and other non-law enforcement duties,” the senators said.

While the ATF lost its authority to reclassify positions as law enforcement in 2020, it has since regained that authority. The reclassification of the DEI position is further evidence that the ATF may be reverting to its previous practices—something the senators explicitly warned against last year.

“Appropriate corrective action must be taken in regard to all employees who allowed taxpayer dollars to be wasted after notification of the aforementioned misconduct,” the senators wrote in 2024. “The American public must know the ATF will not revert to its previous impropriety after the restoration of its classification authority.”

48 COMMENTS

  1. The directive did not say terminate the employees. In fact, it placed them on paid leave.
    .
    Call the position whatever you want to, it is the work that matters. And if it turns out the employee is continuing to push DIE, they will rapidly find out that crap is not acceptable.

    • An Affirmative Action queen. And old, too. Wind is rapidly dying in her sails. DEI is whimpering and will be reduced to the scrap heap of history.

  2. The solution is simple. Dissolve the ATF. Repeal the NFA. It is an illegal usurpation of power by Congress. The ATF is entitled to no authority whatsoever.

  3. I hope the new sign says welcome to Alaska all, home of the 3rd largest mountain on our globe, Mount McKinley. & the biggest fake of all time Lisa Murkowski.

  5. A major tenet of the Progressive religion is trading success for failure. We can anticipate this congregation of believers to encircle the weak and ensure these members will continue to feed off of success. Nothing new under the Sun. The idea being of course by sacrificing success for failure Nirvana will be that much closer. In practice the only thing closer is societal decay and destruction.

  6. Nothing new here; nothing to see here. The “Always Think Forfeiture” team has been making up rules and playing defacto law-makers for decades now. If they don’t like a law, they ignore it, go around it or make up new regulations. This is why for the past 20 years their “rule-making” has lost court case after court case after court case. The institutional rot in this agency runs deep. It needs to be rooted out. Starting with newly-minted Senior Executive.

    • Perhaps they should be “thinking Forfeiture” when it comes to a certain former President and his family who have flouted numerous laws through abuse of the person and clemency powers

  10. Apparently this has been going on for years at ATF.
    .
    See “ATF Unlawfully Paid Agents Millions of Dollars in Wrongful Benefits” (‘https://osc.gov/News/Pages/22-07-ATF-Wrongful-Benefits.aspx)
    .
    Might be fixed pretty quickly if President Trump and his Office of Personnel Management Director were made aware of it.

  12. When will these undereducated Affirmative Action directors realize that they are subjecting themselves to termination as a direct result of defiance and insubordination. This woke clown at ATF is just testing the limits of Trump so she can sue. That’s all. Let her sue. Make her pay for her own civil rights attorney. Then clobber her in court and send her back to 7th grade so she can try and move on to 8th grade.

    • But, like pretty much every other leftist, what they did yesterday is no longer relevant. They are unburdened by what has been.

  16. Do we really expect the deep state to just stop fighting? The only answer is to start rolling heads: Start with all who were involved in this case of insubordination; then if that doesn’t produce our desired result, bag the whole agency – personnel and regulation both.

  17. While we still have an ATF, how fast could we get all former government DEI officials on the ATFs prohibited carrier ghost list?

  19. When you read the Grassley letter, it becomes obvious that Boykin was completely implicit in the illegal classification scheme and it really begs the question :”if she was the Deputy Director of HR and there was a illegal scheme to misclassify and defraud tax payers, at best she is incompetent and at worst she committed criminal conspiracy and her reward? Promote her to chief DEI officer!when she should have been fired.this is the scum clogging the drains when they attempt to drain the swamp hopefully Senator Grassley notices and holds hearings on the private industry world if an employee is over paid, they’re can recoup; have there been any efforts to recover the over payments?

  20. MUST READ FROM Grassley –

    ‘https://www.grassley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/april_2023_national_academy_of_public_administration_classifying_gs_1811_criminal_investigators_at_the_department_of_justicepdf.pdf

  22. The article reveals important realities we must acknowledge. The deep-state-woke-leftist-Marxist-communists are shrewd and slippery–very clever. They will be very difficult, if not impossible to pin-down and eliminate.
    This negative element in American culture is aided and abetted by cohorts in mainstream media. As said in the article, this example was revealed by “citizen journalists.” We direly need all patriotic citizens to endeavor to publicly reveal government and mainstream media corruption. God-willing, let’s Make America Great Again.

  23. Can them all and start over. Same with FBI. FBI needs to bring the lowest employee to the top. Can the top 30%. There is this thing in America called trust And we don’t have much of that in either of these agencies. And it’s unfortunate.

  26. ‘https://www.frbsf.org/our-people/leadership/rita-aguilar/

    technically not a Federal agency, but still clumsy to leave this job history online

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