Fell v. Trump (formerly Stainnak v. Trump) - Challenging Purge of DEI-Associated Federal Workers As Discriminatory and Retaliatory for Perceived Political Beliefs

Federal employees filed a complaint against the Trump administration for targeting workers, especially people of color, women, and non-binary workers, for participating in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) activities, violating their First Amendment rights.

On his first day in office, January 20, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Orders 14151 and 14173, which instructed the Office of Personnel Management to terminate all government activities related to DEI and mandated that federal agencies compile lists of the government’s diversity, equity and inclusion ("DEI") programs and activities in existence as of November 4, 2024.

As a result of those orders, the federal government quickly unleashed a wave of adverse employment actions, up to and including termination, against employees across the entire government. The workers whom the Trump administration targeted were those employees it perceived as being associated with DEI, including those who no longer performed any DEI-related activities in their current positions and those whose only DEI-related activity was involvement in a training or employee resource group.

We represent almost a dozen employees from across the government — from the FAA, the CDC and NIH, to the Departments of Education, Homeland Security, and Labor — subjected to this purge. Together with our co-counsel, in March 2025 we filed a class action complaint before the Merit System Protection Board, challenging the targeting of DEI-associated workers as unconstitutional retaliation based on perceived (left-leaning, or anti-Trump) political beliefs in violation the First Amendment, and as employment discrimination in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 primarily based on its disparate impact on workers of color and workers who are women or non-binary. Our MSPB complaint was filed in tandem with numerous charges of discrimination filed by our clients with their Equal Employment Opportunity offices.

Our clients are asking the Board to reinstate them and their fellow class members to their jobs and to make them whole for the wages they have lost and other damages they have suffered.

In December 2025, having exhausted several of our clients' administrative remedies, we filed a class action lawsuit in federal court on behalf of four fired federal workers, asserting claims under the First Amendment, Title VII, and the Civil Service Reform Act. Our clients — who worked for the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Department of Justice, respectively — provided critical services across a range of public health, public safety, and other functions. As before, we seek classwide relief including reinstatement and compensation for federal workers wrongfully purged from government service based on their perceived political beliefs; based on their race, sex or gender; and/or in violation of the protections of federal civil service law.