Clarifying confusions around discrimination, equity and disadvantage indices in current anti-DEI efforts

Abstract: In January 2025, President Trump issued the Executive Orders (EOs) “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity” and “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing”. The EOs seek to inventorize the scope of efforts aimed at promoting equity through a range of programs “whether specifically denominated ‘DEI’ or otherwise”. In March 2025, the NIH began terminating funded NIH projects that sought to address equity. An associated memo tasked NIH officers with classifying all studies into 4 categories (study’s sole purpose is DEI-related; partially supports DEI; does not support DEI, but contains related language; does not support any DEI). All three efforts pose a major risk to the unprecedented and widespread uptake of disadvantage indices (DIs) to promote equity during, and after the Covid-19 pandemic. Used at the federal, state and local level, indices such as the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) were used to adjust a range of allocation formulas, including for tests, treatments, vaccines and ventilators, to avoid that the pandemic response exacerbated inequities. Proponents of the 2025 anti-DEI efforts will likely deem such efforts centrally in the crosshairs of their effort. Yet, the charge represents a profound misunderstanding of how disadvantage indices function. The presentation reviews how equity-promoting uses of disadvantage indices have been classified by the Trump administration’s anti-DEI efforts, and provides empirical data demonstrating that the charge of discrimination is fallacious, by intersecting major indices with racial groups in key applications such as vaccine allocation during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Keywords: equity, disadvantage index, DEI