Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

2. Executive Office of the President · Notable

Use federal contracts to push back against woke corporate policies

Done

48 2. Executive Office of the President

“This office should be engaged early and often in OMB's effort to drive policy, including by obtaining transparency about entities that are awarded federal contracts and grants and by using government contracts to push back against woke policies in corporate America.”

What has happened

  1. Done

    EO 14398 turned the certification into an enforcement regime. Issued under the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act, it requires agencies within 30 days to insert a clause into contracts, subcontracts and lower-tier subcontracts under which the contractor agrees not to engage in "racially discriminatory DEI activities", opens its books to the contracting agency, reports subcontractor conduct, and accepts cancellation, suspension and debarment for non-compliance. Together with EO 14173's certification term this is the ask delivered: government contracts are being used, on their face, to push back on corporate DEI, and the audit-and-report clause supplies the transparency the Quote wanted about who is being awarded federal work.

  2. Partially done

    Federal contracts became the instrument for pushing back on corporate DEI within the administration's first two days. EO 14173 revoked EO 11246, ordered the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs to stop requiring affirmative action, and — the operative clause for this ask — directed the head of each agency to write into every contract and grant award a term requiring the counterparty "to certify that it does not operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws", with compliance made material to payment under the False Claims Act. The same order tells the OMB Director to excise DEI references from federal acquisition, contracting and grant procedures. The transparency half of the ask — publishing who holds federal contracts and grants — is not addressed here.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

The Quote names the Office of Federal Procurement Policy as the office that should be “engaged early and often”. OFPP has an Administrator again — Kevin Rhodes, confirmed 7 October 2025 — and OMB has issued procurement memoranda through the window (M-25-26 Overhauling the Federal Acquisition Regulation; M-25-31 Consolidating Federal Procurement Activities; M-26-12 Increasing the Acquisition of Commercial Products and Services). We leveled the item on the action the Quote asks for — using contracts against corporate DEI, and transparency about who holds them — rather than on OFPP’s internal engagement, which is not observable.

Action
restrict
Object
Federal contracting and procurement policy (Office of Federal Procurement Policy)
ID
40