Major Medical Education Accreditor Quietly Ditches DEI Requirements After Trump Executive Order

A leading medical education accreditor is eliminating its diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements after suspending them earlier this year to comply with an executive order from President Trump.

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) is closing its DEI department and removing DEI requirements from its accreditation standards, according to an internal email provided to NR by the watchdog group Do No Harm, which works to root out the use of race and gender-based criteria in the medical field.

“Recent federal directives, including executive orders and a proposed rule from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services have prohibited accrediting bodies from requiring or otherwise encouraging a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Similar directives apply to programs and hospitals receiving Medicare payments for GME,” reads the email from the ACGME communications department.

“In alignment with these federal directives, the ACGME has taken several actions, including retiring DEI-specific accreditation requirements, updating the organization’s relevant policies and procedures, and closing the Department of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”

Do No Harm celebrated the decision as a crucial win in its efforts to eliminate identity politics from the medical field.

“For too long, accreditors like the ACGME have gotten away with injecting identity politics into medical education. Now that they’re finally removing DEI mandates — after much scrutiny and pressure—the ACGME is taking an important step toward realigning its standards with common sense, meritocratic metrics,” said Do No Harm chairman Dr. Stanley Goldfarb.

“That’s why it’s so important that organizations like ours, along with elected officials and all medical professionals, continue speaking out and holding these institutions accountable for racialized standards and quotas in medicine.”

ACGME’s standards have been updated to remove the references to diversity present in the group’s previous standards. The organization also removed the DEI webpage from the resources section of its website.

The move comes after ACGME suspended its DEI mandates in July due to Trump’s executive order empowering the Department of Education to scrutinize accreditors that use their authority to promote DEI.

NR has reached out to ACGME for comment.

NR previously reported on how some medical education accreditors were continuing to push DEI onto medical schools despite the Trump administration’s pressure on American institutions to do away with the divisive left-wing programs.

While they’re not widely known among the general public, medical education accreditors wield significant influence over the medical profession. ACGME focuses on accrediting residency and fellowship programs for medical professionals after they finish medical school. One in seven U.S. physicians are residents or fellows. An estimated 167,083 active residents and fellows participate in ACGME-sponsored programs, according to the organization’s data.

DEI programs typically focus on race and other identity characteristics rather than character and merit. Critics of DEI believe that it incentivizes racial discrimination in hiring and admissions by giving preferential treatment to minority groups. Proponents of DEI often argue it is a necessary remedy to past injustices.

Nationwide, DEI initiatives have become common in medical schools, potentially jeopardizing the future of medical education. Numerous red states have banned DEI from higher education but some schools in those areas have continued promoting DEI anyway, as NR previously reported.

On the federal level, the Trump administration has taken a sledgehammer to DEI initiatives throughout American institutions. Undergraduate educational institutions have received the bulk of the administration’s attention, with the Department of Education launching dozens of investigations into colleges and universities for alleged discrimination.