The White House Commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders – a key tool to accessing federal government – has been shut down via executive order.
Shortly after his inauguration Jan. 20, President Donald Trump rescinded 58 executive orders issued by the previous Biden Administration. Among those orders was EO 14031, signed by Biden on May 28, 2021: Advancing Equity, Justice, and Opportunity for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders. The order established the WHAANHPI Commission within the Department of Health and Human Services.
The recission was immediate. The website has been taken down, and links to the page elicit an error message. In a broad statement referencing all 58 orders, Trump said: “The previous administration has embedded deeply unpopular, inflationary, illegal, and radical practices within every agency and office of the Federal Government.”
DEI
“The injection of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) into our institutions has corrupted them by replacing hard work, merit, and equality with a divisive and dangerous preferential hierarchy,” he said.
Several former commissioners have sent a letter to Trump, expressing their disappointment about the closure. “Executive Order 14031 followed a longstanding bipartisan tradition of creating a Presidential Advisory Commission and a White House Initiative focused on AANHPI communities,” wrote the commissioners, asking the president to immediately restore the commission.
Community Bridge
“It was an incredibly important Commission for our community,” Commissioner Mia Ives-Rublee, senior director for the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress, told Ethnic Media Services. “We were provided a bridge between our community and the executive branch, and fanning out to all of the different departments.”
“We were able to provide information and feedback on specific issues that our community was facing, and that feedback was utilized to address barriers to obtaining services and supports from the Federal Government,” she said.
“We were lucky enough to have someone at the top who put a priority on his administration looking like the United States,” said Ives-Rublee, referencing Biden. “He increased diversity up and down the board. And as a commission, we often pushed for continued recruitment of AANHPI members.”
The former commissioner said she was most proud to see the creation of an AANHPI Mental Health Summit during her tenure. “That had never been done at a national scale. We constantly hear about the impacts of mental health issues and suicide in our communities. And we thought as a Commission it was important to uplift that issue and ensure that it would be addressed,” said Ives-Rublee.
Small Business Support
The summit led to the creation of the AANHPI Mental Health Center, which is based in Honolulu, Hawaii.
The Commission also hosted a series of briefings connecting small business owners to federal offices. Attendees could learn how federal contracting worked. It also addressed the spike in hate crimes against the AAPI community.
In the absence of the Commission, Ives-Rublee fears a rollback of all the advances the AANHPI community has made in many sectors.
AANHPIs are among the fastest-growing populations in the US. The Asian American population alone grew by 81% over the past two decades, and is expected to reach 46 million by 2060.
