It’s no secret that “flooding the zone“ has been the primary strategy of this administration—or that the approach has reached a fever pitch when it comes to dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). From my vantage point in mid-2026, the strategy has unfolded in three distinct movements. There was the Day One wave, a blunt-force trauma to the federal bureaucracy that shuttered DEI offices and redefined sex as a strictly biological binary. Then came the second wave, which took the fight to our classrooms and courtrooms by revoking disparate impact protections. By the third wave, the administration sought to “cleanse“ the private sector, targeting everything from AI guardrails to the fiduciary duties of investment firms, making it even more important to continue moving nonprofits' missions forward.

The result has been a volatile mix of immediate enforcement, fierce legal contestation, and sudden abandonment. One could easily argue that this chaos wasn’t a collateral effect; it was the point, making moving nonprofits' missions forward even more vital. But hindsight has a way of making chaos look more coherent than it felt while we were living through it.

In those early months of 2025, perspective was a luxury we did not have. The executive orders crash landed into our lives. They hit faster than organizations could digest them, faster than counsel could interpret them, and certainly faster than leaders could assemble their boards to ask the all-important question: What has actually changed, and what is just noise?

By spring, the administration had scrambled the field, distorted the signal, and made institutions question the ground beneath their own feet. Universities, nonprofits, foundations, and school systems found themselves caught in an atmosphere of escalating uncertainty, legal ambiguity, and political intimidation. All across the mission-driven ecosystem, institutions that had spent years naming equity as central to their values suddenly found themselves asking whether that language had become a liability.

On April 3, that sweeping national anxiety became acutely personal. That morning, the Department of Education issued a certification demand tied to federal funding, requiring education-related institutions to swear they weren’t engaging in what the administration branded “illegal DEI“—a brazen attempt to stretch the logic of the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard affirmative action ruling into K–12 classrooms. For the nonprofits embedded in schools, it was a sudden, sharp reminder that no one was flying under the radar.

Read the full article about moving nonprofits' missions forward by Dax-Devlon Ross at Nonprofit Quarterly.