DEI is out

On 20 January 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”

“(i) terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and “environmental justice” offices and positions (including but not limited to “Chief Diversity Officer” positions); all “equity action plans,” “equity” actions, initiatives, or programs, “equity-related” grants or contracts; and all DEI or DEIA performance requirements for employees, contractors, or grantees.

(ii) provide the Director of the OMB with a list of all: (A) agency or department DEI, DEIA, or “environmental justice” positions, committees, programs, services, activities, budgets, and expenditures in existence on November 4, 2024, and an assessment of whether these positions, committees, programs, services, activities, budgets, and expenditures have been misleadingly relabeled in an attempt to preserve their pre-November 4, 2024 function;1”

On 22 January 2025, the Office of Personnel Management ordered that by 5pm on 22 January 2025, all paid DEI staff were to be placed on leave and all DEI related webpages viewable to the public were to be removed.2

On 27 January 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order “Restore Merit and Lethality to America’s Armed Forces” that clearly stated:

“This Order also abolishes any remnant of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) bureaucracy within the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security.”3

The January 2025 directives were clear – close DEI offices.

The Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS) is the DoD federally funded medical school that trains doctors, nurses, and other allied health personnel for the Army, Navy, Air Force, and US Public Health Service. Accordingly, it is subject to DoD authority and regulations.

On 18 February 2025, a review of the DoD homepage for USUHS (www.usuhs.edu) showed that USUHS no longer had a DEI office and instead had an EEO office. Interestingly, a click on the EEO office icon brought a blank screen.

The university leadership page is where it gets interesting. The medical school leadership lists the leadership team, headed by the Dean, Eric Elster, MD, CAPT, Medical Corps, U.S. Navy (RET). His office has a number of associate deans in the following areas:

 Vice Dean for Academic Affairs

 Associate Dean for Medical Education

 Associate Dean for Student Affairs

 Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs

 Associate Dean of Community and Educational Culture

 Associate Dean for Curriculum

 Associate Dean for Graduate Education

 Associate Dean for Graduate Medical Education

 Associate Dean for Recruitment and Admissions

 Associate Dean for Research

 Associate Dean for Simulating Education

 Associate Dean for Assessment and Professional Development

 Associate Dean for Clinical Education

 Associate Dean for [Navy Clinical Rotations]

 Associate Dean for [Army Clinical Rotations]

 Associate Dean for [Air Force Clinical Rotations]

 

At first glance, this appears to be a comprehensive list that covers just about everything a medical school should need. One, though, was a position I didn’t recognize because it didn’t exist when I was a medical student at USUHS 1998-2002: ‘Associate Dean of Community and Educational Culture.’

 

The Associate Dean of Community and Educational Culture description states that the current position is held by Jessica L. Bunin, MD, COL, USA, MC (Ret). The website lists the job description as:

“The Associate Dean of Community and Educational Culture ensures that the School of Medicine prepares students to care for a patient population, and adapt to our nation’s future needs.”4

Note that ‘a patient population’ is awkward as written and for good reason. This will be addressed later.

I recognized COL (Ret) Bunin’s name because she was my classmate in the class of 1996 at West Point. Her USUHS faculty page had benign, non-DEI research listed and there was no mention of jobs associated by name with DEI. Curious, I began to do a search for Bunin on the USUHS website and on the world wide web search engines and uncovered the following:

Bunin attended Tulane Medical School and earned a Masters of Public Health from USUHS. (Recall that the USUHS MPH program still lists 2 DEI objectives on its recruitment page.)

Her LinkedIn page describes her job as USUHS Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion June 2022-August 2024.

On 6 June 2024, USUHS posted the following news story on an internal bulletin:

“This morning, I had the pleasure of presenting the Defense Superior Service Medal (DSSM) to Jessica Bunin, MD, COL, USA MC (Ret.), Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.”5

USUHS posted its Summer 2024 Faculty Affairs / Faculty Development Newsletter that stated the following:

 

“New Leadership Announcements/Current List of Department Chairs: Associate Dean of Community and Educational Culture. Dr. Jessica Bunin has officially changed titles! She is no longer the Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. This new title reflects a more holistic approach to the SOM’s efforts for students, faculty and staff.”6

A web query for the USUHS Associate Dean for Community and Educational Culture returned the following description of the job: “The Associate Dean of Community and Educational Culture ensures that the School of Medicine prepares students to care for a diverse patient population, lead in complex cultural …” The web search finding likely had a prior version of the description that was sanitized on the actual usuhs.edu page but the traces were still visible on the world wide web. Note the current description has removed the diversity mention that is now listed and is awkward as whoever removed ‘diversity’ failed to correct the awkwardness without the word ‘diversity’ at that particular place in the sentence.

PubMed is a website that shows all the medical articles published by an author. A query of Dr. Jessica Bunin on the site found the following articles that she chose not to publish on her current USUHS web page:7

“Implementation of a "Health Equity Rounds" Curriculum in a Military Internal Medicine Residency Program: A Pilot Study.” (2024)

“Making allyship visible: evaluation of a faculty development DEI curriculum.” (2023)

(*”Allyship” is a DEI indoctrination program USUHS sends its faculty through. It is still listed on the Faculty development webpage at www.usuhs.edu under DEI Resources and Allyship information.8)

“Professionalism Policies and Practices as Experienced by First-Generation Medical Students, Residents, and Physicians.” (2024)

“Examining Scientific Inquiry of Queerness in Medical Education: A Queer Reading” (November 2024)

“End of affirmative action in admission policies in the US.” (2023)

In late 2023, Bunin was featured in an article on www.themedicalarchives.com called “Resource Limited Care in Military Medicine: Jessica Bunin, M.D., M.P.H.E.” The article had the following quote: “In her current position, Bunin is in charge of DEI and ensures that the medical student and faculty populations at Uniformed Services University remain diverse. She also ensures that adequate DEI education is implemented, a role that requires curriculum development and teaching.”9

It should be clear by now that Bunin was formally in charge of DEI at USUHS 2022-2024. It is clear she has a passion for DEI in education, research, and publication and she was involved in the insertion of DEI into medical education curriculum. It also appears she was involved in selection of students and faculty according to DEI doctrine. In 2024, USUHS announced that her office would change its name, even though was she to remain in the position in the newly named office. Further the position of ‘Associate Dean of Community and Educational Culture’ is almost certainly a poor attempt to just rename the DEI office something other than DEI. It is an odd name but the fact that a passionate DEI champion is still there betrays USUHS’ real intention – to keep its DEI master and program in place despite the Executive Orders from the current Commander and Chief and the directives of the current SECDEF. Of note, the MacArthur Society of West Point Graduates reported that West Point tried to do the same thing about the same time in 2024 when it renamed its ‘Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equal Opportunity’ headed by Ms Lisa Benitez to the ‘Office of Engagement and Retention’ also headed by Ms Lisa Benitez and her same staff.10

If Dr Bunin had retired and been reassigned as an Associate Dean for one of the other traditional offices (ie medical education, research, etc) it would have been easier to believe that Dr Bunin and USUHS were both giving up DEI to comply with new Executive Orders banning DEI. However, her passion for DEI coupled with the spurious creation of an office with a funny name is too much to believe.

USUHS’s leaders are likely being belligerent and deceitful, qualities not desirable of DoD personnel. Dr. Bunin is doing the same job with a different title with a sanitized front-facing faculty page on www.usuhs.edu. Looks like this is an easy target for DOGE to recommend for closure. Further, perhaps the SECDEF needs to pay a visit to USUHS in Bethesda, MD, located just 18.5 miles from his Pentagon office according to MapQuest to put an end to DEI at DoD’s medical school.

  1. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-and-wasteful-government-dei-programs-and-preferencing/
  2. https://apnews.com/article/dei-trump-executive-order-diversity-834a241a60ee92722ef2443b62572540
  3. https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2025/01/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-restores-merit-and-lethality-to-americas-armed-forces/
  4. https://medschool.usuhs.ed”u/about/leadership
  5. https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USMHSUSU/bulletins/3a069ef
  6. https://mccareer.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/faculty-affairs-fac-dev-newsletter-summer-2024.pdf
  7. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Bunin%20J&cauthor_id=35480596&page=3
  8. https://medschool.usuhs.edu/ped/faculty-development
  9. https://themedicalarchives.com/resource-limited-critical-care-in-military-medicine-jessica-bunin-m-d-m-h-p-e/
  10. https://macarthursociety.org/west-points-dei-office-changes-name-to-office-of-engagement-and-retention/