Taking old, resolved scandals - slapping a coat of culture war paint on it - and then selling it as a new scandal is already a popular MO for state-sponsored propoganda, so we should be extra wary of stories like this being massaged.
Post-reframing consists in telling people it wasn’t introduced as this, which may be true for journalists but clearly understood by the audience as a DEI issue, then claiming the DEI issue is slapped upon an existing problem.
Agressive DEI has been uniformly contested since it was introduced, by (practically) everyone who has ever lost a promotion on non-skills criteria. It’s just that today, the good side has finally won.
And in the US the federal government can’t stop it as it’s mostly defined in local and state gov (which is many times larger than the federal workforce). Dept of Education would only have limited influence there.
See California public universities still practicing affirmative action despite it being made illegal decades ago for a good example of this