National Native News

Photo: Anti-DOGE/Elon Musk protest in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown neighborhood on March 22, 2025. (Geoff Livingston / Flickr)

The chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and other Republicans are pushing back against the Trump administration’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) purge of Native Americans — quite literally — from federal government websites.

Correspondent Nicolae Butler reports from Washington that even members of the president’s own party are aghast at efforts to erase First Americans from government websites.

At the U.S. Capitol, Republicans are more unified than the party’s been in decades, if not a century as the party rallies around most all of President Donald Trump’s recent efforts to reshape Washington in his own image. But even members of the president’s own party are aghast at efforts to erase First Americans from government websites.

Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team seem to have crossed an unwritten Republican red line when they literally erased the term “Native American” from some government sites.

U.S. Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) told National Native News at the Capitol he doesn’t “know why you just do that as a matter of course.”

Other Republicans are struggling to even grasp what Musk and his team did.

U.S. Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) told National Native News he “hadn’t seen that, so I have no idea.”

Still, other Republicans, like U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK), are confused by what DOGE did, even after we told him what was deleted from federal websites, because it’s so incomprehensible to them.

“Wait, I don’t understand the question.”

It’s more than just deleting the term “Native American”, which critics say is bad enough, but Department of Defense web pages honoring Navajo Code Talkers were also deleted.

The administration says it restored the pages, calling it a “mistake”, but the “mistakes” didn’t stop there.

Sen. Cramer said he’s no fan of DEI, but the administration went too far this time.

“If it’s Native American, it’s Native American. I don’t know. You can’t — I don’t know. I mean, seems weird. I don’t know why you do that, But first thing I would do is check with local Native people to see what their preference is, because some of them don’t like it.”

U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), chair of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, has been leaning on officials at the Interior Department and Health and Human Services (HHS) to ensure tribal programs aren’t caught up in this DEI purge.

“We were worried about that right at the outset, right? And that was why it was important to get some assurance, some confirmation that when it came to tribes and tribal programs, they were not going to be subject to this DEI initiative. We got that assurance through Interior; we got it through HHS.”

But Sen. Murkowski says other federal agencies have some catching up to do.

“But we’re seeing this in other accounts, which is troubling. We’ve reached out to address this, because it’s not the way it should be.”

Alaska’s other senator, Sen. Sullivan, calls the erasure of tribal references a “huge” misstep. The Republican suggests Musk and his DOGE team are in need of a history lesson.

“Tribes and Native Americans are in the Constitution. Maybe some people should go reread their Constitution.”

The LCB contributed to this report from Washington.