The accreditation mandates are gone. The White House has made its position clear. Yet some of America's medical schools appear to be clinging to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that federal authorities and a growing number of watchdog groups say compromise patient safety and violate civil rights law.
That is the central finding of a new investigation by Do No Harm, a medical watchdog organization that has spent the past two years tracking DEI's footprint across graduate medical education. The group's latest work, first reported by the Daily Caller, identifies specific institutions, including the University of Iowa's Carver College of Medicine, that may still be promoting DEI efforts in defiance of the shifting legal and regulatory landscape.
The stakes are not abstract. Medical licensure exam pass rates have fallen sharply since 2020. Federal investigators have already opened civil rights probes into at least one elite medical school. And the Trump administration has signaled it will cut funding to institutions that use race as a factor in admissions or training.
On July 1, new accreditation standards took effect that eliminated DEI mandates for all 162 MD-granting and 46 DO-granting medical schools in the United States. Both the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) and the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation (COCA) stripped their DEI requirements entirely.
The changes represented a major policy shift. By 2022, 96% of U.S. and Canadian medical schools had incorporated DEI as a "key learning outcome" under previous accreditation rules. Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, chairman of Do No Harm and a former associate dean for curriculum at the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine, framed the reversal bluntly in a New York Post opinion piece:
"Merit, not skin color, ought to decide who's accepted into a profession that deals with life and death."
But the formal removal of DEI from accreditation checklists has not ended the pressure. Do No Harm released a separate report identifying ten prominent medical accreditation organizations that continue to advance DEI through their own standards, even as the LCME and COCA backed away. That finding, detailed by National Review, puts medical school administrators in a bind: comply with the Trump administration's anti-DEI directives and risk losing accreditation from specialty bodies, or maintain DEI programs and risk federal consequences.
The result is a quiet standoff playing out across campuses that train the next generation of American doctors.
Critics of DEI in medical education point to a measurable decline in student performance that coincides with the rapid adoption of diversity mandates. Medical licensure exam pass rates for MD students dropped from 97% to 89% between 2020 and 2024. For DO students, the decline was steeper: from 95% to 86% over the same period.
Goldfarb has argued that DEI mandates distracted institutions from their core educational mission. He put it in terms patients would understand:
"Patients expect their doctors to be world-class healers, not activists in lab coats."
Correlation is not causation, and multiple factors can influence national exam performance. But the timing has given ammunition to those who believe that ideological commitments crowded out rigorous medical training during a critical window.
The parallel fight over DEI accreditation standards in law schools has followed a similar trajectory, with the American Bar Association voting to eliminate its own diversity mandates under mounting political and legal pressure.
The federal government's willingness to act against medical schools that cross the line on race-based admissions is no longer theoretical. In March 2025, the Department of Health and Human Services opened a civil rights investigation into UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine following whistleblower allegations that the school lowered admissions standards for Black and Hispanic applicants.
The allegations were specific and data-driven. Under a new admissions director who took over in 2020, white and Asian matriculants at the Geffen School dropped from 73% to 57%, while Black and Hispanic matriculants jumped from 16% to 30%. The applicant pool remained steady during that period, Newsmax reported.
Whistleblowers alleged that the admissions office pushed through unqualified minority candidates, resulting in medical students failing basic shelf exams in record numbers. Do No Harm called the evidence "definitive," stating that "the Geffen School of Medicine has sullied their admissions process to the detriment of patient care."
HHS did not hold back either. The agency declared it "will not tolerate informal admissions practices and institutional policies that promote racial discrimination at HHS-funded institutions." UCLA now faces potential loss of millions in federal grants if investigators find violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act.
A subsequent DOJ finding confirmed UCLA used illegal race-based admissions practices even after the Supreme Court's ban on affirmative action, turning the case into a benchmark for enforcement nationwide.
The current landscape creates a genuine institutional dilemma. On one side, the Trump administration has issued executive directives against DEI in federally funded institutions and backed those directives with investigations and funding threats. On the other, specialty accrediting bodies continue to embed diversity requirements into their standards, meaning a school that strips its DEI infrastructure could face questions about its accreditation status from the very organizations that certify its residency programs and specialty training.
Do No Harm's report on the ten accreditors still pushing DEI highlighted this tension directly. The watchdog argued that these organizations are harming both medical professionals and patients by prioritizing ideological compliance over clinical excellence.
The dynamic mirrors what has unfolded in legal education, where House Republicans moved to strip the ABA of its law school accreditation power after contentious hearings revealed the extent of DEI mandates embedded in the accreditation process.
In both fields, the core question is the same: who controls the professional pipeline, and what values will govern entry into professions where competence is not optional?
The University of Iowa's Carver College of Medicine is among the institutions flagged by Do No Harm as potentially maintaining DEI efforts despite the changed regulatory environment. The watchdog's investigation suggests that some schools have rebranded or quietly continued diversity programming even after formal mandates disappeared from accreditation standards.
Authorities have not publicly confirmed whether Iowa or other flagged schools face imminent federal scrutiny. But the pattern Do No Harm describes, where institutions nominally comply with new rules while preserving the substance of old ones, tracks with a broader trend across higher education.
The Republican pushback against DEI mandates at the institutional level has extended well beyond campuses, with elected officials using funding leverage to force compliance in cities and agencies that have resisted the shift.
Whether the same funding leverage will prove effective against medical schools, many of which depend heavily on federal research grants and Medicare dollars, remains an open question. The UCLA investigation suggests HHS is willing to use it.
Investigators will need to determine how many medical schools are maintaining DEI programs in substance, even if they have removed the label. Do No Harm has indicated it will continue publishing school-by-school analyses. The Trump administration has shown no sign of easing enforcement pressure.
For medical school administrators caught between competing authorities, the calculus is shifting fast. The accreditation bodies that once demanded DEI compliance are losing ground. The federal agencies that fund medical education are demanding its removal. And the watchdog groups tracking compliance have grown more sophisticated in their methods and more aggressive in their public reporting.
The question is no longer whether DEI will leave American medical education. The question is whether the schools still holding on will let go before the federal government forces them to, and how many patients will be affected in the meantime.
When the people training your doctors care more about ideology than competence, the exam scores are not the only thing at risk.
