The Free Press
The U.S. Mint has hidden its five diversity, equity, and inclusion personnel from President Trump’s axe—and has even deleted the chief DEI officer’s background from its website, a whistleblower has told The Free Press.
On January 20, Trump issued an executive order effectively terminating all DEI offices, positions, and programs across the federal government. The U.S. Mint, a division of the U.S. Treasury responsible for manufacturing coins, has employed five staffers in its Office of Equity and Inclusion (OEI) since the department’s inception in 2022. On December 3, 2024, the OEI office was closed and all five staffers were rehomed in other parts of the agency, Mint employee Brian Martin told The Free Press.
Martin said he is personally aware of these moves—because two of the staffers have since taken his job.
Martin, who used to work as a web content manager in the Mint’s public affairs department, said two DEI officers—Luz Sullivan and Vicky Best-Morris—are now doing the PR duties he once performed, including writing and distributing educational content for children, conducting outreach to schools, and supervising public affairs contractors. On December 29, he was reassigned to the sales and marketing department. Before he was shifted, chief human capital officer Cami McClain told Martin the move was “for efficiency” and “based solely on the business needs of the Mint,” according to an email obtained by The Free Press.
This led Martin to register a formal complaint to the Office of Personnel Management, which he shared with The Free Press. “What has happened to me over the last few months,” he wrote in the complaint, “is a prime example of the toxic nature of forcing political values into a federal office and the complete disregard for equal and fair treatment that comes about as a result.”
Together, the five former DEI staffers at the Mint made $722,755 in 2023, according to the most recently available financial disclosure forms. Three of the five OEI officers were moved to open positions in the 12-strong Department of Public Affairs, where Martin used to work.
Those three are:
Dennis Fish, formerly the Mint’s Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer, who now holds the title of Chief of Public Affairs.
Vicky Best-Morris, who has retained her title of Community Outreach Coordinator.
Luz Sullivan, formerly Recruitment & Special Emphasis Coordinator, who now has the title of Management Analyst.
The remaining two OEI officers were placed in the Mint’s Equal Employment Opportunity office (EEO). They are:
Sheneice Taylor (née Hoffman), formerly the DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility) Senior Adviser, who is now an Equal Employment Specialist.
David Laboy, formerly an Equity & Inclusion Data Analyst, who is now a Data Analyst.
What’s strange is that if you go to Dennis Fish’s biography page on the U.S. Mint’s website, his previous title—as Chief Equity and Inclusion Officer, a post he held since 2022—is gone.
That’s not by chance.
On January 22, two days after Trump issued his executive order on DEI, Mint Director Ventris Gibson warned staffers that any changes to DEI personnel descriptions should be reported to the agency, according to emails Martin shared with The Free Press. And yet, two days later, Jill Westeyn, the Deputy Chief of Public Affairs, told a web designer who reports to Martin to scrub Fish’s DEI experience from the website:
The web designer replied to Westeyn, saying Martin would not allow her to make that change. After Westeyn pushed back, saying DEIA references “should be removed from our digital channels,” Martin responded directly to Westeyn, saying he “cannot authorize” the designer “to make that change,” because editing a bio would be “considered an attempt to obscure the connection to DEIA.”
Later that day, Martin received an email from an e-commerce project manager, telling him that Fish’s DEI experience had been deleted from the site:
Three days later, Martin reported the deletion of the bio to the office of Ventris Gibson, but he never heard back, he said. Martin, who is a father of seven, told me that he served in the military for 12 years and received a Defense Meritorious Service Medal—which is one level below the Purple Heart. He said he is disappointed by the “lack of fairness” at the Mint, which he feels “powerless” to oppose.
“You feel like if you speak up and you complain that you’re jeopardizing your career,” Martin told me. “At a certain point, you have those long nights where you can’t sleep. You have to ask yourself, ‘Is this worth it?’ ”
“They tried to go around me,” Martin added. “It’s such a sloppy attempt to hide their behavior.”
Emails requesting comment from all five former DEI Mint officers, as well as Westeyn and McClain, were not returned. Westeyn, McClain, and Fish did not reply to messages left on their phones. And when reached by phone on Thursday, Mint Director Ventris Gibson declined to comment.
Although all five officers were moved in December before Trump issued his executive order, the mandate still applies, Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the Manhattan Institute, told The Free Press. The question now is whether or not the five former DEI staffers are doing truly new jobs—or fake jobs that are a cover for DEI.
“It will depend on what these staffers end up doing—if they continue doing DEI programming, then that’s blatantly going against the executive orders,” Shapiro said. “If they’re somehow retooling, then that’s a different matter. But I’m skeptical that they will be, given that they weren’t needed for those tasks before.”
The Mint, which employs nearly 1,700 across six facilities, is not the first government organization accused of concealing DEI staffers and programming from the Trump administration. Earlier this month, The Free Press reported on PBS’s attempts to hide two senior DEI executives from Trump’s executive order. And officers at the National Science Foundation have reportedly removed DEI language from its grants to protect federally funded diversity initiatives from Elon Musk’s cost-cutters at DOGE.
In addition to his complaint to the Treasury Department, Martin filed a grievance with the labor union that represents U.S. Treasury employees. On February 25, the union denied his grievance, according to an email obtained by The Free Press.
Martin said he worked at the Mint for nearly 10 years before he turned whistleblower for this story. He said he is now considering legal action against his employer for discrimination. “I’ve tried to hold out as long as possible to give people the opportunity to do the right thing,” Martin told me.
“My agency showed no respect for my service nor for me as a person,” Martin wrote in his formal complaint, “and I’m not sure where my career will go from here.”
CORRECTION AND UPDATE (February 28, 2025): A previous version of this story said an email seeking comment from the Office of the Treasury Assistant Secretary for Management was not returned, when in fact, the email seeking comment was not sent to that office. This has been updated. The Free Press regrets the error.
The staffers in the Mint's office of Equity and Inclusion have been placed on administrative leave, according to a post on X from the Treasury Department.
Read our previous report on attempts to hide federally funded DEI personnel from Trump’s executive order, “PBS Disappears DEI Department in Wake of Free Press Investigation.”