The Trump administration is reasserting its push to strip the federal government of languages other than English.
“Agencies should strive to operate solely in English,” the Justice Department said in new guidance issued to federal agencies on Thursday.
The memorandum is meant to implement an executive order issued last year that declared English the official language of the country and reversed a decades-old policy requiring federal agencies to improve access for people with limited English proficiency.
The order explicitly said that agency heads were not required to remove or stop producing government products in languages other than English. Now, the DOJ says that a long list of government materials should be offered only in English, including official correspondence, regulations, public notices and announcements, forms and applications, websites, outreach and educational materials, internal government communications, and artificial intelligence tools.
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Some federal agencies have already removed non-English resources. This new guidance could accelerate those changes, which would affect how over 27 million people in the U.S. with a limited ability to speak, read or write English interact with the federal government.
“I would be surprised if we didn’t see more agencies taking down multilingual content or trying to reduce the level of language access they provide,” said Jacob Hofstetter, a policy analyst who focuses on language access at the Migration Policy Institute.
Just this week, the General Services Administration shuttered the Spanish version of USA.gov, a website meant to act as a landing page for the government, and began redirecting people to the English version. The Spanish site was first created in 2003.
Asked about the change, a spokesperson for the agency said, “GSA will comply with all directives from President [Donald] Trump as we work to put America first” and cited Trump’s order.
Over the summer, the Department of Housing and Urban Development moved to scrub non-English languages from all of its services.
The new DOJ guidance says that agencies should provide multilingual services only to the extent that they’re required by law or if they are necessary to accomplish an agency’s mission. It offers national security activities and health care services as examples.
The DOJ, per the Federal Register, is taking comments on the new memo through Jan. 11, however a spokesperson for the agency told The Washington Sun that the memo is “final” and “in effect.” The memo was issued to agencies in September and published publicly for the first time Thursday.
There’s no blanket law across federal agencies requiring multilingual services, although some lawmakers have come forth with proposals to do so. Some government programs have their own language access laws specific to them, too.
States and other entities that receive federal funds are covered by the nondiscrimination provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which has been interpreted by DOJ and federal courts to require language access, said Michael Mulé, a civil rights attorney and language access expert who worked on civil rights law at DOJ for 15 years.
Language access often benefits the government, too, he said, not just people with limited English proficiency.
“I want the FBI tip line to be accessible to someone that has a tip on a criminal,” he said. “I want someone to understand how to file their taxes the right way.”
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