March 25, 2025 Dear John, The Trump administration’s recent executive order declaring English the official language of the United States is likely to lead to less consistent and coordinated efforts by federal agencies to provide information and services in languages other than English to the nation’s nearly 28 million residents who have limited English proficiency.
Executive Order 14224 revokes a quarter-century-old executive order requiring federal agencies to improve access to their programs for limited English proficient (LEP) individuals. It also orders the Justice Department to rescind companion guidance and issue updates. While it makes clear that federal agencies can still provide language access, at the discretion of agency leaders, there is likely “uncertainty ahead for LEP individuals themselves, recipients of federal funding, and the broader language access field,” Jacob Hofstetter writes in a new short read from the Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy. Still, he notes that the Trump executive order does not touch civil-rights laws that require the removal of language barriers to federally funded programs and services. And state and local initiatives to provide language access in their federally funded programs and services—which are not directly implicated by the Trump executive order—may become increasingly consequential for ensuring language barriers do not impede access to critical government programs and communications, the short read suggests.
“Even so, the revocation of Executive Order 13166 has removed a key plank in the framework that supports language access across federal programs,” Hofstetter concludes. “This framework has always had gaps but also comprised an important foundation upon which to build efforts to support improved language access. Whether that framework will stay intact, wobble, or collapse under the Trump administration remains to be seen.”
Find the short read here: www.migrationpolicy.org/news/official-english-order-language-access. For all of MPI’s work on language access, visit: www.migrationpolicy.org/topics/language-access. |
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| The Migration Policy Institute is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit think tank in Washington, D.C. dedicated to analysis of the movement of people worldwide. MPI provides analysis, development and evaluation of migration and refugee policies at the local, national and international levels. For more on MPI, please visit www.migrationpolicy.org. |
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