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WASHINGTON, D.C. – America First Legal (AFL) has filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) calling for an immediate investigation and enforcement action against Washington University School of Medicine (WashU) in St. Louis for operating one of the most egregious, systemic, and unlawful “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) regimes in the nation.
As a premier medical school and top recipient of federal funding, WashU has a critical responsibility to uphold fairness and merit in medical education. Instead, it has infused race, sex, and identity-based preferences across its medical school—from admissions and residency programs to faculty hiring, curricula, and governance. WashU celebrates engineered racial outcomes and has abandoned merit-based standards in favor of discriminatory pipelines, racial quotas, and ideological indoctrination.
The complaint alleges that WashU is violating the U.S. Constitution, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX, Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act, Supreme Court precedent, and President Trump’s Executive Orders.
It further shows how WashU circumvents the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), which prohibits race-based admissions. WashU does this by adopting a “holistic review process” that evaluates “experiences, attributes, and metrics” against its “institutional goals” and in ways that allow race and identity-based characteristics to drive selection. It also redefines merit as “systemic racism,” pre-filters applicant pools through pathway and pipeline programs, and embeds unlawful preferences into its residency programs.
“WashU has transformed its medical school into a DEI indoctrination training camp, where students, residents, and faculty are compelled to internalize and enforce the university’s ideological agenda. This isn’t compliance with the law—it’s contempt for it,” said Megan Redshaw, counsel for America First Legal. “WashU is far more egregious than Harvard or UNC because its unlawful discrimination extends beyond admissions and pollutes every corner of medical education, residency training, and clinical care.”
AFL’s investigation uncovered, among other evidence of unlawful practices, the following:
- WashU uses a “holistic review process” for admissions that functions as a mechanism to engineer racially preferred outcomes while avoiding the appearance of formal quotas. Yet its own practices suggest that racial balancing is exactly what the university is doing.
- WashU justifies race-based practices as a means of remedying the effects of “white supremacy culture,” health inequities, privilege, and past injustices.
- WashU’s Office of DEI operates more than 30 “pathway programs” to channel middle school through doctoral students into medicine, explicitly filtering opportunities based on race, sex, and other inherent, immutable characteristics.
- WashU’s Internal Medicine Residency Program increased its percentage of “underrepresented in medicine” applicants matching into its program from 9.7% to 27% in just three years through a Department of Medicine initiative that openly prioritizes race in recruitment.
“WashU has turned medical education into an ideological crusade, excluding students who spend years preparing for a career in medicine simply because it has decided race matters more than achievement,” said Redshaw. “When schools condition opportunity on race and sex and embrace radical DEI policies, they don’t produce better doctors—they produce activists in white coats who carry bias into the healthcare field. This does not serve students, and it does not serve patients who deserve the best doctors.”
Read the full complaint here.
Learn Learn more about AFL’s Merit-Based Medicine initiative here.
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