Environmental Protection Agency staffers are organizing against President Donald Trumps recent executive order banning diversity trainings, mounting what may be the fiercest opposition to Trump administration policy from within to date.

By Monday morning, at least 80 employees in the agencys Office of General Counsel more than one-third of staffers there signed on to a statement warning that Trumps move will result in further institutionalizing racism in the federal government and fly in the face of freedom of speech under the First Amendment, according to a copy of the letter HuffPost obtained. Combined, the signatories represent more than 1,000 years of service to the agency.

We reject the approach of these directives, the letter read. They are punitive and demeaning to federal employees, contractors, and grantees especially those who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. These directives both perpetuate and amplify the harmful stereotyping they purport to discourage.

The White House issued an executive order on Sept. 22, following a segment on Fox News about diversity training that apparently caught the presidents attention. The order claims that certain kinds of anti-racism and anti-sexism trainings are un-American, particularly those that teach such concepts as systemic racism, white privilege and unconscious bias, and effectively bans all such training within the federal government and any entity that contracts with or accepts funding from the federal government.

The crackdown on trainings that have been standard in the work world for decades has been widely condemned outside the corners of Fox News and the right-wing media. Last week, two civil rights groups, represented by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, filed suit against the administration in federal court, arguing that the order is an unconstitutional restriction on free speech and asking that the order be immediately rescinded.