President Barack Obama meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Thursday, Nov. 10, 2016. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

President-elect Donald Trump was barely mentioned at the White House Summit on Diversity and Inclusion in Government, but he wasn’t ignored.

Top career civil servants and Obama administration political appointees gathered Monday to discuss the importance of a federal workforce that looks like America at all levels, just weeks before the new president, who was overwhelmingly rejected by voters of color, takes office.

Trump gained political notoriety by fronting a racist birth certificate campaign to delegitimize Barack Obama, the first black president. Trump then ran a campaign that started with bashing Mexicans and was tarred by his vulgar misogyny. It speaks volumes that he was backed by the Ku Klux Klan, an American Nazi leader, and hailed with Nazi salutes, even as he rejected their support.

With that context the summit, planned before his electoral college victory, took on even greater significance.

No one was openly critical of Trump during the morning plenary sessions. That would have been impolitic, particularly given the graciousness of the president and first lady toward the incoming occupants of the White House.

Indeed, participants seemed to expect the diversity effort to continue under Trump, despite his actions and statements, because it is “imperative,” in the words of acting office of personnel management director Beth Cobert.

“The bottom line is simple,” she said in terms Trump can appreciate. “We cannot afford to leave talent and resources on the table.”

Yet Trump’s reputation provides good reason for trepidation, as some speakers alluded to — if only obliquely.

“Given the nature of this campaign on this issue of diversity and inclusion, I’m sure that there is more than the usual amount of concern and questions,” said Shaun Donovan, Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director.

That is “all the more reason,” he added, that career officials “should be thinking about how you step up, how you join together in the coming months and years to make sure that this issue gets carried on.”

Carrying on efforts to expand federal workforce diversity after Obama’s departure was a repeated message at the summit.

Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, deputy secretary of energy, said “the work we have begun to date has to be extended across administrations” and how deeply disappointing it would be if that work was “lost or dropped.”

Although Gilbert Sandate, chair of the Coalition for Fairness for Hispanics in Government, said the Obama administration has had “inconsistent, spotty success in advancing diversity,” he also praised the president for establishing “one of the most ambitious, multipronged, systematic efforts to institutionalize hiring excellence in government.”

The summit grew from Obama’s 2011 Executive Order “establishing a coordinated government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce.”

Sandate does not expect similar efforts under Trump.