Major companies like Meta and Ford are undoing diversity initiatives. Once Donald Trump takes office, those rollbacks are expected to be much more widespread — and perhaps not voluntary.
Since the end of Trump’s first term, conservative legal organizations like the Stephen Miller-founded America First Legal have pushed a campaign to target corporate diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
They’ve filed lawsuits and flooded the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with letters and formal complaints in an effort to get the Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights to look into their allegations. The Biden administration mostly didn’t engage; Trump’s DOJ is expected to be different.
Jonathan Butcher, a senior fellow with The Heritage Foundation, said he anticipates Trump’s administration to have an interest in going after workplace DEI initiatives, pointing to his first-term executive order banning DEI training in the federal workforce.
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“Investigating DEI claims, I think, was not a priority for the Biden administration,” Butcher said.
There’s also an appetite at the congressional level.
The last bill Vice President-elect JD Vance introduced as a senator was the Dismantle DEI Act, which would not only have eradicated DEI initiatives from the federal workforce, but also sought to prohibit any contractor being paid in excess of $10,000 from having DEI company policies while servicing the government.
Rep. Andy Biggs, who was a co-sponsor on the mirroring House bill, said he hopes similar legislation gets passed this Congress.
“Here’s the thing: We want merit and we want efficiency. And DEI doesn’t foster either of those things,” he said.
This kind of legislation, if signed into law, would have a dramatic impact. Any government contractor, many of which are global Fortune 500 companies, would be forced to potentially reevaluate, cut or scrap any DEI initiatives they may have.
“It could serve as a vehicle to say, ‘We don’t need to do this anymore,’ but it does not take into account the systemic patterns of discrimination, the policies, the practices that have necessarily restricted the advancement of development and growth of people of color in those organizations,” said Effenus Henderson, co-director of the Institute for Sustainable Diversity & Inclusion.
Conservatives, who are preparing to continue this crusade under Trump, say it’s about increasing equality in the workplace.
“We are aiming for an opportunity to have a job sector, an education sector, a government in which race is not something in which we are attributing every problem in society to. If there is an issue of discrimination, let’s fix it. We can repair it. We have laws to do that. We have a Department of Justice, an Office of Civil Rights that will protect people from that,” Butcher said. “We’re going to move beyond this constant looking for racism, and we’re going to begin to talk about what it will look like when people are judged according to what they do and not what they look like.”
There have only been a handful of successful “reverse discrimination” DEI-related lawsuits. America First Legal, which bills itself as the conservative answer to the American Civil Liberties Union, has filed a flurry of federal civil-rights complaints with the EEOC, which does not publicize updates to complaints it has received.
America First Legal did not respond to requests for comment.
“What we saw is that they did file lawsuits,” ReNika Moore, director of the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program, said. “But those lawsuits were thrown out by federal courts at the very earliest stage, at the motion-to-dismiss stage. Repeatedly saying that America First Legal had not made sufficient allegations about the facts and about the law. They were representing people who haven’t even applied for the specific program that they were challenging. And these are basic requirements to go to court and for court to fix the problems.”
While the legal waters continue to be tested, Moore said the ACLU is watching a number of other ways the incoming administration could impact DEI initiatives.
“We anticipate potentially executive orders that make it much harder to do important work, to ensure equality, to protect — whether it’s employment opportunity, protect educational opportunities that allow teachers to teach,” Moore said, adding that she expects to see fundamental changes in the way the Department of Justice treats marginalized communities.
Companies are already responding to social pressure. Ford, John Deere, Lowe’s and now Meta are a few of the companies that have eliminated or scaled back their corporate DEI initiatives not because of an executive order or legal challenge, but in many cases, because of pressure from conservative activists.
DEI initiatives do not inherently constitute racial discrimination. Some companies like McDonald’s have doubled down on their commitments to inclusion. And while others have chosen to eliminate DEI policies, many have turned to attorneys and law firms to ensure that their policies are nondiscriminatory and in full compliance with the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Samia Kirmani, a co-leader of corporate diversity counseling at Jackson Lewis, a firm that specializes in employment law, said much of maintaining a lawful DEI program comes down to implementation.
“People who don’t spend a ton of time thinking about this might jump to the conclusion that, ‘Oh, because we have a DEI program, that means we make decisions based on race or gender and that.’ It’s not the case,” she said.
“Many of those organizations that have kind of said that they are changing their DEI programming, or that they’re renaming their DEI programming, they’re not necessarily pulling away from their DEI programming,” Kirmani continued. “They’re still doing it, but they’re taking a look at what their initiatives are and how they’re being implemented, ensuring they’re being implemented in the lawful way.”
But as the chips continue to fall, DEI proponents are worried that this is not about equality, but instead another phase in a much larger effort to reshape the U.S. around white, Christian nationalist values as the country’s demographics shift.
“It’s changing rapidly because of the increase in people of color and the increase in people migrating here from different parts of the world,” Henderson said. “So their strategy, in my mind, is really, ‘How do we undercut programs? How do we create a lack of support for DEI programs?’ And what’s the ultimate objective? I actually think it goes as far as putting something in front of the Supreme Court that might negate a lot of the requirements under Title XI and Title XII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”
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Violet Jira is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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