America's Biggest Companies Are Waging A Stealth Campaign To Dismantle Dei

Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BI

In 2020, it was all the rage for corporations to pledge their allegiance to diversity and inclusion. In 2025, it's very much in vogue to declare that they're no longer into that kind of stuff. Companies such as Target, Walmart, McDonald's, Google, and Meta have recently announced major rollbacks of their DEI efforts. In corporate America, nixing employee resource groups is the new version of posting that Black Lives Matter black square five years ago. On the flip side, companies including JPMorgan and Costco say they're sticking to their DEI guns despite the Trump-fueled headwinds.

It's tempting to paint an us-versus-them — or them-versus-them — picture: the DEI backpedalers versus the DEI warriors. But there's a quieter and potentially larger group of businesses taking a different course: subtly burying DEI efforts. They're not putting out press releases or big memos saying they're axing programs aimed at hiring diverse candidates or tracking supplier demographics. Instead, they've taken a look at the legal, political, and cultural landscape and made the calculation that it's better to silently pull back on DEI-related language for now.

"Many companies in America have always wanted to promote diversity in the workplace in a manner that's lawful, and that hasn't changed," said Rebecca Baker, a partner at the law firm Vinson & Elkins in its labor and employment group. "What has changed is there's a cloud of ambiguity as to what is lawful."

Companies are hoping to fly under the anti-DEI crowd's radar at a moment when the movement feels more emboldened than ever. They're afraid to put a target on their backs, legal or otherwise. Despite some of the attention-grabbing headlines, this might be how DEI really dies — quietly, in the shadows.

While several companies have made splashy announcements about their DEI plans, others have simply scrubbed mentions of them, including in their annual 10-K financial reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. For their latest filings, it appears that a lot of publicly traded companies did a CTRL+F+DELETE on "diversity."

Legally, companies have to disclose some information about their workforces in their annual reports, such as how many people work for them, but they're not required to say anything about diversity and demographics. It had become popular over the past decade or so for companies to make such disclosures anyway, especially in the wake of George Floyd's murder in 2020. But that's shifted as companies have become increasingly worried about being viewed as "woke" or overly progressive.

General Motors, for example, cut the DEI section of its annual report. In its 2023 report, the automaker said it aimed to be "the most inclusive company in the world" and touted its diverse board of directors and dozen employee resource groups. In its 2024 report, that section was gone. PepsiCo's latest filing scrapped a breakdown of its workforce demographics as well as a line about how it believed its "culture of diversity, equity and inclusion is a competitive advantage that fuels innovation, enhances our ability to attract and retain talent and strengthens our reputation." The soda maker did, however, retain a mention of pay equity. Disney shortened its DEI section, in part removing mentions of employee development programs and fellowships for underrepresented talent while adding a mention of Heroes Work Here, an initiative to hire and train US military veterans. Mondelez International scrapped its section dedicated to diversity and inclusion in its workforce. Philip Morris International significantly shortened what had previously been its DEI section, removing goals for gender and racial representation in its management and mention of employee resource groups. The section is now named "collaborative culture."

Some firms are taking a subtler approach. Pinterest, for example, renamed the "inclusion and diversity" section of its report "inclusion and belonging." Chipotle swapped "diversity, equity & inclusion" for "culture and inclusivity," though it continues to include breakdowns of its workforce by gender, ethnicity, and race.

Lots of companies obviously realize that DEI became a very politically loaded term.

The companies mentioned did not respond to a request for comment or declined to comment on the record, with the exception of Philip Morris, which said it valued its "global workforce" and was "focused on fostering a fair and collaborative workplace in an environment that provides opportunities to all employees for growth and professional development."

"Prior to Trump taking office, there was already a lot of pressure on DEI," said Andrew Jones, a senior researcher at the Conference Board's ESG Center. "Lots of companies obviously realize that DEI became a very politically loaded term, controversial term, even a slightly toxic term in terms of the legal and political scrutiny."

Last spring, a Wall Street Journal analysis found that dozens of companies were changing their DEI descriptions in their annual reports amid heightened legal and political scrutiny. A new analysis by NPR this year found that several companies were axing references to DEI altogether. Beyond the filings, data provided by AlphaSense, a financial information and insights company, indicates that mentions of DEI have sharply declined on earnings calls and in other public investor-related communications over the past couple of years.

Businesses are increasingly hush-hush about anything that might even have a whiff of DEI, lest they poke the anti-woke bear and become the next Bud Light or worse.

"If you're a CEO, you've got the general counsel in one ear saying you're going to get sued or you're going to use lose contracts," said Alison Taylor, an associate professor at New York University's Stern School of Business who wrote the book "Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World." "And then you've got the public-affairs person in the other ear saying here's who's yelling at you on social media."

Baker said companies were increasingly including mentions in their risk-factor disclosures of potential controversies around their employment practices and social initiatives. "So they're flagging that 'Hey, investors should understand that the DEI climate is in flux right now and we can't exactly predict what might happen. And some of our employment practices, although we believe they're fully legally compliant, may ultimately end up a target of litigation,'" she said.

Corporate America was nervous before the election about the political tides turning, given the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling against affirmative action in college admissions and the growing influence of conservative activists such as Robby Starbuck. Now, Trump 2.0 has sent many of them into a silent panic mode. The president positioned himself as a fierce opponent of almost DEI, determined to root it out of the federal government and, if he can manage it, private industry. The crusade is clearly having a chilling effect across the business community.

There is a valid fear of companies having a target on their back.

In an executive order signed on his first day in office, Trump set out to end what he called "radical and wasteful" DEI programs in the federal government. The next day, in a separate executive order, he revoked an order signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 that barred government contractors and subcontractors from engaging in employment discrimination. Many government contractors are public companies. But even for those that aren't, the order lays out steps for "encouraging the private sector to end illegal DEI discrimination and preferences." It instructs federal agencies to identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of private companies. In effect, they're hunting for lists of names to sue, and no one wants to be one of them.

"There is a valid fear of companies having a target on their back based on how they outwardly promote DE&I," said Renai Rodney, a counsel in Ropes & Gray's litigation and enforcement practice group, "which is unfortunate, because while there's certain things in the executive order that companies should certainly be mindful of, the underlying law has not changed."

The chaos and confusion is part of the point. The letter of the law isn't any different — it's always been illegal for companies to implement quotas or require a certain proportion of their workforce to be a specific race or gender. The law's interpretation and enforcement, however, have clearly undergone a reversal. Federal contractors run the risk of the Department of Justice going after them to assert that their DEI policies violated the False Claims Act, which prohibits contractors from defrauding the federal government. Major companies could be accused by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of violating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. The law was meant to prevent businesses from declining to hire someone because they're part of a minority group; now it's being used against businesses by people who say they're being overlooked because they're in the majority.

Jenny Yang, who served as an EEOC chair and commissioner from 2013 to 2018 and now heads the Urban Institute's Workplace Equity Initiative, said companies facing claims that they discriminated or used ill-defined "illegal DEI" practices may very well have a good case in court and win. But going to court costs money, and any battle is likely to draw attention, so they may be inclined to give up before there's even a fight.

"A lot of this really does not have the law behind it, and it's not likely to survive a motion to dismiss," she said. "But companies don't want to spend the money even defending against the lawsuit, and they don't want the reputational harm, or they don't want their board to get upset."

Employers may proactively examine programs they think could be subject to legal scrutiny, such as scholarships or fellowships aimed at underrepresented communities.

"It may not actually make it to a legal decision, but they decide, well, we'll settle this by opening up that program to everyone and not just groups," Rodney said. "Those haven't been ruled unlawful, but companies are either deciding we don't want a bad decision on the books or we don't want to use resources to fight this, so we'll just change the terms of the program."

It isn't just the federal government that companies have to worry about — conservative state authorities, legal groups, and individuals with big platforms are also freaking them out. In mid-2024, Missouri's attorney general sued IBM, alleging that it was using unlawful racial and gender quotas in employment. The Trump-aligned group America First Legal has filed several complaints, including against Southwest Airlines and American Airlines, over their DEI practices. Texas' attorney general, Ken Paxton, has told financial institutions such as BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup to watch it on DEI or face enforcement actions. A police pension fund in Florida is suing Target, saying it wasn't made aware of the risks of the retailer's DEI initiatives and potential backlash.

"In terms of what's the actual legal risk, I think we're seeing it now morph into Title VII discrimination claims from individual employees, activism by Republican state attorneys general," Baker said. "Now we're waiting to see exactly what comes out of the president's executive order."

Just because companies quietly disappear mentions of their DEI policies doesn't mean the work can't continue. They can practice without preaching, and many will. If one is to believe companies meant it when they said they cared about fostering diverse workplaces, then presumably none of that went away overnight. The issue is that, cynically, it's sometimes hard to believe these companies were that dedicated to the idea in the first place.

"Many initiatives weren't always measurable," Jones said. "There were a lot of public commitments without really thinking through how they were measured and implemented."

They're governed by social media. They're governed by who was last yelling at them.

Corporate values often seem like a PR stunt — X supports the troops, Y wants to end racism — based on where companies calculate the "right" answer is at any given moment. What's "right" often means "whatever will generate the most cash for shareholders" or, increasingly, "what will keep us out of trouble."

"They're governed by social media," Taylor said. "They're governed by who was last yelling at them."

A few years ago, companies were worried about the progressive backlash. Now they're worried about the conservative one. To some extent, companies ended up in this spot by talking a big game and launching programs without thinking through what they were actually trying to accomplish.

"They're making decisions out of fear, likely, but they know no matter what they do, there's going to be a percentage of the population that is upset with that decision," said Naomi Wheeless, the chief customer officer at Nextech Systems and a board member at Eventbrite. "So moving silently or slowly is the strategy that a lot of them are choosing."

The strategy is not a foolproof one. Many activists and government officials are out for blood, and they're seeking to make some high-profile examples of big-name companies in order to put some anxiety in everyone else. Hiding doesn't mean you won't be found. What's more, the political winds can change, and if they do, companies may be faced with explaining their choices to a new set of constituents. Maybe next time they'll think about what they actually want to accomplish, business-wise, instead of just paying lip service to whoever's maddest at them on Twitter.

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.