President Trump campaigned on ridding America of the DEI agenda, and major companies are following suit.
Facing government pressure, top corporations are walking back Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies that have divided America, the Washington Times reported.
During the Biden era, DEI became a whole-of-government effort as the White House set explicit racial targets and shoveled public money toward the government's favored groups, while shutting out whites and other supposedly dominant demographics. Trump's approach has been just as sweeping, but in the other direction.
Trump has threatened to cut off government funds to institutions that practice DEI, and he has clarified that such policies violate civil rights law, creating a starkly new legal climate for corporations and universities to navigate.
Many companies in the private sector are walking a tightrope between placating the government and keeping woke activists at bay. Some major chains, such as Costco, have publicly resisted Trump's pressure, but others have tried to play it both ways, adopting new language to dodge scrutiny.
Major League Baseball deleted a "diversity" reference from its website, but the corporation says its "values on diversity remain unchanged.”
In February, Pepsi said it was axing its chief DEI officer and ending "workforce representation" goals, but the extent of the rollback has been questioned.
“If you check their website it still has DEI [crap] all over it… they’re just pushing it below the surface,” said Paul Chesser, director of the Corporate Integrity Project for the National Legal and Policy Center, told Fox Business.
Like many big names, McDonald's has taken an equivocal approach. Facing a boycott over its DEI rollback, the fast-food giant issued a boilerplate response touting "inclusion."
"As a brand that serves millions of people every day, McDonald's opens our doors to everyone, and our commitment to inclusion remains steadfast," the company said.
The big question is, are corporations like McDonald's really abandoning DEI, or just pretending? While many companies are still woke using woke lingo, the real changes are happening privately, said Dan Lennington, managing vice president and deputy counsel at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.
“A lot of this is happening behind the scenes,” he said. “Corporations, education institutions, hospitals, health care institutions are just sort of either caving completely, fighting or they’re trying to play it cutesy by changing the language in their DEI webpages, which is doomed to fail eventually.”
Trump has also used regulatory power to browbeat telecommunications companies like Verizon and AT&T, which have agreed to curtail DEI to get approvals for merger deals from Trump's FCC.
The administration's war on DEI is also shaking up higher education. University of Virginia's president resigned in June following months of pressure from the Justice Department, which finally threatened to cut off funding to the public university unless its DEI-friendly president stepped aside.
