Large US companies scale back or abandon diversity pledges
Some of America’s largest companies, from Walmart to MetaPlatform, have scaled back their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, known as DEI.
How diverse are American businesses?For decades, it was the job of the federal government to track them.
Every year, major companies submit to the federal government a breakdown of their employees by race and gender in a format commonly known as an EEO-1 report. Since the 1960s, this treasure trove of demographic data has helped identify patterns of discrimination in the workplace and support civil rights investigations.
It doesn’t last that long. The Trump administration has signaled it intends to put a stop to this as part of its diversity, equity and inclusion reforms.
The battle over corporate diversity has significantly escalated, with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission last week informing the White House of its plans to eliminate reporting requirements not only for companies but also for unions, state and local governments, apprenticeship programs and schools.
In recent years, EEO-1 data has given Americans a better sense of how fair the playing field is in their workplaces, but critics warn that cutting off this flow of information will make it harder for companies and regulators to keep track of it. The Trump White House insists this is just the latest in a series of steps needed to roll back Biden-era policies that unfairly promoted advantaged groups over others.
Rep. Lauren Underwood, D-Ill., attempted to amend the spending bill to require the EEOC to fund the collection of employee demographic information, but the effort was rejected without Republican support.
Information tracking the state of diversity in America’s workplaces will not completely disappear. States such as California and Illinois still require employers to submit workforce demographic reports. If the federal government stops collecting EEO-1 data, more states may enact similar reporting requirements. But legal officials say there’s little else standing in the way of the EEOC.
“After 60 years, EEO-1 reporting will likely end within the next few years,” Littler Law Firm said in a blog post.
“One of the most significant civil rights reversals.”
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin illegal and established the EEOC to enforce these new laws. But the new federal agency lacked specific data to identify patterns of job discrimination and segregation based on race, ethnicity, and gender. So the EEOC used its authority under the Civil Rights Act to require businesses with 100 or more employees and federal contractors with 50 or more employees to fill out standardized reports with specific demographic data.
The public had little access to such reporting until the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, when companies began voluntarily releasing more information in the face of growing pressure from investors and customers and inquiries from media outlets like USA TODAY.
Three-quarters of S&P 500 companies have disclosed EEO-1 data for 2022 and 2023, according to Josh Roemer, founder of PeopleReturn, which provides data and research on employee trends for publicly traded companies.
However, when President Donald Trump took office for a second term, the DEI backlash accelerated and companies withdrew. In 2024, the most recent year for which EEO-1 data is available, that number dropped to about 57%, Lamar said.
The widely anticipated announcement that the EEOC would cease data collection drew immediate condemnation from the Joint Center for Political and Economic Research. The research organization, which focuses on issues affecting Black Americans, said the loss of the data could be “one of the most significant civil rights reversals of our time.”
“For generations, America’s civil rights framework has operated on the simple premise that inequality can be measured: disparities in mortgage lending, redlining, employment discrimination, and unequal access to capital. None of these were exposed because institutions voluntarily admitted wrongdoing. They were exposed because data was collected, analyzed, and tested in court,” the magazine writes. “Data does not predetermine outcomes. Data does not guarantee that a discrimination claim will be successful. Data merely makes it visible to society. And increasingly, that visibility itself appears to be under attack.”
Advocates say enforcement agencies like the EEOC rely on EEO-1 data to know where to focus their limited resources. Employers use it to identify major gaps and barriers to equal opportunity in the workforce.
“Without this data, the EEOC is without the most basic tools it needs to accomplish its mission,” said Lily Zheng, an expert on equity, access, inclusion, and representation strategies and author of Reconstructing DEI.
Former EEOC Commissioner Chai Feldblum argued that the lack of EEO-1 data weakens the federal government’s ability to enforce anti-discrimination laws.
The EEOC did not respond to requests for comment.
“The EEOC’s data collection is critical to understanding what is working and what is not working in both employer and regulator efforts,” Donald Tomaskovich-Devey, a sociology professor who runs the Employment Equity Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told USA TODAY. “Without these data, employers and the EEOC will be acting blindly.”
Why DEI critics want to throw away EEO-1 data
Repealing EEO-1 data collection has been on the Republican wish list for decades. The Heritage Foundation has made this a priority in Project 2025, a comprehensive blueprint developed in anticipation of Trump’s return to power.
Jonathan Berry, a veteran of the first Trump administration and lead author of a chapter on the Department of Labor and related agencies, told USA TODAY in 2024 that the EEO-1 report is a “reductive document” that requires employers to classify employees into racial categories even when there is no suspicion of discrimination, and encourages employers and the government alike to evaluate employees in racial terms.
“The goal here is to move towards colorblindness and recognize that we need laws and policies that treat people as full human beings who cannot be reduced to categories, especially when it comes to race,” Berry, who is now an attorney with the Department of Labor, said at the time.
A central focus of President Trump’s campaign and second term in office has been the elimination of DEI programs that focus on race and gender at the expense of individual achievement.
His view is that “illegal” and “woke” DEI policies are harming white Americans, especially white men, even though men, especially white men, dominate corporate America.
Republican EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas has emerged as one of the most aggressive regulators in implementing President Trump’s DEI rollbacks.
Under the Lucas administration, the EEOC upended decades of civil rights policy that once focused on the rights of women and people of color to align with the president’s agenda, dismissing lawsuits on behalf of transgender employees while soliciting complaints from white men.
She warned employers that the Trump administration will not tolerate “discrimination against any particular race or group.”
Her agency’s recent priorities include investigating Nike’s diversity policies for allegedly discriminating against white employees and suing a Coca-Cola Co. distributor for allegedly excluding male employees from a women’s retreat.
“Your job as a business executive is not to solve the world’s ills,” she said in a recent podcast with the advocacy group America First Legal. “The way to serve our country is to actually create the goods and services that need to be done, and we should try to find the best people to do that, and it should be relevant to the goods and services that we’re providing, not what they look like or who they are. Those things are irrelevant, corrosive, contrary to the founding of our country, and downright illegal.”
Some legal experts have questioned why the Trump administration has stopped tracking workforce demographics.
Historically, white workers account for a small percentage of bias complaints brought to the EEOC. Despite making up about two-thirds of the U.S. workforce, white workers account for about 10% of all racial discrimination claims, according to data obtained by USA TODAY from the EEOC in 2023. According to a study by the University of Massachusetts Employment Equity Center, from 2012 to 2016, about 9% of racial discrimination claims were filed by white men.
“If DEI discrimination against white men is rampant, wouldn’t the EEOC want this data?” asked Josh Roffman of Roffman Horwitz on LinkedIn.
“This is what poker players call a tell,” Roffman says. “The data will not support their narrative or political talking points. It will continue to show that women, black and Hispanic employees are ‘underemployed’ compared to their colleagues.”
