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A major shift is underway in the way large companies talk about and fund Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs.
President Donald Trump began the transition when he signed an executive order last month eliminating DEI policies and staff at the federal government and extending the anti-DEI policy to federal contractors.
Private companies, some of which had already begun the transition before Trump took office, remarkably began backing off their DEI policies, even if only symbolically with little internal change.
Costco resisted, pushing back on the Trump administration, but other major brands like Amazon Wal-Mart, Target, and Meta announced a pullback from DEI. Media reports indicated DEI discussions on earnings calls has plummeted.
Others, such as Wisconsin-based financial services company Fiserv, have not yet made a change, at least not publicly.
A murky legal future awaits companies willing to take the risk to stick with DEI policies, particularly in hiring.
Fiserv receives hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts.
According to Fiserv’s website’s Diversity & Inclusion page, the company is “committed to promoting diversity and inclusion (D&I) across all levels of the organization, in our communities and throughout our industry."
Fiserv says that it “partner[s] with people and organizations around the world to advance our D&I efforts and create opportunities for our employees, entrepreneurs around the world and the next generation of innovators.”
The company's diversity and inclusion page includes a careers section that discusses “engaging diverse talent” and events to connect with “diverse candidates.”
Critics of DEI initiatives and policies say they discriminate against white men and Asians and lead to hiring and promotion decisions based on factors such as race and sexual orientation rather than merit.
In its 2023 Corporate Social Responsibility Report, the company boasted that "60% of director nominees for the 2024 annual meeting reflect gender or racial/ethnic diversity."
According to an April 2024 report from Payments Dive, Fiserv was “buoyed by sales to government entities” in Q1 of 2024 and reported $500 million in revenue from those contracts. The U.S. Coast Guard contracted with Fiserv in 2024 to help with payroll, according to HigherGov, among other government contracts.
Fiserv did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
A watershed moment against DEI came when during the Biden administration, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against longstanding affirmative action policies at American universities, one key example of white and Asian Americans being discriminated against.
Trump’s election has only solidified the new legal framework for what is permissible when considering race and gender in hiring, promotion, and workplace etiquette.
From Trump’s order:
In the private sector, many corporations and universities use DEI as an excuse for biased and unlawful employment practices and illegal admissions preferences, ignoring the fact that DEI’s foundational rhetoric and ideas foster intergroup hostility and authoritarianism.
Billions of dollars are spent annually on DEI, but rather than reducing bias and promoting inclusion, DEI creates and then amplifies prejudicial hostility and exacerbates interpersonal conflict.
DEI has become increasingly controversial as activists use the moniker to advance every liberal policy on race and gender, often at taxpayer expense. In the federal government, DEI had become widespread and infiltrated into every part of governance, from racial quotas for promotions at the Pentagon to driving healthcare research at the National Institutes of Health.
At private companies, DEI policies guided investment decisions via ESG (Environmental, Social Governance) as well as personnel decisions with racial quotas for company board rooms. Those ideas are out of favor with the Trump administration.
Some of the companies resisting the shift from DEI could face legal action.
A coalition of state attorneys general sent a letter to Costco alleging it is violating the law, as The Center Square previously reported.
“Although Costco’s motto is 'do the right thing,' it appears that the company is doing the wrong thing – clinging to DEI policies that courts and businesses have rejected as illegal,” the letter said.
This week, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a lawsuit against Starbucks for similar policies.
"By making employment decisions based on characteristics that have nothing to do with one’s ability to work well, Starbucks, for example, hires people by thumbing the scale based on at least one of Starbucks’ preferred immutable characteristics rather than an evaluation of an applicant’s merit and qualifications,” the lawsuit said. “Making hiring decision on non-merit considerations will skew the hiring pool towards people who are less qualified to perform their work, increasing costs for Missouri’s consumers."
A 2022 Starbucks document touts a DEI goal: “By 2025, our goal is to achieve BIPOC representation of at least 30% at all corporate levels and at least 40% at all retail and manufacturing roles.”
Bailey called the Starbucks policies discriminatory and illegal.
"With Starbucks’ discriminatory patterns, practices, and policies, Missouri’s consumers are required to pay higher prices and wait longer for goods and services that could be provided for less had Starbucks employed the most qualified workers, regardless of their race, color, sex, or national origin,” Bailey said. “As Attorney General, I have a moral and legal obligation to protect Missourians from a company that actively engages in systemic race and sex discrimination. Racism has no place in Missouri. We’re filing suit to halt this blatant violation of the Missouri Human Rights Act in its tracks."
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The White House over the weekend touted its progress on the southern border as President Donald Trump completed his fourth week back in office.
"Encounters of illegal immigrants at our southern border are plummeting and migrants are starting to realize it’s fruitless to attempt to illegally cross our border," the White House said Saturday in a statement.
Upon taking office, Trump issued a series of executive orders ending Biden administration policies that allowed asylum seekers to flood into America. On his second day in office, the president sent 1,500 active-duty service members and additional air and intelligence assets.
“Border numbers are down over 90% in three weeks,” Tom Homan, the pick by Trump called border czar, said during an interview on Fox News. “When you got 90% less people coming across the border, how many women aren’t being raped by the cartels? How many children aren’t drowning? How many women and children aren’t being sex trafficked in this country? President Trump is a gamechanger.”
Multiple media reports indicate many people headed from other countries to the United States have since changed their mind and headed back home.
The White House pointed out a Wednesday story from The Washington Times showing officials in Costa Rica and Panama are meeting to discuss how to handle the large number of people who had been waiting in Mexico to enter the United States but have since given up and are returning to South America.
The administration also linked a Thursday story from Telemundo saying "migrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Columbia and Venezuela are heading back home" instead of continuing to America. And the White House linked a Thursday story from El Cronista saying the Mexican government provided a $9.3 million contract for 140 shelters to help with people "returning to Mexico."
Policies during the Biden administration allowed 12 million people to enter the country, most given dates to appear with immigration officials much later. The volume pushed many of those appointments beyond a year and even 18 months. A surge in fentanyl accompanied the timing.
Trump, the second term Republican, has reversed the trend. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and specifically ICE Enforcement and Removal regional offices, across the country have helped move many people illegally in the country back to their native homelands.
Trump also threatened tariffs against Mexico if it did not help fix the problem. To temporarily avert the tariffs, Mexico’s president agreed to deploy thousands more troops to the southern border.
In another reversal, the Biden administration worked – including litigation – to block Texas from installing border security measures like barbed wire and buoys in the river to keep people from swimming across.
In a social media post Sunday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott wrote, “Texas installed more buoys into the Rio Grande the SAME day President Trump returned to office. The Biden administration tried – and FAILED – to keep Texas from using this effective border security tactic.
“Now, we have a President who is partnering with Texas to deny illegal entry.”
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President Donald Trump said late Sunday that he has ordered the U.S. Treasury Department to stop producing pennies.
Pennies famously cost more than a penny to produce, putting them in the crosshairs of Trump and DOGE’s government efficiency push.
"For far too long the United States has minted pennies which literally cost us more than 2 cents," Trump wrote on TruthSocial, his social media site. "This is so wasteful! I have instructed my Secretary of the US Treasury to stop producing new pennies.
Let's rip the waste out of our great nations budget, even if it's a penny at a time," Trump added.
DOGE posted on X last month critical of the penny’s cost, hinting at its fate.
"The penny costs over 3 cents to make and cost US taxpayers over $179 million in FY2023," DOGE wrote on X. "The Mint produced over 4.5 billion pennies in FY2023, around 40% of the 11.4 billion coins for circulation produced. Penny (or 3 cents!) for your thoughts."
According to the U.S. Mint’s latest report, the cost of all coins is on the rise. From the Mint’s 2024 report:
"FY 2024 unit costs increased for all circulating denominations compared to last year. The penny’s unit cost increased 20.2 percent, the nickel’s unit cost increased by 19.4 percent, the dime’s unit cost increased by 8.7 percent, and the quarter-dollar’s unit cost increased by 26.2 percent. The unit cost for pennies (3.69 cents) and nickels (13.78 cents) remained above face value for the 19th consecutive fiscal year."
(The Center Square) – A group of Wisconsin lawmakers have filed legislation to protect sturgeon spearing in the state.
The bill would exempt Wisconsin from any listing of lake sturgeon under the federal Endangered Species Act.
The group, including Republican Congressmen Glenn Grothman and Mike Gallagher filed what they called the Sturgeon Protected and Exempt from Absurd Regulations Act.
Reps. Tony Wied, Grothman and Tom Tiffany introduced the legislation on Friday.
The bill is in response to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service conducting a status assessment of lake sturgeon after the group was sued by an animal rights group in 2018 attempting to have lake sturgeon listed as threatened.
“Sturgeon-spearing is crucial to maintaining Wisconsin’s lake sturgeon population which is why we must take proactive steps to ensure that we are exempt from any action to list the lake sturgeon under the Endangered Species Act,” Tiffany said about the bill. “Wisconsin is a global leader in sturgeon management, and the SPEAR Act will protect this unique and long-standing tradition for years to come.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it will not add the lake sturgeon to the endangered species list last year.
A bipartisan group of Wisconsin lawmakers sent a letter to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in December 2023 pointing out the impact a listing could have on Wisconsin and how the state has worked to manage the lake sturgeon population.
The letter was signed by Gallagher and Grothman along with Sens. Ron Johnson and Tammy Baldwin and U.S. Reps. Bryan Steil, Tiffany, Scott Fitzgerald and Derrick Van Orden.
“Wisconsin does not list lake sturgeon endangered nor threatened in state waters, and has in place a sturgeon program considered a world model for effective management and recovery, and as such should be exempt from any Federal ESA listing of the species”, said Dr. Ron Bruch, former Chief of Fisheries and Leader of the statewide Sturgeon Management Team for the WI Department of Natural Resources.
(The Center Square) – A pair of Wisconsin legislators are pushing for more transparency in the school referendum process in the state.
The proposal comes after 169 out of 241 school ballot referenda in 2024 elections were approved by voters at a cost of $4.4 billion to taxpayers.
Sen. Rachael Cabral-Guevara, R-Appleton, and Rep. Scott Allen, R-Waukesha, proposed bills that would require local governments and school boards to include information on the ballot about how much the difference in taxes would for a median-valued home in the community resulting from the referendum.
“Referendums are opportunities for voters to make important decisions about how their tax dollars should be spent,” Allen said. “Good decision making requires transparency in the information provided to voters.”
A second bill would protect school districts from losing state funding when other districts go to referendum.
“It was a shock to many to learn that the massive school referendum passed in Milwaukee would take away vital state funding from over 300 other school districts,” Allen said. “It’s only fair that large referendums in one district should not negatively affect other school districts.”
A Legislative Fiscal Bureau report last year analyzed by Badger Institute showed that a $252 million Milwaukee referendum would cost Madison, Waukesha and Racine $2 million a year in state funding while Appleton and West Bend would lose more than $1 million each year.
The impact is due to tax base equalization, which means that “a school district's property tax rate does not depend on the property tax base of the district, but rather on the level of expenditures.”
The bill states that any school referendum of over $50 million dollars should be paid for by the district that votes for the referendum instead of taking away money from shared school funding.
Late last month, President Donald Trump signed an executive order restricting “transgender” procedures on youth, including puberty blockers and surgeries such as mastectomies and penile reconstruction. In response, many medical providers including some of the top in the nation for performing them have announced they will comply with the EO.
The EO states that “it is the policy of the United States that it will not fund, sponsor, promote, assist, or support the so-called 'transition' of a child from one sex to another, and it will rigorously enforce all laws that prohibit or limit these destructive and life-altering procedures.”
Last year, nonprofit Do No Harm unveiled a database reporting that between 2019-2023, there were 13,000 gender reassignment procedures performed throughout the nation on minors; those procedures included both surgeries and prescriptions. Among the top states in the nation for those procedures was Ohio, which has since enacted legislation banning such procedures.
The Center Square reached out to more than two dozen medical providers throughout the country based on data provided by Do No Harm regarding their total billing, prescriptions, and surgeries performed, asking them how they planned to respond to Trump’s EO.
Among those to announce they were suspending all procedures was Seattle-based UW Medicine, which stated in an email that it was “committed to supporting the clinical care needs and well-being of all our patients, as well as complying with state and federal law. We are currently in compliance and are also continuing to provide our full spectrum of services.”
Seattle Children’s Hospital ranked among the top in the nation for puberty blocker prescriptions; though it did not respond to request for comment, there have been reports that it has suspended those services, and its webpage for gender affirmation surgery has since been removed.
MultiCare Mary Bridge Children's Hospital located in Tacoma wrote in an email that while it does not perform gender-affirming surgeries, “we are aware of the executive order that calls for an end to gender-affirming medical treatments for children and adolescents under 19 and are continuing to monitor the situation. Executive orders are directives to federal agencies on how they will operate. Much of what’s been issued has not yet become rules for us to evaluate.”
D.C.-based Children’s National Hospital released a statement that it will no longer prescribe puberty blockers or hormone therapy, noting that prior to the EO it did not perform gender affirming surgeries.
Coolie Dickinson Hospital based out of Massachusetts wrote in an email that it “is reviewing to see what, if any, actual impact the executive orders might have and would follow up, if there is any impact. In the meantime, the care we provide to our community continues as normal at this time.”
University of Michigan Health stated that its “teams are assessing the potential impact of this executive order on our healthcare services and the communities we serve. Our priority remains delivering high-quality, accessible care to our patients while ensuring compliance with the law."
Another medical provider to cease gender transition services for anyone under 19 is VCU Health and Children’s Hospital of Richmond, Virginia, which wrote in a statement that it was “in response to an Executive Order issued by the White House on January 28, 2025, and related state guidance received by VCU on January 30, 2025. Our doors remain open to all patients and their families for screening, counseling, mental health care and all other health care needs.”
UCSF’s Gender Affirming Care in San Francisco has also ended services for patients under 19, a policy also adopted by Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.
Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York simply wrote in an email that “we will keep you posted once we have an update on this matter.”
Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia both said they were reviewing their services.
Several hospitals and hospital systems who performed these procedures on minors did not respond to The Center Square's requests for comment on the executive order. The Center Square will continue to seek clarification on whether they plan to comply with the order.
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