President Donald Trump’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion is ripping through the private sector as fear rises over losing federal contracts or facing investigations.

Just weeks into his first term, a blitz of executive orders from the president is reshaping diversity policies across industries.

Last week, Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense contractor, closed down its DEI department and ended all programs, citing a Trump executive order. Goldman Sachs said this week it retired a formal policy of refusing initial public offering business from companies with all white, male boards, saying it “served its purpose.”

Walt Disney told employees it was adjusting its DEI programs to focus more closely on business outcomes. It also added “talent strategy” – how well leaders advance Disney’s values – to the criteria evaluating executive compensation, replacing the objective of increasing diversity.

What's more, corporations are increasingly finding themselves in the crosshairs of Republican officials.

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The Federal Communications Commission, the agency that regulates the telecommunications and media industries, warned Comcast this week that it will begin a probe into its DEI practices.

Comcast said it would cooperate with the FCC. "For decades, our company has been built on a foundation of integrity and respect for all of our employees and customers,” the company said in a statement.

At the state level, Oklahoma plans to use its financial might as an investor to target six companies, including Amazon and Google owner Alphabet, in shareholder proposals that call for “political neutrality” in the companies’ policies.

Trump’s pledge to establish a “colorblind and merit-based” society has escalated “what was already an extremely challenging environment for DEI,” said David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at the NYU School of Law. “We are only getting a first taste of what’s coming now.”

The push to eliminate diversity initiatives began during Trump’s first term and grew while he was out of office. 

Emboldened by a 2023 Supreme Court ruling banning affirmative action in college admissions, conservative foundations, think tanks and political operatives have pushed to end diversity initiatives that they claim focus on race and gender at the expense of individual merit. 

A priority of right-wing foundations, think tanks and political operatives in courts and statehouses across the country, the anti-DEI campaign is gaining ground now that it is at the center of the president’s economic and cultural agenda.

Trump wants to dismantle DEI.These advocates are pushing back.

Trump DEI orders alarm business world

In his first days in office, Trump ordered an end to DEI in federal agencies and rescinded a six-decade-old executive order that required government contractors to root out discrimination on the basis of race and sex.

The president also directed federal agencies to identify the “most egregious and discriminatory DEI practitioners” among private-sector organizations and recommend up to nine targets for investigation. Hours after taking office, Attorney General Pam Bondi also pledged to prosecute offenders.

The moves set off panic in the business world as companies assessed their exposure and what diversity policies they should change or abandon. A growing number of corporations, including Google and Facebook owner Meta, responded by rolling back their diversity programs.

Jon Solorzano, a partner with the Vinson & Elkins law firm, said he expects lawsuits and investigations targeting DEI initiatives will rise, heightening the risks especially for high-profile companies.

“It is clear that many companies are attuned to the new landscape and have determined that the benefits of maintaining visible DEI commitments may not outweigh the risks," Solorzano said.

Not all companies are retreating from their DEI commitments. Costco leadership, for example, urged shareholders to reject an investor proposal from a conservative think tank to conduct an investigation into the business risks of its diversity initiatives. Shareholders voted it down.

Longtime DEI defender and JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told employees Wednesday that he planned to eliminate some diversity initiatives because they were costly and ineffective, not because of pressure from the Trump administration.

“I’m just gonna cancel them,” Dimon said, according to a recording of the town hall heard by Bloomberg News. “I don’t like wasted money in bureaucracy.”

"Some companies are likely taking a measured approach in weighing the risks of antagonizing opponents of DEI or continuing DEI initiatives that are potentially legally suspect with the expectations and demands of key constituencies like their customers or employees – in the hopes of balancing these competing considerations,” Solorzano said.

The daughters of one of Target's co-founders said they're "shocked and dismayed" at the company's recent DEI rollback.

In letters to the editor published Thursday in the Financial Times and the Los Angeles Times, Anne and Lucy Dayton said they were alarmed by how quickly the business community caved to "the current administration's retaliatory threats."

"It is not 'illegal' for a company to create a business model based on what it believes to be important ethical and business standards," they wrote. 

Their father, Bruce Dayton, one of five brothers who grew the Minneapolis department store into a national retailer, died in 2015. The Dayton sisters said that “Target and others are undermining the very principles that have made their companies a success.”

Starbucks DEI lawsuit may be first of many

This week, Missouri’s attorney general sued Starbucks, accusing the Seattle coffee giant of engaging in a pattern of illegal discrimination since 2020 when the George Floyd killing ushered in a wave of sweeping diversity initiatives to make corporate America look more like the rest of America. 

The federal lawsuit, filed Tuesday by Andrew Bailey, a Republican, is the latest in a series targeting the DEI practices of the nation’s largest companies.

From baristas to the boardroom, the lawsuit alleges that Starbucks’ diversity policies has made its workforce “more female and less white” through “systemic racial, sexual and sexual orientation discrimination” from linking compensation to hiring quotas and offering training and mentorship programs and other advancement opportunities exclusively to women and people of color.

“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,” the lawsuit alleged, without citing evidence. 

“We're taking action to BLOCK these unlawful policies once and for all,” Bailey said on the X social media platform. 

Starbucks denied the allegations. 

“We disagree with the attorney general,” the company said in a statement to USA TODAY. “Our programs and benefits are open to everyone and lawful. Our hiring practices are inclusive, fair and competitive and designed to ensure the strongest candidate for every job every time.”

Federal demographic disclosures released by the company show that the company has become more female and less white since 2020, but the shift is in line with workforce trends in the food service industry that has long been predominantly female and non-white, a USA TODAY analysis showed.

From 2020 to 2023, the percentage of women in the Starbucks workforce grew by 4 percentage points to 72%. The white workforce shrunk by 5 percentage points to 48% even as the company increased the number of white workers it employed by more than 110,000 people.

At the same time, Starbucks’ executive ranks shrunk from 54 people to 36. Even with those changes, executives were 67% white, in line with the U.S. workforce which is 63% white. Men held a greater percentage of those top jobs, increasing slightly to 52%.

Contributing: Jayme Fraser

(This story has been updated to add new information.)