Good morning! REI gets a new CEO, Apple faces a gender discrimination lawsuit, and Trump's anti-DEI spree extends far beyond modern-era hiring rules. Have a terrific Thursday!
- Blast from the past. President Donald Trump's plan to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion work in the federal government at first may sound like he's targeting teams that have been built over the past decade or two, as DEI became more common among employers.
Instead, Trump's anti-DEI spree has stretched back much further—all the way to former President Lyndon Baines Johnson and the civil rights era. Among Trump's flurry of executive orders this week, he overrode Johnson's Executive Order 11246, which, per HuffPost, "forbade federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, sexual orientation or gender identity." The Labor Department's (surely soon-to-be-nuked) website describes Johnson's order as a "major safeguard" for workers employed by federal contractors, which gave the secretary of labor the authority to enforce these standards for the first time.
Johnson's executive order was issued about a year after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, part of that wave of reforms. In the press release announcing its reversal, however, the new White House says that DEI (with specific blame cast on the Biden administration) "revers[es] the progress made in the decades since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 toward a colorblind and competence-based workplace."
In his executive order, Trump takes pains to say his administration will continue to enforce federal civil rights law. "Longstanding federal civil-rights laws protect individual Americans from discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. These civil-rights protections serve as a bedrock supporting equality of opportunity for all Americans. As President, I have a solemn duty to ensure that these laws are enforced for the benefit of all Americans," the order reads. DEI, however, is a separate bogeyman—even when the order Trump is revoking predates the term itself.
Trump has issued so many DEI-related proclamations, it's hard to keep track. There's the fact sheet titled "President Donald J. Trump protects civil rights and merit-based opportunity by ending illegal DEI," the fact sheet titled "President Donald J. Trump ends DEI madness and restores excellence and safety within the Federal Aviation Administration," the presidential action "Reforming the federal hiring process and restoring merit to government service," and the presidential action "Ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing."
Trump's destruction of DEI efforts within the federal government is hardly surprising. By setting standards for federal contractors for the past half-century, however, the federal government has been able to influence the private sector. Trump's orders not only remove that lever but direct federal agencies to initiate "civil compliance investigations" of the private sector to "end... DEI discrimination."
Meanwhile, business leaders are at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, coming up with other names for their DEI programs, Reuters reports. For many execs, diversity in hiring will continue, if under another name—as Hello Alice cofounder Elizabeth Gore, whose company was targeted by an anti-affirmative action lawsuit, advised businesses to do at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in October.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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