Under President Donald Trump, the Department of Justice could stop corporations from implementing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that disadvantage white and Asian applicants.
As The Daily Wire has reported, companies across industries appear to have discriminated against white and Asian individuals through their DEI programs, which prioritize hiring and promoting black applicants and other “underrepresented racial minorities.” David Pivtorak, a lawyer who has active cases against American Express for alleged racial discrimination against white employees, told The Daily Wire that the Trump Justice Department will have a wide range of tools at its disposal to combat DEI discrimination.
“The DOJ has a panoply of remedies it can seek to address the discrimination that results from these DEI programs,” Pivtorak said.
The department’s Civil Rights Division, for instance, “can initiate investigations” to obtain “a wide variety of a company’s internal data and documents,” or file lawsuits to take “depositions of high-level executives and even the CEO or Board of Directors if they were directly involved in implementing these DEI programs.”
The Justice Department could also go further, issuing a “consent decree,” which would let the department “oversee a company’s operations for years to come.” Such a move — which “has an extreme coercive effect” — could push companies to abandon DEI programs outright, Pivtorak says.
“From a cost-benefit perspective, companies may decide that the hassle of maintaining DEI is just not worth it, especially since these are not profitable endeavors but are mostly there to keep a small contingent of vocal activists satisfied.”
Reporting in the lead-up to the presidential election indicated that Trump’s allies could apply laws from the Civil Rights era to cases of “anti-white racism,” in which DEI programs utilize racially discriminatory criteria. Stephen Miller, whose America First Legal filed a successful suit against a $29 billion pandemic relief program that was found to have discriminated against white male business owners, will be at the forefront of these efforts as Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy.
Should the Trump Justice Department decide to prosecute companies that engage in discriminatory practices, it would have no shortage of programs to investigate.
At Oracle, for example, whites and Asians were ineligible for two career advancement programs reserved for “African American/Black, American Indian – Alaska Native, Hispanic American” applicants.
IBM hosted two internship opportunities, including one that barred white and Asian applicants and another that barred male applicants — unless those men identified as women.
The company’s “internship for underrepresented minorities” said that “applicants must be underrepresented minorities” and listed the approved racial backgrounds of “African American, Hispanic, or Indigenous.” The “internship for undergraduate women” required that applicants be female, but caveated that “all students who present or identify as women and/or trans women,” were also eligible.
David Bernstein, a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, told The Daily Wire that the programs “clearly violate Title VII,” which “does not allow for race or sex-based preferences for employment except perhaps as part of bona fide affirmative action programs initiated to redress past discriminatory policies.”
Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey sued IBM over other acts of alleged discrimination against white and Asian job applicants.
Microsoft boasted in a report that it paid non-white employees slightly more than white employees, even when they had the same job titles. And Apple’s entrepreneur camp development program, where founders could receive “one-on-one code-level guidance from Apple engineers,” required companies to have personnel from certain demographic backgrounds in certain roles. Apple’s underrepresented founders program required companies to have “a black, Hispanic/Latinx, or Indigenous founder, cofounder, or CEO” as well as a “black, Hispanic/Latinx, Indigenous, or female developer.”
There’s also NASCAR’s diversity internship program, which Bernstein called “blatantly illegal” because it barred white people from applying. NASCAR amended its internship program and removed the racial requirements in the wake of The Daily Wire investigation.
Robert Kraft’s company, best known for owning the New England Patriots, appeared to engage in anti-white discrimination when it advertised a job posting that listed “BIPOC,” a term that means “black, indigenous, people of color,” as a job qualification.
“The goal of this program is to diversify the future of the sports and entertainment management industry by providing opportunity and access to BIPOC candidates connected to the New England community,” the job posting said.
Voya Financial was equally brazen when it barred white students from its Financial Services Diversity Scholars Program. Applicants for the now-defunct program were only eligible if they self-identified as “Black or African American; Hispanic or Latino; American Indian or Alaska Native American; Asian; Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander; or multi-racial.”
Voya Financial is just one entity among a long list of banking and financial institutions that implemented discriminatory DEI programs.
One Daily Wire investigation revealed that several of the most prominent banks in America advertised racially discriminatory DEI programs. A Morgan Stanley summer training program was limited to “historically underrepresented populations.” The eligibility criteria explained that the term referred to “women, Hispanic, Black, veteran, disabled, LGBTQ+, and first-generation college student populations.”
J.P. Morgan’s now discontinued “launching leaders undergraduate program” was only open to “Black, Hispanic and Native American sophomores and juniors from all majors who are interested in financial services and have a 3.5 GPA minimum,” while a Wells Fargo fellowship was limited to “underrepresented candidates,” including “female, Black/African American, Latinx/Hispanic, Asian, Native American/Alaskan Native and LGBTQIA+ students, as well as protected veterans and people with disabilities.”
U.S. Bank’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Strategy Manager Astrid Benedetto celebrated a career advancement program from McKinsey and Company that appeared to discriminate against white professionals, The Daily Wire also revealed. The consulting giant hosted race-specific professional development programs, respectively titled the “Black Leadership Academy,” the “Hispanic and Latino Leadership Academy,” and the “Asian Leadership Academy.”