The Senate Judiciary Committee on Civil Rights, led by Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt, held a hearing on July 24 to discuss the state and merits of DEI. The hearing largely focused on the racial component of DEI, and explored how the Trump administration is handling companies that continue DEI efforts under other names.
Focus on race. Schmitt began his opening statement by saying that DEI policies are meant to mainly hurt white, Christian men while others take over. Schmitt said that diversity officers and HR managers have set up a “victim hierarchy,” and that “DEI isn’t just illegal. It’s a fraudulent and cynical ideology from top to bottom built on layers of lies.”
Schmitt went on to say that people in favor of DEI programming are not concerned about equality. “Their entire mission is to elevate members of certain groups over members of other groups and remake America in their own image,” Schmitt said. “It’s about exclusion of the competent, the qualified, the meritorious when those people are members of the wrong race or sex.” Schmitt believes that DEI is about racial quotas (note: DEI programs are not focused on racial quotas, which are illegal).
The committee first interviewed Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Department of Justice, who said she is in charge of protecting “the civil rights of all Americans against illegal DEI initiatives.”
Dhillon said that the Civil Rights Division is currently overseeing multiple potential cases, including the local government hiring practices in Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Chicago, noting the federal government believes these entities are engaged in racial hiring.
Robert Stewart, state senator for Alabama’s 23rd district, disagrees with the way DEI has been portrayed by some. “DEI initiatives are not preferences or perks,” he told the committee. “They are attempts to rectify generations of exclusion and ensure equal access to opportunity. To eliminate these efforts under the guise of enforcing civil rights is to misinterpret history and undermine justice.”
Coming for rebrands. Throughout the hearing, some Republican committee members focused on organizations that rebrand their DEI programs. “Whatever the name is, in every instance, it amounts to the same thing: A new racial caste system sanctioned and enforced by the administrative state,” Schmitt said.
Dhillon told Schmitt that she is committed to ending DEI practices in all forms. “Either DEI will end on its own or we will kill it,” she said. “When I hear the slogan DEI, what I hear is discrimination, exclusion, and intolerance.”
Quick-to-read HR news & insights
From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.
She went on to say that the DOJ is relying on whistleblowers inside organizations to alert them when rebranding is happening, and that she speaks with the EEOC “almost daily” about ongoing investigations into corporations. “When those investigations are concluded without satisfactory resolution or termination of the DEI policies in question, these matters are often referred to the Civil Rights Division for further enforcement,” Dhillon said.
Most companies see diversity and inclusion efforts as a business imperative, according to recent research from Catalyst and the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at the NYU School of Law. Some advocates have warned against rebranding DEI too quickly, even as more employers rebrand or engage in “diversity hushing,” where companies continue doing DEI work quietly.
“The reality is, once we start to change our name, that’s the beginning of changing our mission,” former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said recently. “It’s the failure to hold a righteous position that gets us in the most trouble because it fractures us, and it creates an internal set of dynamics, an internal set of debates that allow them to distract us from where the real attack is coming from.”
“We’ve seen in some cases corporations, universities, [and] other institutions take on and actually abandon some of these exclusionary programs and policies,” said Gene Hamilton, a lawyer and cofounder of America First Legal, which has sued several large employers including IBM and American Airlines, over their DEI practices. “But in many other cases, they seem to be just deleting the language or changing the language and morphing to things trying to fly under the radar long enough to think that they’re going to evade federal enforcement, or they’re going to evade private liability.”
Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono asked Hamilton if any court has ruled that DEI efforts are unconstitutional, but Hamilton could not point to one. Hamilton claimed the Supreme Court ruled DEI as unconstitutional. Hirono pointed out, however, that was not what the court determined, and many legal experts agree with her.
“The constitution mandates equal protection of the laws for everyone. Full stop,” Hirono said. “It does not bar diversity, equity, and inclusion. Programming relating to diversity is not illegal just because Donald Trump says so.”