More than half of the Fortune 100 has changed public-facing DEI language since the 2024 election

DEI has faced immense pressure since the 2024 election cycle, largely from the second iteration of the Trump administration. Executive orders and directives from the Departments of Labor and Justice and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) aimed to deter employers from pursuing diversity practices, HR Brew previously reported.

The political fear campaign appears to have at least partially worked: Roughly 63 Fortune 100 companies have rebranded or eliminated the DEI messaging that appeared on their websites since the summer of 2024, an HR Brew analysis found. Of those companies, 54 made their changes following the 2024 presidential election.

“The Trump administration did a very good job of putting out a narrative of fear and of misinformation that became very hard to combat, quite frankly, as practitioners,” according to Evelyn Carter, a DEI expert and author of the forthcoming book, Was That Racist? In some cases, she said, businesses seem to have continued the work internally, without publicizing it externally.

“It [the data] implies to us that these rollbacks weren’t ideological. They’re fear-based. They’re shortcut-based,” Jarvis Sam, founder and CEO of the Rainbow Disruption, a DEI consultancy, told HR Brew. “What I listen for is, show me the system that makes merit real, and a lot of what they underpin it with is some of the exact same approaches that are the foundation of how we define and talk about DEI.”

Trends. When some companies started backtracking on DEI in the summer of 2024, many made announcements through internal memos or X posts following online pressure from DEI opponents. Tractor Supply and John Deere, for example, were among the first companies to roll back DEI initiatives; both shared detailed statements.

This trend seemingly accelerated as anti-DEI rhetoric from conservative activists increased, and then again in the wake of the 2024 presidential election. Companies—including Deloitte, Target, and Meta—issued statements, with many citing the changing conversation surrounding DEI as the reason for walking back their efforts. Others, including Johnson & Johnson and IBM, appeared to erase from their websites their previous commitments to DEI, without public acknowledgement.

Some of the roughly 60 Fortune 100 companies that HR Brew found had rebranded or eliminated DEI messaging appeared to do so without any fanfare. These quiet modifications were especially true of companies in and around the healthcare industry including CVS, Walgreens, and MetLife. 

CVS, for instance, appears to have rebranded its DEI programming to “Inclusion and Belonging” on its website in the summer of 2025. While the language shifted, the company’s overall messaging appears largely unchanged. In response to a request for comment, CVS pointed HR Brew to its latest 10-K filing, which states its goal to “attract the most talented and qualified workforce in health care” and its commitment to a respectful culture, representative of the “diverse communities” it serves.

“DEI didn’t disappear in 2025,” Sam told HR Brew. “In a lot of ways, it went underground. A lot of companies didn’t end their approach to DEI. They ended the word and kept the work, or kept the word and ended the work in some capacity. So we saw that duality play out.”

Walgreens deleted its DEI landing page and related information in January 2025, just months before its acquisition by private equity firm Sycamore Partners in August 2025.

“We are focused on providing convenient, accessible care by meeting people where they are in communities across the country. This includes hiring, engaging, promoting and retaining team members from the communities we serve, who can offer the care our patients and customers deserve,” Rebekah Pajak, a spokesperson at Walgreens, told HR Brew in an emailed statement. “We lead with courtesy and respect, and are committed to fostering a safe workplace where every team member feels valued and supported.”

MetLife also seems to have quietly retreated from DEI over the summer of 2025, removing any public-facing reference to the company’s diversity council and 2030 aspirational goals. While MetLife did not comment on whether the programs still exist, it said in an emailed statement, “We have a longstanding commitment to a purpose-driven and inclusive culture, and we remain steadfast in making MetLife a great place to work for all.”

Other Fortune 100 companies, including American Express (which removed diversity language and its DEI page from its website) and HP (which rebranded to “inclusion”) did not respond to requests for comment.

Some companies, such as Cigna and Oracle, removed all mentions of the word “diversity,” something Carter found “deeply” concerning. “‘Diverse’ is not a bad word in any sense,” she said. “My fear is that by pulling back on not necessarily the words, but on the actions themselves that are the bedrock of good DEI work, we are going to recreate and reinforce the same inequities that we have been trying to fight for generations.”

HR and legal teams navigated how to keep government contracts while continuing DEI work amid the Trump administration’s campaign against the programs, according to Sam. “It created quite a whirlwind where, when these two are at odds, organizations picked the side of ending their approach to DEI.”

Looking ahead. Sam and Carter both stated concern over the damage that’s been done over the past year to equality and fairness progress.

Sam fears the retreat from DEI will have bigger impacts, and will cause more risk for companies, a sentiment other experts have echoed, HR Brew previously reported. “DEI systems have very clear approaches to control how we navigate risk relative to things like representation, employee development, discriminatory practices or policies related to pay or otherwise,” he said. “I understand why organizations are trying to fly at or below the proverbial radar by not using the term, however, there is risk that comes with that as well.”

“I am so sad by how few of those organizations have held up under the pressure,” Carter said. “We haven’t just pressed a pause button. We are dismantling progress, and you can’t just turn around and push the boulder back up the hill.”

Carter added that, no matter who is the next president, “I don’t think that we’re going to be able to get that [ground] back within a handful of years.”