President Trump signed an executive order eliminating federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs on January 20, 2025. One year later, the downstream effects are measurable across labor markets, federal employment, and corporate boardrooms. Social justice leader Rashad Robinson has been tracking those effects closely, and his assessment of what the rollback means for 2026 is more urgent than his analysis of what it did in 2025.
“Last year was the year of rollbacks,” Robinson wrote in his March 2026 newsletter. “This year is shaping up to be the year of advancing discrimination.”
Robinson is Founder and President of Rashad Robinson Advisors (RRA). His newsletter and a recent piece for NewsOne lay out a three-tier framework for communities and institutions confronting the rollback: make discrimination expensive, make it unpopular, make it unsustainable.
The Year-One Record
The first year of Trump’s executive order produced documented, measurable change. Nearly 300,000 Black women exited the labor force in the first six months of 2025. Black unemployment reached 8 percent, roughly double the white rate of 3.9 percent. The federal government cut more than 69,000 positions by mid-year, with many concentrated in equity-related work or disproportionately held by Black women.
Meta and Verizon eliminated their DEI programs. Goldman Sachs removed diversity considerations from its board membership criteria following an agreement with the National Legal and Policy Center, a right-wing anti-labor organization. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission dropped its use of disparate impact investigations, eliminating the legal tool most capable of catching discrimination built into neutral-seeming policies.
Research Robinson cites confirms what the removal of those guardrails produces: a 37 percent drop in women of color hiring and a 33 percent drop in men of color hiring among companies that cut DEI initiatives, with 57 percent of those companies reporting overall declines for historically excluded groups. The Paycheck Protection Program offered a preview during the COVID-19 pandemic. Banks directed relief funds predominantly to white-owned businesses when no equity requirements were attached. “When there is nothing in place to ensure fairness, the default is discrimination,” Robinson wrote in NewsOne. Removing DEI policy restores the conditions that made DEI policy necessary in the first place.
Making Discrimination Expensive
The consumer tier of Robinson’s framework operates on the premise that corporations respond to financial cost more reliably than to moral argument alone. The Feb. 28, 2025 Economic Blackout asked Americans to stop spending at major retailers that had abandoned equity commitments. The NAACP simultaneously released a Black Consumer Advisory, pointing to the community’s estimated $1.7 trillion in annual buying power as economic pressure. Costco, which held its DEI position after rejecting a right-wing shareholder proposal, drew consumers practicing what organizers called a “buy-cott.” Shareholders backed Costco’s board with 98 percent of votes.
Rashad and his team have built campaigns around this premise for years, cultivating relationships with corporate leadership and making the cost of retreat more visible than the political comfort of compliance. “Making change inside of big institutions is hard,” Robinson told Fast Company. The question is whether movements can shift the incentive structure rather than the moral argument alone.
Making Discrimination Unpopular
The financial tier targets the investors and institutions that underwrite corporate behavior. Robinson points to investor Bill Ackman’s public campaign against DEI at elite universities as an illustration of how anti-equity arguments accumulate institutional credibility. After Harvard President Claudine Gay resigned, Ackman called DEI “inherently racist and illegal,” framing that moved into boardrooms shortly after.
“There is nothing neutral about financing a backlash,” Robinson wrote. Goldman’s agreement with the National Legal and Policy Center arose from coordinated right-wing pressure sustained over years, reflecting no market logic and no shareholder consensus. “Corporate behavior is not inevitable—it’s responsive. And right now, it is responding to the wrong people.”
Making corporate retreat unpopular, in Robinson’s framework, requires that organized support be as visible and sustained as the organized pressure working against it.
Making Discrimination Unsustainable
The third tier targets the point where accountability becomes concrete. ICE operations in January 2026 generated outrage that translated into specific demands on local businesses and officials, actors close enough to be held directly accountable. “When communities organize where they live, where they shop, and where they work, we can move faster and win more,” Robinson wrote. Local campaigns, coordinated across communities, generate the national signals that shift institutional behavior over time.
The Second Phase
Robinson’s concern for 2026 is grounded in what he’s already observing. Public statements from senior administration officials about “male standards” and appearance requirements signal a shift from passive program elimination toward active exclusion, policies designed to present discrimination as governance. “If year one was about canceling programs and intimidating institutions, year two will be about making discrimination look normal and permanent.”
He recently hosted a Freedom Table conversation on NewsOne with NAACP Legal Defense Fund Director-Counsel Janai Nelson, author Michael Harriot, and Global Black Economic Forum CEO Alphonso David to examine how anti-DEI campaigns have moved across institutions and reshaped corporate incentives.
Through his advisory practice at Rashad Robinson Advisors, Robinson works with foundations, nonprofits, and organizations on building the infrastructure to apply these pressure points together. “The answer is not a single protest or a single election,” he wrote. “What we are up against is not just a president or a party; it is a project.”
“The attack on DEI is the front door to a much larger assault on the rights, protections, and opportunities that communities have fought for over generations.” Building infrastructure capable of making that assault too costly to sustain over time is what Robinson’s current work is organized around.
