Google quietly doubles down on a controversial workplace trend | Official Website of Louis Velazquez, entrepreneur, finance guy and tech innovator

Google (GOOGL) , operated by Alphabet, raised eyebrows earlier this year when it sent a memo to employees notifying them that it was scaling back its diversity, equity, and inclusion goals.

In the memo, sent to employees in February, Google Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi said that “recent court decisions and U.S. Executive Orders” prompted the company to make this change, since it is a federal contractor.

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“In 2020, we set aspirational hiring goals and focused on growing our offices outside California and New York to improve representation,” said Cicconi. “We’ll continue to invest in states across the U.S. — and in many countries globally — but in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals.”

Google’s decision came after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2023 to end affirmative action in college admissions, raising legal questions about DEI programs in workplaces nationwide.

Then, on Jan. 20, President Donald Trump issued an executive order dismantling the federal government’s diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. In the order, he claims that the programs enforce “illegal and immoral discrimination.”

Google, led by CEO Sundar Pichai, is scaling back its DEI goals.

Image source&colon; Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Google removes DEI groups from charitable contributions list

In addition to scaling back its DEI goals, Google also scrubbed 58 DEI-related groups from its list of nonprofit organizations that receive the company’s “most substantial contributions,” according to a recent report from the Tech Transparency Project.

The report indicates that the change took place around February, and the groups that were removed had mission statements that contained the words “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion,” and other terms the Trump administration advised federal agencies to purge.

Some of the organizations that were removed from the list include the African American Community Service Agency, which aims to “empower all Black and historically excluded communities;” the Latino Leadership Alliance, which is dedicated to “race equity affecting the Latino community;” and the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which spreads awareness about violence against women.

The revelation comes after Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview with The Verge in May that diversity is still “a foundational value” for the company, despite recent cuts.

“What we are doing in the company is constantly at our scale,” said Pichai. “We look at that first — see what works, what we can scale up better. All I can say is we probably have more resources invested in diversity now than at any point in our history as a company, in terms of the scale and the resources we put in.”

Google follows a growing trend of DEI rollback in corporate America

Many companies in corporate America committed to implementing DEI policies in their workplaces in 2020 after George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer who assisted in his arrest. The incident brought to light many inequities Black people face in America.

These policies aimed to advance workplace opportunities for people of various backgrounds. However, when the U.S. Supreme Court ended affirmative action in college admissions, which aimed to improve educational opportunities for minorities, companies began questioning the legality of these policies.

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Also, DEI policies later became the source of backlash from conservative consumers who began boycotting companies that adopted them.

Large companies such as Walmart, McDonald’s, Amazon, and Lowe’s have either scaled back or completely axed their DEI policies over the past few months.

Despite recent cuts to DEI across corporate America, a recent survey from culture and inclusion platform Paradigm found that only 19% of companies/organizations plan to decrease their DEI funding in 2025, while 23% plan to increase their funding, and 58% plan to make no changes.