The White House declared on 28 October 2026 that diversity, equity and inclusion programmes in American public life are finished. In a fact sheet summing up 21 months of President Donald Trump’s second term, the administration used a three-word verdict as both headline and conclusion: “DEI is dead.” The document, published six days before the midterm elections, presents the claim not as a slogan but as a record — a list of executive orders, cancelled contracts, withdrawn grants, military and diplomatic changes, university settlements and corporate retreats that, in the administration’s telling, together amount to the dismantling of a system it describes as unlawful and unmeritocratic.
Whether that verdict is accurate depends on what is meant by dead. The administration’s own record shows sweeping action inside the federal government, real financial consequences for universities and contractors, and a sharp change in the language companies use in public filings. Independent reporting and the administration’s critics point to a more complicated picture: offices renamed rather than closed, programmes continued under different labels, court challenges still working through the system, and colleges and companies that have defended parts of their diversity work even as they dropped the DEI label. This article separates what the White House claims, what is independently documented, and what remains disputed, so readers can judge the scorecard for themselves.
What the White House DEI scorecard actually claims
The fact sheet traces the campaign to President Trump’s first day back in office, 20 January 2025, when he rescinded executive orders from the previous administration that had promoted equity across federal agencies and signed an order ending what it called radical and wasteful DEI programmes and preferencing in the federal government. A second January order targeted DEI preferencing in federal contracting and directed agencies to combat what the administration calls illegal private-sector discrimination. Within the same month, the administration says, it ended a Federal Aviation Administration hiring policy it said prioritised diversity over safety and efficiency, and it moved to eliminate race- and sex-based criteria in the armed forces in the name of merit and lethality.
The timeline then runs through the rest of 2025 and into 2026. In February 2025, a presidential memorandum removed DEI requirements from the Foreign Service. In March 2025, an order directed that programmes receiving remaining Department of Education funds should not advance DEI or gender ideology. In April 2025, further orders overhauled higher-education accreditation, changed school discipline policy to rest on objective behaviour rather than DEI considerations, and eliminated the use of disparate-impact liability — the legal theory under which unequal statistical outcomes alone can indicate discrimination — in various federal contexts. In May 2025, the administration ended taxpayer funding for NPR and PBS, noting that NPR had described its DEI practices as inseparable from its content. In March 2026, another executive order required federal contractors and subcontractors to drop racially discriminatory DEI practices and to certify merit-based employment.
The administration frames all of this as the enforcement of civil-rights law rather than its abandonment. Its argument, repeated across the fact sheet, is that preferences based on race or sex — however they are labelled — violate the principle of equal treatment, and that removing them restores a system in which hiring, promotion, admission and contracting turn on individual merit. Supporters in Congress and in state governments have echoed that framing, and at least one state leader publicly welcomed the scorecard on 27 October while announcing legislation to base public-sector hiring and promotion on merit rather than DEI policies. The White House also points beyond Washington: to data-centre development, artificial-intelligence policy, grant conditions and the proxy-adviser industry, where it says DEI conditions have been stripped out.
The money: more than $1 billion in cancelled contracts
The most concrete numbers in the fact sheet concern money. The White House says federal agencies terminated 104 DEI contracts worth more than $1 billion. Separately, it lists grant and contract cancellations or redirections that include $1.7 billion in Environmental Protection Agency grants, $350 million in Health and Human Services grants, $148.6 million in Agriculture Department grants and $124 million in Education Department contracts. Those figures are administration tallies, and USN has not independently audited each cancellation, but the scale of the claimed terminations is itself part of the story: even critics of the scorecard do not dispute that large sums tied to diversity-labelled programmes were cut, or that contractors and grant recipients felt the change quickly.
The distinction that matters is between a contract or grant being cancelled and a programme disappearing. A cancelled federal contract ends a specific funding stream; it does not necessarily end the underlying activity, which an institution may continue with other money, under another name, or at a smaller scale. The fact sheet’s figures also combine different kinds of action — outright terminations, redirections and settlements — into a single impression of dismantlement. That is why the headline number, striking as it is, cannot by itself settle whether DEI as a set of practices is dead, or merely defunded in its federal form. The administration’s answer is that cutting the federal money and the federal mandate is precisely what dismantlement means, because so much of the system depended on Washington’s requirements and dollars.
Universities: settlements, investigations and a changed calculus
Higher education is where the administration claims its clearest victories, and where the financial stakes are easiest to verify. The fact sheet lists a $221 million settlement with Columbia University in July 2025, a $50 million settlement with Brown University, a $60 million settlement with Cornell University in November 2025 and a $75 million settlement with Northwestern University, each tied to combinations of DEI practices, antisemitism concerns and civil-rights compliance. The administration also says it reviewed $9 billion in federal funding for Harvard University over antisemitism and DEI concerns and opened Justice Department investigations into DEI initiatives at Stanford, the University of California, Berkeley, UCLA and UC Irvine.
Those settlements are real agreements, and they changed behaviour beyond the universities that signed them. University leaders across the country, watching the size of the Columbia figure, began reviewing admissions, hiring, training and student-life programmes for legal exposure even without being investigated themselves. The Justice Department’s guidance to federal funding recipients in July 2025, warning that certain DEI practices could amount to unlawful discrimination, added to that caution. For the administration, that chilling effect — institutions policing themselves before Washington arrives — is evidence the strategy worked. For critics, it is evidence of a different problem: that the threat of losing federal money, rather than a court ruling that a particular programme was unlawful, is doing the work of policy change.
That criticism leads to the legal picture, which is less settled than the scorecard suggests. In February 2025, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against parts of the January executive orders, finding that their vague definition of DEI left federal employees and funding recipients unable to tell what compliance required. Other challenges have continued through the courts, and civil-rights organisations argue that the administration has used the Civil Rights Division — historically the federal government’s instrument for protecting minorities against discrimination — to pursue an agenda that weakens those protections. A coalition of civil-rights groups has accused the division of upending decades of practice. The administration rejects that characterisation, saying it is enforcing the law as written, against preferences that classify people by race or sex. No single court ruling has resolved that underlying disagreement, and several of the policies the fact sheet celebrates remain subject to litigation whose outcome could narrow or restore parts of what was cut.
Corporate America: retreat in language, less clear in practice
The fact sheet’s corporate claim is its most quoted statistic: that 90 percent of the 400 largest companies in the S&P 500 reduced at least some DEI references in public reporting after President Trump’s election. Research behind that figure, reported by the Financial Times, covered companies in that group that had filed eligible annual reports by March 2025, and it measured the removal of at least some references — not the closure of programmes. A later analysis by lawyers at Orrick found diversity-related disclosures in 97 percent of S&P 500 annual reports in 2024, compared with 55 percent of reports filed by 417 companies in the first three months of 2026, with only 8 percent of those 2026 reports using DEI or similar language.
What those numbers establish is a dramatic change in corporate language. What they do not establish, on their own, is that companies abandoned the underlying practices. Some companies did scrap programmes and drop diversity targets in hiring, and business reporting through 2025 documented those cases. Others kept mentoring schemes, supplier-diversity efforts or employee-resource groups while removing the DEI label from annual reports and websites. Still others continued to defend their programmes publicly. The administration treats the language change as proof of a cultural shift driven by legal risk: once race-based practices carried the threat of investigation and lost contracts, the argument goes, companies rationally walked away. Critics treat the same data as proof of rebranding under pressure: the words changed because the legal climate changed, while much of the work continued quietly. Both readings agree that the public face of corporate diversity changed sharply in 2025 and 2026; they disagree about how much substance changed with it.
What critics say was lost, and what they say survives
Civil-rights groups, university leaders and diversity officers argue that the scorecard confuses the removal of a label with the removal of a problem. Their case is that programmes grouped under DEI included mentoring for first-generation students, outreach to underrepresented communities, accessibility work and efforts to broaden applicant pools — activities they say expand opportunity rather than restrict it — and that cutting them narrows the pipeline for students and workers who already face barriers. A University of Southern California panel on 28 October, for example, examined how colleges should respond to rollbacks its organisers described as hurtful actions, including defunded initiatives created to foster belonging and academic success, and discussed how institutions might repair trust with diverse students and employees.
Critics also point to evidence that the label has not vanished even where the administration claims victory. Independent reviewers noted in October 2026 that at least one public college in New York still listed a DEI office, contacts and activities on its website and advertised a DEI awards ceremony for 28 October. That single example does not refute the national trend, but it illustrates the gap between a White House declaration and conditions on the ground, where thousands of institutions make their own decisions under varying state laws and court orders. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has separately noted that DEI itself is a broad term not defined in the relevant federal employment law, which is one reason the legal fight has turned on specific practices — a hiring preference, an admissions criterion, a contract clause — rather than on the acronym as a whole.
The administration’s supporters answer that the survival of a few offices, or the renaming of programmes, does not rescue the system the fact sheet describes. In their view, the test is whether race or sex preferences still carry federal backing, federal money and legal safety, and on that test the answer has changed decisively since January 2025. They also argue that the shift has popular support: voters who backed a merit-based message in 2024, they say, are seeing it carried out, and the midterm campaign is in part a referendum on whether that direction continues. The final days of the midterm campaign have indeed been fought heavily over cultural and institutional questions of this kind, with both parties treating the election as a verdict on the first 21 months of the second Trump term.
What is established, what is claimed, and what comes next
Pulling the threads together, several things are independently established. The January 2025 executive orders were signed and did order federal agencies to terminate DEI offices, programmes and preferences. Large federal contracts and grants tied to diversity programmes were cancelled, with the administration’s tally exceeding $1 billion in contracts alone. Universities paid substantial settlements and changed policies under federal pressure. Corporate public filings dropped DEI language sharply. Courts have both blocked parts of the orders and allowed other parts to proceed, and litigation continues. Those are facts documented in official records, court filings and published research.
What remains a claim, not an established fact, is the scorecard’s central verdict: that DEI itself is dead. That conclusion depends on treating the removal of the label, the cancellation of federal funding and the retreat of corporate language as equivalent to the end of the practices, and on assuming that institutions will not rebuild them under new names, with private money, or under future administrations. It also depends on court outcomes that have not yet arrived. A future administration could reverse the executive orders with its own signature, just as President Trump reversed his predecessor’s orders on his first day. State laws, private employers and universities outside federal funding would remain free to pursue diversity efforts the federal government no longer requires or funds.
That reversibility is the scorecard’s quiet weakness and its authors’ implicit challenge. Executive orders are powerful and fast, but they are also fragile: they last as long as the president who signs them and the courts that sustain them. Legislation, university settlements and changed corporate habits may prove more durable, but none of them, singly or together, amounts to a constitutional amendment against diversity programmes. The White House has chosen, six days before voters decide control of Congress, to declare the fight won. Whether voters, courts and institutions agree will be decided well beyond the midterm — in the lawsuits still pending, in the budgets universities adopt next year, and in the language companies choose when the political weather changes again.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from The White House, WLT Report and News Made Clear.