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Google has ditched its diverse hiring targets in the wake of President Donald Trump’s order to put an end to diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order directing the termination of all “radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing” in the federal government. Google, a federal contractor, has now become the latest tech company to change its practices, joining the likes of Meta and Amazon.
In 2020, the tech giant had aspired to increase the proportion of “leadership representation of underrepresented groups” 30 percent by 2025 — a goal it’s now scrapping, the Wall Street Journal first reported.
Google sent an email to employees on Wednesday announcing its decision. The company is “evaluating changes to our programs required to comply,” read the email, obtained by the Journal.
“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 Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi wrote.
The company has “always been committed to creating a workplace where we hire the best people wherever we operate, create an environment where everyone can thrive, and treat everyone fairly. That’s exactly what you can expect to see going forward,” the email said.
Additionally, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, omitted a sentence about how the company was “committed to making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do” from its annual report that came out Wednesday. The sentence had appeared in its reports from 2021 through 2024, according to the outlet.
The tech giant’s 2024 diversity report shows about one-third of its workforce in the U.S. were women, 5.7 percent were Black, and 7.5 percent were Latino.
Google is the latest tech company to alter its DEI practices with the new presidency. Even before Trump took office, both Amazon and Meta announced plans to roll back their DEI efforts.
His executive order states: “The Biden Administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI), into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government, in areas ranging from airline safety to the military.”
In the wake of the collision in Washington, D.C. that left 67 people dead — claiming the lives of everyone on board both the Black Hawk military helicopter and the American Airlines jet — the president blamed DEI policies for the crash.
“I put safety first,” Trump claimed. “Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody’s ever seen because this was the lowest level.”
Hours later, when pressed about why he pointed fingers at the FAA’s diversity initiatives, Trump told reporters that he had come to that conclusion because “I have common sense.”
The cause of the crash is still being investigated.
