DEI programs vanish across the GovCon landscape

Diversity, equity and inclusion programs across a spectrum of government contractors are disappearing as companies weigh the risk of continuing DEI practices in the face of the Trump executive orders.

Even associations with companies as members are not immune.

AFCEA International, an organization whose goal is to bring government and industry executives together to share ideas, has stripped mentions of DEI from its website and dropped a community of interest group focused on women.

Booz Allen Hamilton, whose CEO Horatio Rozanski was once called a DEI champion, has dropped its DEI programs after President Trump’s executive orders.

First reported by Bloomberg, Booz Allen has disbanded its DEI organization. The firm will no longer have diversity goals as part of the plans for employees and executives.

The moves mark a sharp departure for Booz Allen, which over a decade ago made diversity across the company a priority.

In 2011, the company named the first woman to its senior leadership team. In 2012, it named its first woman to its board of directors.

Today, six of its 12 senior leaders are women. As are six of its 12 board members.

Officials at Booz Allen did not respond to a request for comment.

In a memo to employees, Accenture CEO Julie Sweet said the company was sunsetting global employee representation goals that it set in 2017 and updated in 2020.

Accenture also is ending career development programs for people from specific demographic groups. The company will pause submissions to outside diversity benchmarking surveys while it can evaluate any future participation.

Accenture will will continue to support its employee resource groups and networks, as well as publicly report its demographics in markets where they report today.

Changes are in the works across the GovCon industry.

Pick your company and add DEI to your search term, then you’ll see returns that tout DEI efforts. But after clicking through, you hit broken links because companies have taken those pages down.

The executive orders are putting pressure on companies because the EOs tie payments to contractors to the companies certifying that they do not have DEI practices in place. There appears to be a desire to not draw attention to diversity efforts.

The same pressure is on AFCEA.

The executive order names publicly-traded companies, large nonprofit organizations, state and local bar and medical associations, and colleges and universities with over $1 billion in assets as possible targets for non-compliance investigations.

The EO asks that each agency identify up to nine cases for investigation.

“AFCEA is probably getting guidance that would count as a large non-profit association that is at risk of some Fed identifying them,” one industry observer told us.

Sweet’s memo to Accenture employee talks about the “evolving landscape in the United States, including recent executive orders with which we must comply.”

The memo also emphasized that the company still sees value in diversity.

“We have always believed that attracting, hiring and developing people who have different backgrounds, different perspectives and different experiences are essential to driving innovation and serving global companies across multiple industries,” Sweet wrote.

It remains an open question of how to celebrate the value of diversity without drawing the ire of the Trump administration. No one really knows where the line is.