On the last day of January 2025, employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention opened a memo from their chief information officer instructing them to remove pronouns from their email signature blocks by 5:00 p.m. This gave a workforce of epidemiologists and public health scientists the better part of one business day to delete a few characters of text that had, until that morning, troubled no one. Similar instructions went out at Transportation and Energy, and the Office of Personnel Management had already directed agencies to switch off the Outlook features that prompted employees for their pronouns in the first place. I’ve spent several decades in HR watching organizations take 18 months to update a job description, so I’ll admit to a certain grim fascination at seeing the federal government move with that kind of speed and precision to eradicate “she/her.”
That, of course, was merely the opening act. What followed over the next two years has been less theatrical and increasingly consequential.
What’s Been Taken Apart
In January 2025, an executive order revoked Executive Order 11246, the Lyndon Johnson directive that had obligated federal contractors to nondiscrimination and affirmative action since 1965. This past August, the Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs published final rules dismantling the regulatory framework built on that order (regulations first issued in 1968 and refined over nearly six decades of rulemaking), and the rescission took effect on October 26. While they were at it, OFCCP eliminated the 7% utilization goal for individuals with disabilities along with the requirement that contractors invite applicants and employees to self-identify as disabled – which strikes me as a curious thing to discard if the stated aim is treating everyone equally, since it’s rather difficult to know whether you’re doing that without asking.
Over at the Department of Justice, the Civil Rights Division, established in 1957 and long regarded by its own alumni as the department’s crown jewel, has lost roughly three-quarters of its career attorneys. Last December, on the 68th anniversary of the Division’s creation (a detail I’d reject as too heavy-handed if I came across it in a novel), DOJ finalized a rule stripping disparate impact liability from its Title VI regulations and discarding a framework in place since 1973. Disparate impact, a principle in US civil rights law, occurs when a policy or practice that appears neutral on its face disproportionately harms a protected group, such as those defined by race, sex, national origin, age, or disability – even if there was no intent to discriminate. More than 200 former Division employees signed an open letter warning that the institution was close to being destroyed. And in January of this year, the EEOC voted 2–1 to rescind its 2024 harassment guidance in its entirety, including the sections identifying deliberate misgendering and the forced outing of employees as forms of harassment.
None of this rewrote Title VII of course, and employment lawyers have spent the better part of two years reminding clients that Bostock remains the law of the land and that harassment policies covering sexual orientation and gender identity should stay right where they are.
But the law and the message are two different things. And the message that’s been delivered with remarkable consistency over the last 2 years is stop talking about it.
So organizations scrubbed their websites, renamed their employee resource groups, and let the DEI job titles lapse when the last employee resigned (or was let go). They removed “equity” from the company values statement, and hoped nobody would go looking for the old version on the Wayback Machine.
Our own HR professional association, for those who don’t recall, didn’t even wait to be told. In July 2024, six months before any of the executive orders, SHRM announced on LinkedIn that it was dropping “equity” from its DEI platform in favor of “I&D,” with CHRO Jim Link explaining that there was “so much lack of certainty around the definition of what equity means” that the word had become “a distraction.” A year later, the conference that began in 1996 as the Workplace Diversity Conference, spent years as the Diversity & Inclusion Conference & Exposition, and had more recently been trimmed to SHRM Inclusion, was reborn as SHRM Blueprint, complete with a cool blue color palette and the tagline “Compliant. Connected. Competitive.” Its headline panel that October, moderated by Johnny C. Taylor Jr., paired Van Jones with Robby Starbuck, the activist whose campaigns pushed Walmart, Harley-Davidson, and Tractor Supply to abandon or dial back their DEI programs. Kind of like booking an arsonist for the fire safety keynote and calling it viewpoint diversity.
What Didn’t Get Rescinded
The employees, it should be said, didn’t go anywhere.
The transgender warehouse lead at a 140-person distributor still clocks in every morning, as does the only woman on the night shift, the account manager in her late fifties who has noticed she’s no longer invited to the planning meetings, and the program coordinator at a regional nonprofit who requested an accommodation months ago and is still waiting to hear back.
None of these people were ever protected primarily by an OFCCP audit or an EEOC enforcement document; their working lives were shaped, for better or worse, by whether a supervisor treated them like a person, whether someone in HR returned their call, and whether the organization meant what it put in the handbook.
Most of the organizations I spend time with – small and midsized businesses, nonprofits, outfits where the HR department consists of one overextended generalist and a shared drive – never had a Chief Diversity Officer to lay off or a DEI budget to cut. Inclusion, to whatever extent it existed, lived in the daily decisions of managers and the judgment of whoever handled employee relations. So when federal agencies signal that certain employees are no longer worth the trouble, the signal doesn’t stay inside the Beltway; it shows up in the supervisor who decides he no longer needs to bother with a colleague’s pronouns, in a complaint left unanswered because the owner read somewhere that all that DEI stuff is over, and in the employee who concludes that keeping her head down is the safest career strategy available.
Meanwhile, We Welcome the Machines
All of this is unfolding at the same moment that every vendor, consultant, and conference keynote is announcing that AI will transform work, and on that point they’re not entirely wrong, though the transformation looks rather different from the one in the sales materials. AI isn’t going to replace HR or most of the jobs HR supports, but it IS going to replace tasks. And in doing so it will force organizations to decide what work is for and where the humans fit. Those decisions get made by people, and if the people making them have spent two years absorbing the lesson that inclusion is a liability, I don’t love our odds that the redesigned workplace will make much space for anyone who doesn’t resemble the median of the training data.
In April 2025, the White House also directed federal agencies to abandon disparate impact analysis, the very tool designed to catch discrimination that happens without anyone intending it. And, of course, it did so at precisely the moment when algorithmic screening and automated decision-making have made unintended discrimination the most likely kind.
Making Room for Humans
Which brings me to why my colleague and friend Kelley Diona Miller and I are launching a joint venture named Room for Humans. Every risk-averse instinct in our profession says this is still a moment to wait and see, but this week’s midterms suggested that a good many people are done waiting, and so are we. The name works on three levels, each of them deliberate.
- Room for belonging means making space for everyone, including the employees organizations have historically found it convenient to overlook. Inclusion and equity are foundational, and diversity is simply reality. Belonging never depended on a federal mandate … and so didn’t evaporate when one was withdrawn.
- Room for candor means honest conversations about conflict and accountability, disagreement that doesn’t end careers, and the unglamorous work of repair after something breaks. Employee relations is where inclusion succeeds or fails in practice, and a beautifully worded belonging statement is worth very little if complaints disappear into someone’s inbox.
- Room for humans at work means deciding on purpose and in advance where people fit as AI redefines the work. It’s about planning for the change rather than discovering after the fact that the efficiency gains came at the expense of the people nobody thought to consult.
Practically speaking, that means we’re doing HR advisory work, employee relations support, workshops and training, and a good deal of writing and conversation, all built for small and mid-sized organizations, nonprofits, and lean HR teams. The types of workplaces that still run on people and don’t have outside counsel on speed dial.
Ignoring the Sensible Advice
I don’t know how long it will take us to climb out of the rubble from the last several years and I’m wary of anyone who claims to know. The sensible advice would probably be to sand the edges off our messaging, call it culture work, and leave words like diversity, equity and inclusion off the website until things settle down. I understand that instinct well enough; we’ve all watched plenty of smart leaders make exactly that calculation over the past two years, some of them for perfectly defensible reasons.
But the employees at the organizations we serve were here before the rescissions and will be here after the next round of revisions, whichever direction those happen to go. And we would rather spend the interim building something for them than waiting to learn which words we can safely use once again.
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