Executives Hide DEI Behind 'Belonging' as Deadline Looms
As the April 25 deadline approaches, major corporations quietly rebrand DEI programs with new language while maintaining the same identity-based hiring practices that President Trump's executive order seeks to ban.
As the April 25 deadline for federal contractors to purge DEI from their contracts nears, America's largest corporations are swapping "diversity, equity, and inclusion" for "belonging" — changing the label but not the logic behind identity-based hiring practices. The linguistic maneuver follows President Trump's March 26 executive order banning racially discriminatory DEI activities by federal contractors with a strict 30-day compliance window.
Major corporations including Kohl's, Disney, JPMorgan, and Amazon have quietly rebranded their programs while preserving the same identity-based hiring, resource groups, and reporting metrics. Kohl's changed its Chief DEI Officer's title to "Chief Inclusion and Belonging Officer" and replaced its "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" webpage with "Inclusion and Belonging." Disney changed "Commitment to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion" to "At Disney, we want everyone to belong and thrive" while renaming its "Business Employee Resource Groups" to "Belonging Employee Resource Groups."
JPMorgan replaced "equity" with "opportunity," now calling its program "Diversity, Opportunity & Inclusion (DOI)." COO Jennifer Piepszak stated, "The 'e' always meant equal opportunity to us, not equal outcomes." The rebranding represents a coordinated corporate strategy, not accidental evolution. Seventy-eight percent of C-suite leaders say they are rebranding DEI programs with new language, according to a Catalyst/NYU Meltzer Center survey cited by Fortune.
The corporate silence contrasts sharply with the 800 college diversity officers who gathered in Philadelphia on March 26 — the same day as Trump's executive order — at the NADHE conference. Will Hild of Consumers' Research exposes the deception bluntly. "It's the same racism under a different name," Hild states. "Rebranding from DEI doesn't change the anti-White and anti-Asian nature of these activities."
Hild adds, "It's obvious, 'belonging' is nothing more than DEI by another name. These companies actually believing that no one will notice the fact that they quietly rebranded all of their DEI programs are insulting the intelligence of their own customers." The trickle-down effect from universities confirms an ideological pipeline from academia to boardroom. St. Louis University closed its DEI office and opened an "Office of Belonging" in December 2025.
Amazon removed website sections titled "Equity for Black people" and "LGBTQ+ rights" from its platform, demonstrating that even the most explicit DEI language is being scrubbed while internal programs persist. The executive order defines "racially discriminatory DEI activities" as "disparate treatment based on race or ethnicity in recruitment, employment (hiring, promotions), contracting (vendor agreements), program participation, or allocation or deployment of an entity's resources."
Fortune 100 companies saw a 59 percent increase in use of the term "belonging" between 2023 and 2024, while S&P 500 companies experienced a 68 percent decline in mentions of "DEI" from 2024 to 2025. Corporations shaped by years of socialist-leaning university indoctrination and activist pressure refuse to abandon race-conscious policies even as they dodge legal consequences.
These companies aren't choosing freedom — they're choosing survival. Their silence isn't neutrality; it's complicity in a system that rewards identity over merit while claiming to simply "update language." The April 25 deadline for inclusion of the anti-DEI clause in federal contracts ticks toward an enforcement confrontation that will reveal which corporations prioritize principle over political appeasement.