Google scraping its diversity utilization goals as it complies with Trump’s new government contractor rules

San Francisco (AP)- Google scraping some of its diversity utilization goals and joins an extension list of US companies that have left or shown down their diversity, justice and inclusion programs.

The move that was outlined in an E -mail sent to Google employees Wednesday came in the wake of the An executive order issued by President Donald Trump It was partly aimed at pushing the government’s contractors to scrape their DEI initiatives.

Like several other major tech companies, Google sells some of its technologies and services to the federal government, including its rapidly growing cloud division, which is an important piece of its push in artificial technology.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, also signaled the shift in its annual 10-k report, this week filed for Securities and Exchange Commission. In the removed Google a line included in previous annual reports that said it is “obliged to make diversity, equity and inclusion to part of everything we do and to grow a workforce representative of the users , we serve. ”

Google generates most of Alphab’s annual $ 350 billion revenue and accounts for almost its entire worldwide workforce of 183,000.

“We are obliged to create a workplace where all our employees can succeed and have equal opportunities, and over the past year we have reviewed our programs designed to help us get there,” Google said in a statement to Associated Press. “We have updated our 10-K language to reflect this, and as a federal contractor, our teams also evaluate changes required by recent court decisions and executive orders on this topic.”

The change in the language also comes a little more than two weeks after Google CEO Sundar Pichai and other prominent technology leaders – including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Amazon – founder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Meta Platform’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg – was behind Trump under his Inauguration.

Meta Jettisoned his DEI program last monthShortly before the inauguration, while Amazon stopped some of his DEI programs in December after Trump’s election.

Many companies outside the technology sector are also supported from DEI. These include Walt Disney Co., McDonald’sAt FordAt WalmartTarget, Lowe’s and John Deere.

Trump’s recent executive order threatens to impose financial sanctions against federal contractors who are considered to have “illegal” DEI programs. If the companies prove to be in violation, they may be subject to massive damage under the law of false claims of 1863. This law states that contractors who make false demands to the government may be responsible for three times the government’s damages.

The order also ordered all federal agencies to choose the goals of up to nine studies of listed companies, large non-profit and other institutions with dei policies that constitute “illegal discrimination or preference.”

The challenge for businesses is to know which DEI policies Trump administration can decide is “illegal.” Trump’s executive order seeks to “end all discriminatory and illegal preferences, mandates, policies, programs” and other activities in the federal government and to force federal agencies “, fight illegal private sector dei preferences, mandates, policies, programs and activities. “

In both the public and the private sectors, diversity initiatives have covered a number of practices, from anti -discrimination training and conducting payroll surveys to make efforts to recruit more members of minority groups and women as employees.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, has tried to hire more people from underrepresented groups for more than a decade, but intensified this effort by 2020, after police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis triggered a scream for more social justice.

Shortly after Floyd died, Pichai set a goal of increasing the representation of underrepresented groups in Mountain View, California, the company’s largely Asian and white leadership ranks by 30% by 2025. Google has made some times since then, but the composition of its leadership has not changed dramatically.

The representation of black people in the company’s leadership increased from 2.6% by 2020 to 5.1% last year, according to Google’s annual diversity report. For Latin American people, the change was 3.7% to 4.3%. The proportion of women in leadership roles meanwhile increased from 26.7% by 2020 to 32.8% by 2024, according to the company’s report.

The figures are not very different in Google’s total workforce, where black employees make up only 5.7% and Latino employees 7.5%. Two -thirds of Google’s worldwide workforce consists of men according to the diversity report.

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Associated Press Business Reporter Alexandra Olson contributed to this report.