Under Trump, More Than 1,000 Nonprofits Strip DEI Language From Tax Forms

This post first appeared at ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. According to this year’s tax filing, the American Athletic Conference, the $150 million collegiate sports league that includes schools like Rice and Tulane, is striving to be a leader in inclusion, but no longer in diversity or equity. UNICEF USA, which supports the United Nations’ humanitarian children’s mission, no longer wants a more equitable world for every child - just a better one. And the National Association of Community Health Centers, whose tax filing once said it focused on medically underserved populations, is now “patient-centered for all.” The changes reflect a broader retreat underway in the nonprofit world. After President Donald Trump ordered his administration to root out “illegal” diversity, equity and inclusion efforts earlier this year, opening the door to investigations and funding cuts for offenders, more than 1,000 charities rewrote their mission statements in forms they filed this year with the Internal Revenue Service, removing or minimizing language tied to race, inequity and historically disadvantaged communities, ProPublica found. Some went further, scrubbing diversity initiatives from their websites along with commitments to building more inclusive institutions. They changed the job titles of leaders and, in some cases, even renamed themselves. An Ohio nonprofit once called the Financial Alliance for Racial Equity, for example, is now the Financial Alliance for Representation and Empowerment. The organizations range from large nonprofits such as Seattle Children’s Hospital to smaller ones like a Minnesota-based nonprofit that promotes time with horses as a form of therapy. While many rely on government dollars - a sixth spent more than $750,000 in federal funding last year - about half of the charities that watered down their missions reported receiving no form of government funding. “The administration’s attacks on DEI and equal opportunity efforts have created a chilling effect through fear, intimidation and confusion,” said Maya Raghu, who leads an initiative to protect DEI at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which did not change its mission statement. The Trump administration’s flurry of orders declared diversity programs “pernicious discrimination,” codifying an anti-DEI agenda long animated by claims that such programs disadvantage white men. Raghu’s group has defended nonprofits from Trump’s crackdown, winning an injunction earlier this year against a Trump rule requiring government contractors to certify they did not have what it deemed unlawful DEI programs. A separate effort by the National Urban League and the AIDS Foundation of Chicago brought a lawsuit against the Trump administration earlier this year, arguing that its executive orders were unconstitutional. The leader of one of the groups said that the administration’s actions were “based on a blatant and corrosive lie.” The group sought an injunction against the executive orders, but the effort was unsuccessful. The case is ongoing. To identify organizations that removed DEI language from the mission statements in their tax filings, ProPublica developed its own list of about 20 DEI-related terms, including “disadvantaged” and “underrepresented.” About three quarters of the changes made to...

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