By Joshua Arnold

Corporate infatuation with “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) policies continues to wane as one company after another prefers profits above the progressive propaganda. In this regard, the latest domino to fall is Goldman Sachs, which recently agreed to remove identity-driven DEI requirements from its board criteria, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Wall Street investment giant currently identifies qualified candidates for its board based on four criteria, one of which is diversity. While its description of diversity includes such factors as viewpoints, experience, and military service, it also encompasses “other demographics,” which means all the usual identity categories: race and ethnicity, gender identity, and sexual orientation.

In September 2025, the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC), a conservative group which owns company stock, submitted a proposal, which Goldman Sachs would have to circulate to shareholders this spring, to remove DEI criteria for board members.

Instead, Goldman Sachs reached an agreement with NLPC, according to the WSJ, by which the company would do away with the “other demographics” language, and the NLPC would withdraw its shareholder proposal. The Goldman Sachs board is expected to change the language this month.

NLPC associate director Luke Perlot declined to comment on the organization’s discussions with Goldman Sachs, saying that they remain confidential. However, he directed The Washington Stand to an agreement between NLPC and American Express, in which NLPC had submitted an “almost identical” proposal.

In that document, dated October 10, 2025, American Express agreed to delete a corporate requirement that its board be diverse “including with respect to gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, and nationality.” The bank agreed to make the change “in exchange for the NLPC’s withdrawal” of a proposal that would have a similar effect.

Earlier this month, the NLPC announced that it had reached agreements to remove DEI requirements with both American Express and (John) Deere and Company, with a pending proposal with Colgate-Palmolive.

Goldman’s decision to step away from DEI reflects a monumental shift from 2019, when Goldman CEO David Solomon sent an email to staff announcing that diversity and inclusion would be a “top priority” for the bank. He set a recruitment goal of 50% women, 11% black, and 14% Hispanic staff in the Americas. The next year, Solomon announced diversity requirements for companies Goldman would help take public.

However, with the shifting tides of public opinion, Goldman was already beginning to correct course. Last year, Goldman dropped the DEI requirement for companies to go public, as well as its self-imposed racial hiring quotas. At Goldman’s 2025 shareholder meeting, Perlot praised the company’s “meaningful steps to roll back its DEI programs.”

One reason for this reversal may be increasing pressure from shareholder activism — conservative organizations like NLPC that purchase corporate stock and use the platform to question the company’s far-left DEI policies, which are out-of-step with mainstream American sentiment.

However, such corporate activism is not always successful. Last year, the NLPC proposed that Goldman Sachs eliminate DEI incentives for executive compensation, the (diversified) board recommended against that proposal, and The New York Times reports that fewer than 5% of shareholders voted to eliminate them.

A second reason for the corporate retreat from DEI is increasing pressure from the Trump administration. Early last year, President Trump ordered executive agencies to investigate DEI programs in publicly traded companies in search of policies that discriminated on the basis of race or sex. Last February, the administration targeted Institutional Shareholder Services and Glass Lewis, two financial firms pushing racial quotas.

A third reason is that years of experience have now shown companies that too much obsession over DEI is bad for business. A painful recent example can be found in our nation’s capital — specifically, its water systems. When DC Water hired David Gadis as its new CEO in May 2018, he was reputed as a worldwide “role model” and innovator. Eight years later, DC Water has now gained the odious distinction of overseeing arguably the largest wastewater spill in U.S. history.

On February 6, DC Water estimated that approximately 243 million gallons of untreated sewage had poured into the Potomac River, just above Washington, D.C., since January 19. The Potomac Riverkeeper Network estimates the spill at more than 300 million gallons. At its peak, a collapsed pipeline six feet in diameter poured 40 million gallons per day into the river, but it took the utility five days to significantly reduce the flow with bypass pumping. That was a full week before a winter storm and glacial temperatures imprisoned the D.C. region (and its rivers) in three weeks of ice and snow.

To keep the main channel of the Potomac relatively clear, DC Water has chosen to pump the historic C&O canal full of — well, you know. On Tuesday, February 17, DC Water happily reported that “No overflow events impacting surface waters have been reported since February 9, 2026.” A Pyrrhic victory, if ever there was one.

What happened? How did DC Water go from a world-class role model to the butt of unsavory jokes in less than a decade? In the interim, Gadis brought a relentless focus on DEI, including a 29-member Business Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Council.

Ironically, Gadis’s bio page boasts that, “Under his leadership, DC Water is delivering on its $2.7 billion commitment to build a massive system of deep tunnels and other infrastructure to nearly eliminate combined sewer overflows to the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers and Rock Creek in the nation’s capital.” That agenda item will surely become a top priority now, right behind cleaning up the E. coli swarm upstream from Georgetown Rowing.

More to the point, under his leadership, DC Water grew its Disadvantaged/Women Business Enterprise (DBE/WBE) Program, which required bidders for “non-federally-assisted projects” over $1 million “to make good faith efforts to identify and subcontract portions … to DBE/WBEs,” according to a business development plan amended on June 4, 2020. By fiscal year 2024, DC Water awarded 38.65% of awards to DBE/WBEs, totaling approximately $520 million out of $1.33 billion.

Gadis’s biography also touts his long experience as “Executive Vice President of Veolia North America and as CEO and President of Veolia Water Indianapolis.” The Daily Caller connected Veolia with the water crisis in Flint, Mich., where it contracted as outside experts to diagnose the problem. A class action lawsuit quotes Gadis on February 10, 2018 touting Veolia’s “technical expertise” and “extensive experience.”

The lawsuit alleged that Veolia experts noted the lead problem, failed to mention it, failed to advise the city to reduce its concentration of ferric chloride (the source of the lead contamination), and declared the city’s water safe to drink in a March 2018 report. (Veolia has contributed $79.3 million in settlements to roughly 26,000 claimants in Michigan, but notes that it never received an adverse finding after a months-long mistrial in 2022.) By May 2018, Gadis was hired by DC Water.

To return to the main point, American corporations now face multiple forms of counter-pressure to retreat from the DEI agenda. Corporate activists assail them with shareholder resolutions that threaten to expose the absurdity of their policies. Federal vigilance threatens to land a company in major legal trouble if their DEI policies are found to be discriminatory. And, as the cherry on top, DEI programs rarely produce favorable results.

This year, the Human Right Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index suffered a 65% drop in participation from Fortune 500 companies. Recent years have provided companies ample reasons to leap off the cliff-bound bandwagon, and corporate leaders are taking the hint.

Joshua Arnold is a senior writer at The Washington Stand. This piece was originally published here.