Companies that told Trump to take his anti-DEI executive order and shove it financially did just as well as the ones that panicked and started dismantling their diversity programs overnight. A new study out of UC Berkeley has the receipts, and they are not flattering for the boardrooms that folded.
What the Study Actually Found
Researchers at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley compared S&P 500 companies that kept their DEI programs against those that wound them down after Trump signed Executive Order 14173 in January 2025. The verdict, according to CBS News: no detectable difference in stock returns, no detectable difference in revenue. Zero. Null. Nothing.
The researchers measured what they call "abnormal performance," meaning the gap between what a stock was expected to do and what it actually did. Companies that held the line on DEI showed the same gap, or lack of gap, as companies that scrapped their programs entirely. The markets, in other words, did not care.
Apple, Costco, Delta Air Lines, and Dollar Tree kept their DEI policies intact. Target and Walmart cut theirs. According to the study, the stock market rewarded and punished both groups with identical indifference. The great DEI reckoning that corporate America convinced itself was coming simply did not arrive.
The Corporate Panic Was Real, Even If the Threat Wasn't
To be fair to the executives who folded, Jacob Grumbach, the Berkeley professor who co-authored the paper, told CBS News that the fear was not entirely irrational. A company sitting in the crosshairs of a hostile administration had real things to worry about: a merger blocked by the FTC, a tax audit that suddenly gets very thorough, federal contracts that evaporate.
"A publicly traded firm that's out of step with an executive order might get less favorable treatment from the executive branch," Grumbach said. That is a legitimate concern when the executive branch has spent the better part of two years demonstrating it will absolutely use government machinery as a political cudgel.
But here is the critical distinction. The companies that held firm did not get financially punished by the market. Whether they got punished by the administration in quieter, less measurable ways is a different question entirely, and one the stock charts cannot answer. What the study does answer is the consumer question, and the answer is: American shoppers mostly kept shopping regardless of what a company's DEI page said.
The Bud Light Exception That Proves the Rule
Every time this conversation happens, someone brings up Bud Light, so let's get it out of the way. Yes, Bud Light partnered with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in 2023, and yes, the backlash was swift and financially brutal for AB InBev. Sales cratered. The stock dropped. It was ugly.
But Bud Light is the exception, not the template. The Berkeley study is looking at broad S&P 500 data from 2025, and at that scale, the Bud Light scenario did not repeat itself as a pattern. What happened to Bud Light was a specific, culturally supercharged moment that hit a specific brand in a specific market. It was not evidence of a generalized law of corporate physics where DEI equals lost revenue.
Target actually flipped the script in 2025. The retailer dropped its DEI programs to get right with the Trump administration, and progressive shoppers responded by calling for a boycott. So Target managed to alienate its own customer base while trying to avoid alienating the administration. Brilliant stuff.
What American Consumers Actually Think
A 2025 poll from Gallup and Bentley University found that roughly six in ten Americans believe companies with diverse workforces are more profitable and more innovative. That is not a fringe position. That is a solid majority of the country looking at corporate diversity programs and saying, yes, this seems like a reasonable business practice.
Grumbach offered a more complicated read, though. The flat revenue numbers across both groups of companies might mean consumers actively support DEI. Or they might mean consumers are not paying that close attention to corporate diversity statements when deciding where to buy their groceries. Probably some of both, in proportions that vary by product, brand, and customer base.
"Many things are going on, one of which is that DEI programs don't always have that much depth to them," Grumbach told CBS News. "Some are symbolic, so this partially reflects that they don't affect companies as much either way." Which is its own indictment, just aimed in a different direction.
The Political Stakes of a Business Study
This study lands at a particular moment in the culture war, and it is going to be used as a weapon. The left will cite it as proof that corporate DEI retreats were spineless capitulation to a political bully. The right will argue the study ignores the real risks companies faced from the federal government. Both of those readings contain some truth.
What the study cannot measure is the counterfactual. We do not know what would have happened to Apple or Costco if the administration had decided to make an example of them. We know what happened in the markets. We do not know what phone calls were made, what deals were quietly affected, or what enforcement decisions were quietly shelved in exchange for what cooperation.
What we do know is that Grumbach's team found companies have, as he put it, "a lot of leeway" to resist pressure to cut DEI programs without suffering for it financially. That is a data point. A significant one. And it raises a pretty obvious question for the companies that already folded.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that American corporations abandoned years of diversity commitments because they genuinely concluded, after careful reflection, that the programs were not working. That is not what happened. What happened is that a significant chunk of the S&P 500 saw a hostile executive order, looked at what the administration was doing to companies it disliked, and made a calculated bet that caving early was cheaper than standing firm. Now a peer-reviewed study is telling them the financial bet was wrong. The markets did not punish the holdouts. The boycotts did not materialize at scale. The cost of holding the line was, by measurable financial metrics, essentially zero.
That leaves the companies that rolled back their DEI programs in an uncomfortable position. They did not do it because the data said to. They did it because they were scared, or because their CEOs wanted to stay on the right side of a president who holds grudges like they are savings bonds. Some of them may have had legitimate concerns about federal retaliation that never showed up in stock prices. But a lot of them just blinked, and now a Berkeley professor is publishing a paper with a title that reads like a verdict: "Markets Do Not Punish Firms for Maintaining DEI."
Target is the most instructive case in this whole mess. The company ditched its DEI programs, got boycotted by the left, got no obvious love from the right, and ended up worse off than companies that did nothing. There is a lesson in there somewhere about what happens when you try to please everyone by standing for nothing. Apparently the market did not care either way, but Target's actual customers cared quite a bit.
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