Bloomberg Law, January 24, 2025, Wall Street Watchdogs Scrub DEI Pages After Trump Orders (1)
Lawmakers also explicitly required financial regulatory agencies to establish the minority and women inclusion offices under Section 342 of the Dodd-Frank Act, with the goal of attracting talent, fostering inclusion, and developing standards to assess diversity policies and practices among regulated entities.
It’s unclear whether all the covered agencies had disbanded those offices altogether, but their initial compliance with Trump’s directives sent a chilling signal, said Jesse Van Tol, the president and CEO of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.
Trump’s executive action “doesn’t have the same force as law, and the creation of those offices was established under the law in Dodd-Frank,” Van Tol said. “If they did indeed shut down access to the websites in response to the executive order, that would be troubling and potentially legally problematic.”
