The Retreat from DEI: Language Change on Large U.S. Foundation Websites, 2019–2025

Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, large private foundations in the United States widely adopted language related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on their public-facing websites. In 2023, a series of legal and political developments began reversing the institutional pressures that had encouraged this adoption: first the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023), then state-level anti-DEI legislation, and culminating in President Trump’s Executive Order 14151 (2025). Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we constructed a longitudinal corpus of 3,612 archived web pages from thirteen large U.S. private foundations and tracked the frequency of sixty-seven DEI-related terms from 2019 to 2025. Among the nine foundations with data in both years, a Wilcoxon signed-rank test indicates a decline from 2023 to 2025 (one-sided p = .029, two-sided p = .059), with median usage falling approximately 40 percent. The decline was broad-based across many terms. These patterns are consistent with coercive isomorphism: the same process that drove widespread, convergent adoption of DEI language after 2020 now appears to be reversing it. The findings establish an empirical baseline for tracking how political pressure reshapes organizational communication about equity.