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KOLUMN Magazine
AT&T Ends DEI. The Industry Follows
A regulatory fight in Washington reshapes how America’s largest carriers talk about equity.
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The email that remade AT&T’s corporate values was only a few paragraphs long.
In early December, as holiday ads pushed the usual mix of smartphones and family data plans, a different kind of message landed at the Federal Communications Commission in Washington. In that letter, AT&T—one of the country’s oldest and most powerful telecom companies—told regulators that “DEI does not exist at AT&T, not just in name but in substance,” and pledged that it “does not and will not have any roles focused on DEI.”
On its face, it was a technical filing linked to a technical deal: AT&T is seeking FCC approval for a $1.02 billion purchase of wireless spectrum from U.S. Cellular, airwaves it says will improve its 5G service. But inside the company, and across an industry that only a few years ago advertised its commitment to “equity” and “belonging” in glossy reports and Super Bowl spots, the implications were personal.
From corporate credo to bargaining chip
For much of the past decade, AT&T had been a textbook case of big-company diversity branding. Its 2023 annual report devoted pages to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, touting “employee resource groups,” supplier diversity goals and partnerships with civil-rights organizations. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, executives made public promises to “stand against racism,” and the carrier joined benchmarking tools like the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index to signal support for LGBTQ+ workers.
By 2024, however, the winds had shifted. Conservative activists and media figures began targeting AT&T’s DEI trainings, spotlighting materials that, according to one critic, described racism as a “uniquely white trait” and encouraged white employees to see themselves as “the problem.” Internally, an AT&T memo reported by Bloomberg and HR publications showed the company halting DEI-focused training and withdrawing from the Corporate Equality Index.
The pressure outside the company was even more direct. In his second term, President Donald Trump moved quickly to dismantle federal DEI offices and issued orders discouraging similar efforts in the private sector. At the FCC, Trump-appointed Chair Brendan Carr made his own position blunt: companies that maintained robust diversity initiatives might find merger approvals harder to come by.
By spring, AT&T had begun quietly dialing back its DEI apparatus. By December, the rollback was complete.
The price of spectrum
In the letter that accompanied its spectrum application, AT&T told the FCC that it had eliminated all roles “focused on DEI,” removed diversity-related training and would no longer rely on workforce diversity targets or demographic-based performance incentives. The company framed the shift as a return to first principles: hiring and career advancement would be “merit-based,” free from “quotas based on race, sex or sexual orientation.”
To supporters of the move, including Carr, AT&T’s language sounded like common sense. Carr has argued that corporate DEI programs risk crossing the line into unlawful discrimination, and he has celebrated each rollback as a “victory for equal opportunity and nondiscrimination.”
Critics hear something different: an agency charged with overseeing communications using its gatekeeping power to reshape internal workplace culture. Advocacy group Free Press called Carr’s anti-DEI crusade “racist and sexist” and “almost certainly a dereliction of his duty,” warning that he was twisting civil-rights law to portray efforts to reduce inequality as discriminatory in themselves.
Whatever one’s politics, the effect is hard to miss. In the span of a year, all three major U.S. wireless carriers—AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile—have either dismantled or dramatically pared back their DEI programs, each while seeking approval for multi-billion-dollar deals.
An industry falls into line
Verizon moved first. In May, as it sought the FCC’s blessing for a roughly $9.6 billion acquisition of Frontier Communications, the company notified regulators that it would end its DEI programs. Verizon promised to strip “Diversity and Inclusion” pages from its website, remove DEI references from training, drop diversity goals and tie executive bonuses solely to non-DEI metrics.
The FCC approved the Frontier deal soon after, explicitly noting Verizon’s commitment to stop its DEI efforts.
T-Mobile followed that summer, announcing what one marketing industry analysis described as a “full dismantling” of its DEI programs while it pursued two high-stakes transactions, including a $4.4 billion bid for most of U.S. Cellular’s wireless business. The company removed DEI language from public materials, reassigned DEI staff and recast training as generic “leadership development.”
By the time AT&T made its December pledge, an industry pattern was clear enough that trade publication Fierce Network summed it up in a single line: “At this point, all 3 major U.S. wireless operators have ditched their DEI.”
Whiplash for workers and customers
For customers glancing at their monthly bill, these shifts are nearly invisible. A recent consumer-oriented article about changes coming to AT&T heading into 2026 listed higher “recovery fees,” reduced autopay discounts— and, almost in passing, the end of DEI programs as one of five key changes.
Inside the companies, however, the story looks different. At AT&T, LGBTQ+ employees had spent years using internal resource groups to push for benefits and support; those groups now survive only in a diluted, “open to everyone” form, stripped of much of their original mission. Workers of color who once saw the company’s diversity reports as imperfect but meaningful signals now watch as references to race-conscious programs vanish from websites and training.
At T-Mobile, marketing analysts have warned that dismantling DEI may bring short-term regulatory gains but long-term brand risks—particularly with Gen Z consumers, who routinely tell pollsters they expect companies to stand for something beyond quarterly earnings.
And for Black- and brown-owned small businesses—the neighborhood repair shops, food trucks and start-ups that appear in telecom supplier diversity showcases when times are good—the loss of formal DEI goals can feel like the floor shifting underneath them. Verizon’s commitment to revise its supplier policies and sponsorships as part of its DEI rollback raises uncomfortable questions: when diversity is no longer measured, will it still matter in procurement meetings?
A broader corporate reckoning
The telecom story is part of a wider corporate retrenchment. Across industries, companies that poured money and rhetoric into DEI after 2020 are now pulling back, citing legal uncertainty after a 2023 Supreme Court decision curbing affirmative action and a patchwork of state-level laws restricting DEI offices.
A Washington Post analysis this fall described executives caught in “whiplash,” squeezed between conservative officials and activists who say DEI is discriminatory, and employees and consumers who see rollbacks as a betrayal. For AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, the squeeze comes with a unique twist: the regulator weighing their biggest business bets is also one of the loudest DEI critics in government.
The result is a kind of forced corporate amnesia. The words that once filled annual reports—belonging, equity, anti-racism—now disappear from official documents, even as companies insist nothing has changed about their underlying commitment to fairness.
What’s left after the rebrand
AT&T’s leaders argue that ending DEI programs does not mean abandoning equal opportunity. In public statements and letters, they emphasize that the company will continue to prohibit discrimination and will judge employees “based on merit and qualification.”
Supporters of the rollback say DEI had become an ideological project, one that sorted workers and customers into identity categories and imposed political orthodoxy in spaces that should be neutral. Critics counter that “neutrality” in a country marked by racial and gender inequality is never neutral—that dismantling tools meant to address disparities simply restores the status quo.
Somewhere between those positions are the people whose lives intersect with the telecom giants in less abstract ways: the call-center worker wondering whether a promotion path that once promised attention to underrepresented groups will quietly narrow; the Black entrepreneur who built her business on supplier diversity commitments that may no longer be tracked; the rural customer who may benefit from new spectrum-powered coverage but worries about the values shaping the company delivering it.
They don’t appear in FCC dockets or executive letters. But they will live with the consequences of a bargain few of them were asked to approve: faster service and bigger deals, in exchange for the formal end of a set of promises that, for a brief period, companies like AT&T insisted were central to who they were.