A US federal agency for protecting workers’ civil rights revealed Wednesday that it is investigating sportswear giant Nike for allegedly discriminating against white employees through its diversity policies.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission disclosed the investigation in a motion filed in a Missouri federal court demanding that Nike fully comply — effectively compelling them to cooperate — with a subpoena for information.
Trump’s war on DEI
The EEOC’s allegations are the latest example of the White House’s using the civil rights agency to target corporate diversity initiatives, as the Trump administration and Lucas have made scrutiny of DEI-related discrimination a stated priority.
Nike employees themselves were not the ones filing the discrimination claim, as is typical procedure for EEOC filings.
Instead, the charges were made by then-commissioner Andrea Lucas in May 2024, who has since been appointed chair of the EEOC by US president Donald Trump.
The claim was based on publicly available hiring information such as Nike’s own annual “Impact Reports” and information on its public website.
The charge, for example, cited Nike’s publicly stated goal in 2021 of achieving 35% representation of racial and ethnic minorities in its corporate workforce by 2025.
Many US companies made similar commitments in the wake of the widespread 2020 racial justice protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man.
Bias in hiring?
Companies have said such commitments are not quotas but rather goals they hoped to achieve through methods such as widening recruitment efforts and rooting out any bias during hiring process.
The Trump administration has made opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) a central theme across federal policy, repeatedly arguing that DEI efforts undermine “merit” and can amount to reverse discrimination.
DEI is an umbrella term for workplace and institutional policies aimed at increasing protections and hiring for underrepresented or marginalised groups and addressing barriers linked to race, gender, disability or other characteristics.
Critics on the right portray DEI less as an effort to tackle historic disadvantage and more as “positive discrimination”, arguing that it can sideline some candidates — including white workers — in favour of others.
Such narratives are frequently promoted by far-right groups in the US and parts of Europe.
That framing has been used to justify executive actions directing agencies to wind down DEI offices and programmes, and to reshape hiring, training and contracting practices across government.
Others accused of DEI
The White House has also linked DEI to high-profile controversies.
After a deadly plane crash in the Washington, DC area at the very start of his second term in office, Trump suggested — without providing evidence — that FAA DEI hiring policies could be a factor, and ordered an aviation review focused on what he described as the impact of “DEI and woke policies”.
Trump allies have echoed claims that DEI had lowered standards in air-traffic control, though fact-checkers and industry experts said those arguments mischaracterised existing recruitment policies and did not establish any connection to the crash.
Elsewhere, the administration has pushed to strip DEI considerations from the armed forces in the name of “readiness”, while agencies such as the EPA have cited anti-DEI priorities in cancelling large grant programmes.
The Pentagon’s broader effort to purge DEI-related content has also drawn scrutiny after officials acknowledged some material was removed or archived in error, including historic tributes.
EEOC goes after Nike
The EEOC sought the company’s criteria for selecting employees for redundancies, how it tracks and uses worker race and ethnicity data, and information about programmes which allegedly provided race-restricted mentoring, leadership or career development opportunities, according to court documents.
In a statement, Nike said the company has worked to cooperate with the EEOC and the subpoena “feels like a surprising and unusual escalation.”
“We have shared thousands of pages of information and detailed written responses to the EEOC’s inquiry and are in the process of providing additional information,” Nike said in a statement sent to The Associated Press.
Nike appears to be the highest profile company the EEOC has targeted with a publicly confirmed, formal anti-DEI investigation. In November, the EEOC issued a similar subpoena against financial services provider Northwestern Mutual.
“When there are compelling indications, including corporate admissions in extensive public materials, that an employer’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion-related programmes may violate federal prohibitions against race discrimination or other forms of unlawful discrimination, the EEOC will take all necessary steps — including subpoena actions — to ensure the opportunity to fully and comprehensively investigate,” Lucas said in a statement.
Civil rights for white employees
The disclosure comes two months after Lucas posted a social media call-out urging white men to come forward if they have experienced race or sex discrimination at work.
The post urged eligible workers to reach out to the agency “as soon as possible” and referred users to the agency’s fact sheet on DEI-related discrimination.
Lucas’ charge came just months after America First Legal, a conservative legal group founded by top Trump adviser Stephen Miller, sent the EEOC a letter outlining complaints against Nike and urging the agency to file a commissioner’s charge.
America First Legal has flooded the EEOC with similar letters in recent years urging investigations into the DEI practices of major US companies.
It is unclear how many other companies the EEOC may be targeting through such commissioner’s charges.
The EEOC is prohibited from revealing any charge — by workers or commissioners — unless it results in fines, settlements, legal action or other such public actions.
Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, employers are prohibited from using race as a criteria for hiring or other employment decisions.
Lucas has long warned that many companies risk violating the Civil Rights Act — which was enacted after long-fought battles in the US Civil Rights Movements to protect vulnerable US communities such as Black and Latino workers — by not hiring enough Caucasian employees.