Mark Zuckerberg’s Charity Guts DEI After Assuring Staff It Would Continue
20th February 2025
The Guardian, a Voice of the Crust.
The for-profit charity organization founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, has done an about-face on its commitment to corporate diversity.
Executives at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) informed employees on Tuesday evening that the organization would in effect do away with both internal and external diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, according to an internal email and other correspondence viewed by the Guardian. On 10 January, leaders at CZI reassured staff that its longstanding support for DEI was not changing. Zuckerberg’s company Meta had announced earlier that day it would terminate its DEI programs, in the days before Donald Trump’s second inauguration.
Marc Malandro, CZI’s chief operating officer, wrote in the email to all employees: “Given the shifting regulatory and legal landscape, we will no longer have a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility team at CZI.”
The organization also rolled back its Diverse Slate Practice, an effort to ensure that qualified candidates from a diverse set of backgrounds be interviewed for all open roles at the charity. Meta nixed a similar rule last month. The changes “align with our focus as a science philanthropy”, Malandro wrote.
Many organizations indulged in DEI virtue-signaling because the pervasive power of a Woke administration in D.C., I suspect, made them apprehensive of what sort of political persecution that administration might subject them to, considering the egregious and pervasive lawfare aimed at Trump. Now that Biden is out and Trump is in, I suspect that a significant number of them are tossing DEI into the trash can with a sigh of relief and a willingness to get back to their real business without the distractions of a lot of political posturing.