State of Connecticut
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong
April 7, 2025
Experts: Trump administration’s aggressive stance on DEI likely to have chilling effect on CT employers’ diversity programs
HBJ PHOTO | STEVE LASCHEVER
Patricia Reilly is the co-lead for law firm Harris Beach Murtha’s labor and employment group. She said employers uncertain about diversity programs must understand the difference between affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion.
Law firms around Connecticut are fielding calls from client companies concerned about the implications of the Trump administration’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
In early April, Harris Beach Murtha spent an entire session of its regular webinar series discussing the labor and employment law implications of Trump’s first 100 days, giving top billing to DEI executive orders.
“I think that you can do things to create a more inclusive and diverse workforce without running afoul of the law, pre-executive order and post-executive order,” said Patricia Reilly, the firm’s co-lead for labor and employment, in an interview with the Hartford Business Journal.
Key to navigating this new environment, she said, is understanding the difference between affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion.
“To me, that is a big distinction that employers need to understand,” she said. “Traditionally, affirmative action has been a protocol procedure where employers are required to meet certain quotas, hire a certain number of people of a protected category or a disadvantaged class.”
That’s the type of hiring that seemed to be targeted in Trump’s day-one executive order on government contracting, but that’s not the definition of DEI.
“For years, we’ve been advising our clients that you cannot have a DEI initiative that favors groups, certain protected categories, and disadvantages others,” she said. “To me, this is nothing new.”
Reilly says the language that the administration has been using to speak about these issues — emphasizing the DEI term — has led to a lot of confusion.
“For sure, the conversation has gotten muddied as a result of these federal initiatives, but there has always been a distinction, and there’s an ongoing clear distinction between DEI initiatives and affirmative action,” she said.
It’s also a distinction that was emphasized by Attorney General William Tong in guidance he issued for businesses in the wake of the January 20th executive order.
“Diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility refers to law-abiding and commonsense employment policies,” he said in a statement. “Certain partisan demagogues like to misuse the term ‘DEI’ as code for advancing their re-segregationist vision for our country. There is zero need for businesses to enable that. Our guidance to businesses is simple — keep doing what you are doing to prevent unlawful employment discrimination and support your workers.”
Reilly said she expects the Trump administration’s aggressive stance to have a chilling effect on diversity programs, even in a blue state like Connecticut, but she says employers don’t need to give up on improving the demographics of their workforce.
“I think it is still possible to do it, and to do it correctly,” she said. “My experience is that many employers still want to have a diverse, inclusive workplace, but they’re fine-tuning how they’re going to try to enable that sort of culture.”
Parsing through the rhetoric
Sharon Brown
The topic was also central to a recent dinner hosted in Cromwell by the Connecticut Bar Association’s Young Lawyers Section, where Sharon Brown, diversity, equity and inclusion partner at Barclay Damon, sought to define the terms.
She emphasized that diversity means “acknowledging and valuing the difference among different people,” while equity involves “meeting people where they are, and giving them the tools they need to succeed.”
Inclusion, she said, is “about ensuring people not only feel included, but also have a true sense of belonging.”
Permissible DEI actions that Reilly recommends include broadening the reach of hiring ads into more diverse spaces, and rethinking formal educational qualifications for positions where that’s possible.
The intent is to diversify the pool of potential hires for an open position.
The employers that will be left in the most difficult situation, according to Reilly, are those that hold both federal and state contracts, where federal practices are now likely to conflict with the state of Connecticut’s hiring requirements.
Daniel Schwartz
Daniel Schwartz, an employment lawyer at Shipman Goodwin, says companies here need to pay attention to state law on diversity issues, even if they’re not contracting with government entities.
“State laws are even broader than those that exist out of federal laws,” he said. “So, the notion that you should just eliminate sex harassment prevention training under the guise of it being a quote ‘DEI program,’ I think would be very shortsighted considering states like Connecticut still mandate such training.”
Schwartz concurs with Reilly that the rhetoric of the administration expressed through executive orders is running ahead of anything that employers might actually have to comply with.
“The law hasn’t changed at all, nor have there been any changes to any federal regulations,” he said. “The biggest thing for employers to understand is despite the rhetoric, which is certainly loud and pervasive, the underlying laws have not been modified.”
Heavy-handed tactics
Law firms themselves are squarely in the crosshairs on this issue. The acting chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Andrea Lucas, sent letters to 20 major law firms in March, warning that their employment policies to boost diversity, equity and inclusion may run counter to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits an employer from discriminating against an individual because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.
The letters ask the firms for information about the internships, scholarships and fellowships they offer to law students and their hiring and compensation practices, as well as the name, sex and race of every lawyer who has worked at or applied for a job at the firms since 2019.
Schwartz thinks “absolutely” such heavy-handed tactics will have a chilling effect.
“Part of the strategy of this administration does appear to be trying to encourage employers to withdraw some of these programs on their own,” he said.
So far, Connecticut employers Schwartz said he has talked to are taking a wait-and-see approach, remaining quiet on their intentions.
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