France attacks Trump ‘diktak' on DEI

Yahoo

30-03-2025

France has accused Donald Trump of 'interference' after the White House demanded that European companies working with the US government drop diversity schemes.
Companies in France and other EU countries have received letters in recent days warning that Mr Trump's executive order on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) schemes applied to companies outside the United States.
The order bans companies with federal contracts from operating 'illegal' DEI programmes. The letter from the US embassy in Paris says this 'applies to all suppliers and service providers of the US Government, regardless of their nationality and the country in which they operate'.
Aurore Bergé, France's equality minister, called the letter a 'diktat', and said that French companies would not sign up to its demands.
Ms Bergé told French broadcaster BFMTV: 'The letter is a form, obviously, of interference. That's to say it's an attempt to impose a diktat on our businesses.'
She said that many companies do not intend to respond to what is 'a sort of ultimatum laid out by the US embassy in our country'.
'It's out of the question that we'll prevent our businesses from promoting social progress,' she added. 'Thankfully, a lot of French companies don't plan to change their rules.'
Ms Bergé later tweeted: 'We have principles and laws and we intend that they be respected, despite what the US Embassy says.'
The US letter, which emerged on Friday, demands that companies return a form in five days confirming that they are complying with the order.
Companies must confirm they 'are in compliance in all respects with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws', and that they 'do not operate any programmes promoting diversity, equity and inclusion that violate any applicable federal anti-discrimination laws'.
UK companies are not believed to have received a similar letter. The US embassy in London did not respond to a request for comment on whether it planned to send similar letters to companies in the UK.
BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce, BP and GSK are all among the US Government's top 100 federal contractors, according to the General Services Administration.
GSK said in February that it was dropping diversity activities in order to continue work for the US government.
This weekend, it emerged that WPP, the London-based advertising giant, had dropped references to DEI from its latest annual report as Mr Trump campaigns against the policies. The omissions were first reported by the Sunday Times.
UK branches of companies including McDonald's and Deloitte have kept DEI policies despite their US counterparts scrapping them.
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