FCC Chair Investigates Disney Over Potential Past and Present DEI Policies
Disney scaled back DEI policies this year. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr still opened an investigation.
When President Donald Trump reentered office in January, he immediately set about removing all traces of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives from the federal government. He signed one executive order "ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preferencing" and another "ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity."
More recently, anti-DEI efforts have moved from the government into the private sector. Last week, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr threatened Disney—which owns the ABC broadcast network—with government action over the DEI policies it no longer has, and the ones it may or may not currently have.
"I am writing to inform you that I have asked the FCC's Enforcement Bureau to open an investigation into Disney and ABC," Carr wrote in a letter to Disney CEO Bob Iger. "In particular, I want to ensure that Disney and ABC have not been violating FCC equal employment opportunity regulations by promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination. While I have seen reports that Disney recently walked back some of its DEI programs, significant concerns remain."
Disney ended certain DEI efforts in February—for example, no longer using "diversity & inclusion" as a metric of executive compensation and shortening the content advisories that played before some classic films on the Disney+ streaming service. Company insiders worried about the precedent set by capitulating to the concerns of social conservatives: "What's next? Where do we go from here? What do we stand for now, keeping MAGA happy?" one complained to Deadline.
In fact, Carr apparently worries Disney didn't go far enough: "I am concerned that ABC and its parent company have been or may still be promoting invidious forms of DEI in a manner that does not comply with FCC regulations," he wrote to Iger. "Although your company recently made some changes to how it brands certain efforts, it is not clear that the underlying policies have changed in a fundamental manner—nor that past practices complied with relevant FCC regulations." (In February, Carr sent very similar letters to the CEOs of Comcast—which owns NBCUniversal—and Verizon.)
Carr's threat is a stretch. The FCC is empowered to enforce equal employment opportunity rules on radio and TV stations, but targeting Disney's DEI practices via its authority over ABC—one of Disney's numerous subsidiary companies—gives the impression that Carr is simply reaching for whatever means he can.
Trump's executive orders equate DEI with unlawful "race- and sex-based preferences," but that's not always true. "Correctly designed DEI programs have never been inherently illegal, and remain viable even in the face of recent events," according to law firm Fisher Phillips, "but they must comply with anti-discrimination laws."
Discrimination is a prohibited act defined in state and federal laws, while DEI is an amorphous umbrella term used to describe any number of diversity programs; while a DEI initiative could be discriminatory, they are not inherently the same.
In his letter to Iger, Carr's justification for FCC involvement comes up short. "In recent years, Disney made DEI a key priority for the company's businesses and embedded explicit race- and gender-based criteria across its operations," he wrote. To substantiate that claim, among other sources, Carr cites a recent report that 99 percent of Disney shareholders rejected a proposal in February 2025 that would have ended the company's participation in the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index, which lists and rates companies' LGBTQ policies.
In other words, Carr takes Disney shareholders' near-unanimous support of continuing a nonprofit partnership as evidence of the company's discriminatory bias necessitating the involvement of a government agency—an agency whose primary purpose is regulating the broadcast licenses of TV and radio stations.
Carr also cites previously reported guidelines for ABC's TV shows "that '50 percent of regular and recurring characters' be drawn from 'underrepresented groups.'" This mandate, he says, "may have forced racial and identity quotas into every level of production—demanding that '50% or more' of writers, directors, crew, and vendors be selected based on group identity."
Carr does not back up his assumption, other than citing a 2021 Hollywood Reporter article that quotes Disney executive Dana Walden as saying, "We received some incredibly well-written scripts that did not satisfy our standards in terms of inclusion, and we passed on them….That's not going to get on the air anymore because that's not what our audience wants."
Walden said nothing about the "writers, directors, crew, and vendors" that would have been hired on this show, merely the characters it would have depicted. It would be ludicrous, for example, to expect ABC's Black-ish—a show about a multigenerational African-American family—not to feature a mostly black cast. Walden said ABC's audience wanted more diverse and inclusive shows, not that Disney would stop hiring white people.
Carr is no stranger to wielding government power against companies that conservatives oppose, and he has been very open about his plan to use DEI as a cudgel against any companies he wants—particularly, those with mergers and acquisitions that involve FCC broadcast licenses and therefore require his agency's approval.
"Any businesses that are looking for FCC approval, I would encourage them to get busy ending any sort of their invidious forms of DEI discrimination," Carr told Bloomberg in March. "If there's businesses out there that are still promoting invidious forms of DEI discrimination, I really don't see a path forward where the FCC could reach the conclusion that approving the transaction is going to be in the public interest."
But Carr's threat against Disney suggests less that he is concerned about illegal discrimination and more that he is interested in punishing the company for its diversity efforts.
Consumers who disapprove of Disney's DEI measures are free not to shop at its stores, visit its theme parks, or watch its TV shows or movies. But unless it very explicitly violates existing federal guidelines, it's not the government's business—and it's especially not the FCC's concern.
