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Policy proposals from the new administration — and the seemingly unmatched power granted to Elon Musk and his allies — sure do suggest that Donald Trump is trying to serve his megarich benefactor more than nearly anyone else.
Whether it’s punishing South Africa for attempting to stem the impact of apartheid racism or giving bigoted white men unfettered access to the upper echelon of the U.S. government, it seems Trump and his allies are ensuring that Musk gets ample returns on the multimillion-dollar investment he made in Trump’s campaign.
And the apparent benefits to Musk could also include the suspension of a federal probe into allegations of racial discrimination at his company Tesla.
An executive order Trump signed Jan. 21 as part of his crusade against diversity required the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which is part of the Department of Labor and investigates discrimination allegations, to immediately halt “[p]romoting ‘diversity’” and “[h]olding Federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for taking ‘affirmative action.’” According to The San Francisco Standard, the order essentially required the compliance office to stop an audit of Tesla over allegations of discrimination at one of its automobile factories.
The Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs enforced equal employment laws for federal contractors. The office’s employees now have little to do besides notifying companies that they will no longer be audited for potential discrimination — and, in some cases, that they won’t have to pay outstanding fines.
The Standard reported that Tesla was recently notified that the discrimination probe had been halted. Other large corporations were made aware of dropped investigations into their workplaces, too:
The OFCCP sent Tesla a letter last week stating that its review had stopped. “We had to mail the companies we audit to tell them they no longer have to comply with our rules or regulations,” said Aliyah Levin, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 2391, which represents 1,200 federal workers in San Francisco and eight Western states.
Tesla’s letter was one among dozens in California alone, according to Levin. OFCCP investigators were set to review the practices of more than 2,000 U.S. companies this year, including 211 in California, according to federal data that is no longer online. Investigations have been canceled at the San Francisco offices of Google, Meta, Blackrock, Sony, and PG&E, among others.
According to The Standard, a federal lawsuit against Tesla from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is ongoing. When the lawsuit was announced in 2023, the EEOC said: “Black employees regularly encountered graffiti, including variations of the N-word, swastikas, threats, and nooses, on desks and other equipment, in bathroom stalls, within elevators, and even on new vehicles rolling off the production line.” The EEOC also said that “those who raised objections to racial hostility suffered various forms of retaliation, including terminations, changes in job duties, transfers, and other adverse employment actions.”
Tesla has called the allegations “a false narrative that ignores Tesla’s track record of equal employment opportunity.”
It’s unclear how the lawsuit progresses from here. Trump’s acting EEOC chair, Andrea Lucas, has already gotten to work pursuing his priorities of rolling back protections for transgender and nonbinary people. How she’ll approach a discrimination suit against one of Trump’s closest allies remains an open question.