SEC Cuts Access to Mandated Diversity Office Amid DEI Purge (2)

The SEC has quietly erased the online home of its federally mandated Office of Minority and Women Inclusion, as President Donald Trump seeks to end federal diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s main web page for the office went away sometime after March 2, according to a Bloomberg Law review of archived versions of the agency’s website. The page has been replaced with an error message.

It is unclear whether the Office of Minority and Women Inclusion is operational Monday. But Nathaniel Benjamin still was listed as the office’s director in an online SEC directory of senior agency officials. He was one of about a dozen employees working in the office earlier this year, according to SEC records. Benjamin became director in 2024.

An SEC spokesperson declined to comment Monday.

The SEC’s Office of Minority and Women Inclusion and similar units at other financial regulators are required under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act. The SEC office “seeks to attract high-quality talent for all levels of its workforce, foster inclusion in all levels of business activities, and develop standards for assessing the diversity policies and practices of entities regulated by the SEC,” according to information preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.

The web page’s disappearance came after Trump directed agency heads in January to terminate all DEI offices and positions to the “maximum extent allowed by law,” according to an executive order. Trump made Republican Commissioner Mark Uyeda the agency’s interim leader in January. The Senate confirmed Wall Street consultant Paul Atkins as the agency’s permanent chairman on April 9.

The SEC removed the Office of Minority and Women Inclusion portal after first taking down a page on DEI in January. The end of the diversity page coincided with the elimination of sites for DEI programs and offices of minority and women inclusion at the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Rep. Maxine Waters of California, the House Financial Services Committee’s top Democrat, warned the Trump administration in a January letter against ignoring the Dodd-Frank mandate for offices of minority and women inclusion at financial regulators. The offices are “legally required to promote diversity and inclusion within these agencies and their regulated entities,” said Waters, who authored the provision requiring them.

A spokesperson for Waters didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The SEC’s Office of Minority and Women Inclusion web page included links to details about a diversity program for the agency’s suppliers and its efforts to collect firms’ self-assessments about their diversity policies and practices, among other information.

In 2023, the SEC said it secured only 58 responses from about 1,300 investment advisers, brokers, and other firms as part of its efforts to better understand their DEI practices and policies.