
US companies delay impact reports with DEI, ESG under attack
For more than a decade, this is usually the time period when companies tout the steps they're taking to lower carbon emissions and improve the diversity, equity, and inclusion of their businesses. Opposition to these reports first surfaced about three years ago when GOP lawmakers and activists began pressing companies to scale back such efforts. And some companies have reacted by taking steps such as scrubbing ESG and DEI-related words from public documents.
Get Starting Point
A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday.
Enter Email
Sign Up
The election of President Donald Trump has further empowered the anti-DEI movement. During his first week in the White House, he signed executive orders ending federal diversity programs and restricting gender definition to two sexes — male and female. None of the companies contacted said Trump's actions changed their planning for releasing sustainability reports.
Advertisement
'The consequences of reported information are much greater now than they were a decade ago,' said Martin Whittaker, chief executive officer of JUST Capital, noting that both progressive and conservative activists are searching for evidence of companies' missteps.
Advertisement
Whittaker estimates that about 25 percent of sustainability-related corporate reporting is behind schedule this year.
Here are some of the S&P 500 companies that have yet to publish sustainability reports, according to researchers at DiversIQ.
Nike, JPMorgan, Constellation Brands, and Akamai Technologies have different explanations for why their sustainability reports haven't been published this year.
Nike said in an email that it still plans to share the work it's doing to create a more inclusive and sustainable world for athletes in other formats and that its commitment to diversity goals for 2025 hasn't changed.
In a regulatory filing, JPMorgan said it plans to release a consolidated report on ESG and climate topics later this year. However, the bank added that it will 'monitor the evolving disclosure landscape as we iterate on our approach to disclosure.' JPMorgan published its '2024 Climate Report' in November.
At Constellation Brands, a spokesperson said the timing of the publication's release was adjusted after receiving 'stakeholder feedback.' The next report is scheduled to be issued next month, the spokesperson said. Cambridge-based cloud computing and cybersecurity company Akamai said its data-center vendors were partly to blame for a delay in publication until the end of this quarter. The company wasn't more specific.
For the past several years, Pfizer Inc. had published an impact report by April. When contacted last week about the delay in publication, a company spokesperson said the timing was adjusted to 'allow for necessary internal processes in preparation for evolving global ESG (environmental, social and governance) reporting requirements.' The company released its report this week.
Advertisement
The lack of information is a blow, even if temporary, to corporate transparency. Many shareholders rely on the disclosures to gauge how serious companies are about addressing ESG issues, inequities in the workforce and other factors that can impact the short- and long-term value of their investments.
Activist investors who've pressed companies to release more data on DEI and climate initiatives have been willing to cut companies some slack this year, given the heightened scrutiny from the Trump administration.
Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow, which supports social responsibility, said executives have been asking him privately for some flexibility in what information they release this year.
'We told them to not put themselves at risk right now,' Behar said. 'That isn't good for anyone.'
And the caution is warranted, said GianCarlo Canaparo, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has warned against possible discrimination in company DEI programs.
Corporate leaders are aware that Trump has asked agency heads to identify nine companies or organizations that should be investigated for possible illegal DEI activities, Canaparo said. So far, the names haven't been made public, but it's clearly on companies' radar, he said.
'If you have been using race preferences, you really want to make sure you don't get caught,' Canaparo said. 'And if you haven't, you want to make sure you aren't dragged into litigation to explore whether you have.'
Mathieu Benhamou and Fiona Rutherford contributed to this report.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Motor Trend
37 minutes ago
- Motor Trend
How the One Big Beautiful Bill Will Affect Car Buying and Ownership
On July 4, President Trump signed the 'One Big Beautiful Bill' Act into law. The budget reconciliation bill made big changes to federal spending, taxes, and regulation, some of which will have big effects on car owners, enthusiasts, and the automotive industry. We've read through the 879-page bill and outlined the parts that'll affect your next car purchase, the price of gas, and your commute. The "One Big Beautiful Bill" affects car buying by altering tax deductions on auto loans, ending EV tax credits, reducing CAFE penalties to zero, and cutting grants for clean vehicles. It also impacts gas and power prices by changing drilling and energy policies. This summary was generated by AI using content from this MotorTrend article Read Next Because this is a reconciliation bill, which modifies existing budget legislation rather than starting from scratch, there are limits to what can be included in the legislation. Everything in the bill has to be directly related to government spending and taxation, so some of the changes are creatively written in order to make the cut. (As always, please consult your tax professional before making financial decisions. The below is provided for information purposes only and is not tax or financial advice.) 'No' Tax on Car Loan Interest This one is confusing, and 'no' is in quotation marks because it's misleading. Car buyers looking to finance their next purchase may be able to write off some—but not all—of the interest charged on the loan each calendar year on their taxes. That's not the same as abolishing or suspending the tax altogether, as the claim implies. There are also a number of rules for qualifying which will cut off a lot of buyers. First and foremost, the vehicle you're buying has to be assembled in the U.S. That will be confusing for some buyers, because some of the bestselling vehicles in the U.S, such as the Toyota RAV4 and Chevrolet Silverado, are built in multiple plants, not all of them in the U.S. The IRS will know where your vehicle is made because you have to supply the VIN when claiming the tax deduction, and that number includes a digit that represents the country of origin. The tax deduction doesn't apply to leases, either, only purchases. It appears to apply to both new and used vehicle purchases, as the legislation makes no distinction. Vehicles with salvage titles and parts cars don't count, either. Similarly, it doesn't apply to anything with a gross vehicle weight rating over 14,000 pounds (which is the rating of a Ford F-350, as an example). Commercial vehicles qualify but only if they're for personal use, not business use. Business fleet purchases don't qualify, so be careful if you're planning to register your vehicle to your small business in order to take advantage of other tax incentives. If your purchase qualifies, there are still more rules. The tax deduction is capped at $10,000 per calendar year, so if you pay more than that in interest, the balance will still be taxed. If you make more than $100,000 per year as an individual or $200,000 per year as a joint filer (married or similar), the amount of interest you're able to deduct goes down by $200 for every $1,000 of income you earn over $100,000 (individual, or $200,000 combined). Do the math and it means no tax credit for anyone making over $150,000 individually or $250,000 combined. Finally, the tax credit is only available for a limited time. You can't start counting interest payments towards a deduction until January 1, 2026, so the rest of this year doesn't count. The tax credit will expire on December 31, 2029 unless Congress extends it. EV Tax Credits End September 30 The (up to) $7,500 federal tax credit for new and used EVs now expires on September 30 of this year. Previously, both tax credits were scheduled to expire on December 31, 2032. Likewise, the tax credit for commercial EVs expires the same day. State tax credits are not affected. On a related note, the federal tax credit for installing an EV charger or renewable fuel dispenser at your home or business will expire even sooner, on July 30 of this year. Tax credits have been a huge driver of EV sales to date, so the end of them could cause final vehicle sale prices to rise and sales to plummet. A large drop in sales could lead automakers to discontinue some or all of their EVs, reducing choice in the market. Lower cost EVs with smaller profit margins would be vulnerable, which could lead to only more expensive EVs on the market. Less Help With Bad Auto Loans Stopping predatory auto loans had been a major focus for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau during the Biden administration, but enforcement is likely to drop off substantially after the passage of this bill. Funding for the bureau is cut by 54 percent, which will drastically reduce the number of investigations and actions it's able to execute. No Penalties for CAFE Violations Because this is a reconciliation bill, Congress could not make changes to vehicle emissions and fuel economy laws. Rather than replace or abolish the Corporate Average Fuel Economy program (CAFE), this bill keeps all the existing rules in place but reduces the penalties for breaking them to $0.00. This means automakers are free to ignore federal fuel economy regulations as the EPA cannot meaningfully enforce them. This could potentially affect consumers in multiple ways. If automakers stop following CAFE rules, fuel economy could go down and emissions could go up. Any savings on R&D could then be passed on to the consumer. This is unlikely, however. Automakers plan as much as a decade in advance, so vehicles for sale today were engineered years ago and the money already spent. Future iterations of Congress and future presidents could also reinstate the penalties in a few years, which would wipe out any savings and put automakers behind on R&D. Fuel economy regulations elsewhere in the world aren't changing, so there's little incentive for automakers to cut R&D spending regardless, meaning no reduction in pricing is likely. No More Money for Clean Commercial Vehicles Businesses and local governments around the country have taken advantage of federal grants to help offset the cost of replacing older heavy duty commercial vehicles with EVs. These grants were commonly used to replace old, diesel school busses with new, electric versions and also covered installation of chargers and training employees to work on those vehicles and chargers. Any grant money not already spent has been taken away. Similarly, grants for reducing diesel exhaust emissions in low income and disadvantaged areas have been cut, with all unspent money withdrawn. Funding has also been cut for an EPA program which studies the health and environmental effects of fuel additives. Reduction in Tax Credits for Commuters If your employer provides a transit passes, vanpool reimbursement, parking passes, or a bicycle commuting reimbursement, the amount you're able to deduct on your taxes is going down. Previously, you could deduct up to $175 per month each for your vanpool, transit pass, or parking pass. Now, you can only deduct up to $175 total per month for any combination of those services. The deduction for bicycle commuting has been eliminated entirely. No More Money or Credits For Home Solar and Battery Backups This is tangential to car buying and ownership, but if you were planning to take advantage of tax credits to install solar panels and battery backups in your home to offset the cost of charging an EV, you're out of luck. Any money not already spent on those grants and tax credits has been rescinded. Likewise, the business tax credit for building specifically energy efficient new homes has been cut, along with business tax credits for training contractors to install solar panels, batteries, and more efficient appliances. Gas and Power Prices Could Be Affected Portions of the bill addressing oil drilling and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve may have a small impact on gas prices in the future. Various provisions restart new oil and gas drilling leases both in the U.S. and offshore in its oceans, which would eventually add to the global oil supply and potentially push down prices. However, it will take years for any new leases to be acquired, explored, drilled, and turned into production wells, and oil companies are already sitting on a large number of unexplored leases. Because oil is a globally traded commodity, adding more supply doesn't necessarily change the price of a barrel of oil, nor the price of a gallon of gas. The bill also requires the government to abandon a plan introduced during Trump's first term to sell down part of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Instead, it requires the government to buy more oil it can store for future emergencies. Presidents like to draw on the Strategic Petroleum Reserve during times of high gas prices, but the quantities withdrawn are typically so small they have little to no impact on lowering the price at the pump. With regard to electricity generation, the bill paves the way to reopen old, closed power plants and cuts tax credits for wind and solar farms. Old power plants will now be able to reopen without any retrofitting of modern pollution controls, which could make them economically viable, although it depends on the individual plant. New wind and solar farms now have a shorter window to begin operations before the tax credits are cut off, and the lack of credits is expected to make new such farms economically unviable in the future. Fewer wind and solar farms means energy prices are less likely to go down or remain flat, while old power plants coming back online could partially offset their absence at the cost of greater air pollution in those communities. The bill also undoes several provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act, which provided loans and grants for electrical infrastructure improvements nationally, including transmission line improvements in particular, as well as integrating offshore wind farms into the power grid and improving electrical infrastructure on tribal land. Any reductions in electricity prices or increases in reliability these improvements may have provided are off the table. Similarly, by cutting the clean hydrogen production credit several years earlier than planned, the bill will likely slow or halt the adoption of clean sources of hydrogen and slow or stall the nascent hydrogen vehicle industry, both for private and commercial vehicles. Most hydrogen today is produced from gas and oil, which is both cheaper and dirtier than clean alternatives.


Bloomberg
an hour ago
- Bloomberg
Trump Pressures South Korea to Pay More for Defense
President Donald Trump said South Korea should pay more for its own defense, upping pressure on the Asian ally after sending a letter to extend time for negotiations before 25% across-the-board levies are set to kick in for its shipments to the US. 'South Korea is making a lot of money and they are very good, they are very good but you know, they should be paying for their own military,' Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
How Unusual Options Standout Boston Scientific (BSX) is Signaling a Statistical Edge
Undeniably, Barchart's screener for unusual stock options volume is an important tool for deciphering market sentiment, especially among the voices that matter. Indeed, the smart money is akin to battleground states. Sure, California and New York represent the nation's economic engine. But it's states like Pennsylvania and Georgia that ultimately determine the presidency. Still, it's not a perfect analogy because unusual options screeners can be deceiving. For example, put/call ratios provide a potential clue as to the smart money's motivations. At the same time, derivatives can be bought or sold, thus changing whether the position is debit based or credit based. Moreover, an elevated volume of calls doesn't necessarily imply bullishness nor does heightened put activity necessarily imply bearishness. Chevron Stock's 4.6% Dividend Yield and 1.67% One Month Short Put Yield Make CVX a Buy Trading DAL Earnings? This Naked Put Play Benefits from Volatility Constellation Brands Stock is Down But Produced Good Earnings - Is STZ a Buy Here? Our exclusive Barchart Brief newsletter is your FREE midday guide to what's moving stocks, sectors, and investor sentiment - delivered right when you need the info most. Subscribe today! Further, not every security generating unusual options activity is going to be statistically intriguing. Frankly, many if not most names that look attractive are simply generating noise. A select few are genuinely tempting — and it's my belief that we can deploy Markovian frameworks and probabilistic analyses to separate the wheat from the chaff. We'll dive into this concept soon enough. For now, investors may want to zero in on Boston Scientific (BSX). A specialist in medical devices, BSX stock has been a solid performer. Since the start of this year, the equity gained nearly 17%. For context, the benchmark S&P 500 index is up only less than 7% during the same frame. Even better, those who missed the boat may have an opportunity for a do-over. On Thursday, total options volume for BSX stock reached 15,589 contracts, representing a 33.39% lift over the trailing one-month average. Call volume hit 11,368 contracts while put volume sat at only 4,221 contracts. This pairing yielded a put/call ratio of 0.37, which in theory favors optimistic traders. Still, as I mentioned earlier, investors need to be careful of reading too deeply into the ratio. It's here that options flow — a screener that focuses exclusively on big block transactions likely placed by institutional investors — can be instructive. Heading into the holiday weekend, net trade sentiment clocked in at $378,800 above parity, distinctly favoring the bulls. As compelling as the unusual options data is, the screener alone doesn't always provide a clear framework for when an anticipated move may materialize. Usually, transactions in the derivatives market feature multiple expiration dates, making inferences difficult. To remedy this challenge, we can apply statistical analysis. Unfortunately, statistics is a deceptively difficult practice in the investment markets. Taking the frequency of the desired outcome divided by the total number of events merely calculates the derivative probability or the outcome odds across the underlying dataset's entire distribution. What we're looking for is the conditional probability — the outcome odds across a specific subset of the data. However, conditional probabilities really can't be calculated using share price or its many derivatives because of the continuous signal problem. Another remedy must occur and that is the process of discretization — converting scalar signals into discrete states. This is where market breadth or sequences of accumulative and distributive sessions comes into play. In the past two months, the price action of BSX stock can be converted as a 4-6-U sequence: four up weeks, six down weeks, with a positive trajectory across the 10-week period. Admittedly, this conversion process compresses BSX's magnitude dynamism into a simple binary code. But the benefit is that this code segregates price action into distinct, discrete behavioral states — forming the basis for Markovian analysis. Essentially, we're looking for the likelihood of sentiment transition based off the 4-6-U sequence. From past analogs, we know that this sequence materialized 17 times since January 2019. Notably, in 64.71% of cases, the following week's price action results in upside, with a median return of 1.79%. Should the bulls maintain control of the market for a second week, investors may anticipate an additional performance boost of around 1.1%. Based on last Thursday's close of $104.32, BSX stock could potentially crack above the $107 level within the next two weeks. For those who want to roll the dice on the statistical narrative above, the 105/107 bull call spread expiring July 18 could be enticing. This transaction involves buying the $105 call and simultaneously selling the $107 call, for a net debit paid of $100, the most that can be lost in the trade. Should BSX stock rise through the short strike price ($107) at expiration, the maximum reward is also $100, a payout of 100%. Primarily, what makes this trade attractive is the implied shift in sentiment regime of the 4-6-U sequence. Ordinarily, BSX stock enjoys a fairly robust upside bias. As a baseline, the chance that a long position on any given week will be profitable is 56.47%. However, the 4-6-U adds 8.24 percentage points of favorable odds for the bullish speculator. To be clear, no forecasting model is perfect, particularly because the stock market is an open system, which means that outside catalysts can enter the paradigm and disrupt it. Still, the discretization process mentioned earlier for the purpose of applying Markovian principles helps us to empirically quantify our decision-making process. On the date of publication, Josh Enomoto did not have (either directly or indirectly) positions in any of the securities mentioned in this article. All information and data in this article is solely for informational purposes. This article was originally published on