Almost three-quarters of US employers said the Trump administration’s clamp down on diversity and inclusion policies has impacted their businesses over the past year, according to a Littler survey.
The firm’s 2026 Workplace Policy Institute Survey Report found that 71% of employers say DEI policy changes have impacted them, while 65% said immigration policy changes also had an impact.
Those immigration changes were even more pronounced for technology and retail/hospitality organisations, with 81% of employers in those sectors reporting an impact. DEI issues were also more likely to impact organisations with at least 10,000 employees, with 86% saying the policy changes had affected them.
Survey respondents said they had been forced to take action on immigration policy changes by reducing immigration sponsorship or entirely stepping back from sponsoring H-1B visas.
Almost 25% of employers said they had experienced large to moderate workforce staffing challenges as a result of the Trump administration’s immigration policies, with 39% saying they had experienced staffing challenges to a small extent. Combined, that surpassed concerns about workforce staffing in Littler’s 2025 Employer Survey, when 58% of organisations said they were worried about the potential impacts from Trump’s policies.
Aside from diversity and immigration-related impacts, respondents also highlighted issues stemming from regulatory changes and economic volatility.
Some 35% of employers said their organisations had made workforce reductions because of regulatory and economic uncertainty, which was even higher for large employees (42%). Another 30% of employers said they had paused or reduced hiring, while 18% said they had reduced or eliminated workplace perks and 17% had delayed promotions or pay rises.
Littler noted that not all industries have been equally impacted. While tech companies have been shedding staff, industries such as healthcare are seeing stronger hiring rates and, in some cases, struggling to fill job vacancies.
Meanwhile, almost nine in 10 employers said their organisations had been impacted by legislative changes over the past year, including new workplace regulations at state and local levels. More than half of employers said those impacts had been large or moderate.
Much of the impacts were related to changes around paid leave (67%), followed by pay equity and transparency (51%) and data privacy (47%).
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