The new 2026 Economic Report of the President confirms what we’ve been saying for five years in our report card on ESG: these programs reduce corporate returns to shareholders.  Specifically, they find that when the diversity fad gained momentum in the late 2010s, the impact on productivity became “negative and statistically significant in most years.”

The conclusion: “industries that pursued DEI heavily… were about 2.7 percent less productive than those which did not… In the aggregate, the cost of mismanagement was roughly $94 billion annually by 2023, or 0.34 percent of U.S. GDP. This is an average cost of about $1,100 annually for a family with two working adults.”

In short, ESG/DEI programs make America poorer. And they are a violation of the fiduciary duty of corporate boards to their shareholders.