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Accenture has scrapped its global diversity and inclusion goals after an “evaluation” of the US political landscape, becoming the latest big company to ditch its targets since the election of Donald Trump.

A memo to staff from chief executive Julie Sweet said the New York-listed consulting group would begin “sunsetting” its diversity goals set in 2017, as well as career development programmes for “people of specific demographic groups”.

Sweet said in the memo that the change followed an “evaluation of our internal policies and practices and the evolving landscape in the United States, including recent Executive Orders with which we must comply”.

Accenture, which employs 799,000 people around the world, joins Meta, McDonald’s and Target in ditching diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) goals in response to the new political climate since Trump’s election.

The US president has been highly critical of what he calls the “absolute nonsense” of “discriminatory” diversity, equity and inclusion measures.

He signed a series of executive orders cutting federal DEI programmes when he came into office last month, tapping into a vein of corporate fatigue for diversity goals.

Other companies, such as Costco and JPMorgan Chase, have reaffirmed their commitment while some are reassessing their inclusion policies for the Trump era.

In 2017, Accenture set a target that half its staff would be women by the end of 2025. It also set a goal for 25 per cent of its managing directors to be women by 2020, a target it later updated to 30 per cent by 2025. At the time, 41 per cent of its employees and 21 per cent of managing directors were women.

The group also set itself goals for ethnic minority representation in its workforce in the US, UK and South Africa.

As well as rolling back the targets, which Sweet said would no longer be used to measure staff performance, Accenture would no longer submit data to external diversity benchmarking surveys.

The group would also “evaluate” external partnerships on the topic “as part of refreshing our talent strategy”, she added.

Accenture declined to comment.

Authorities are searching for a passenger plane that went missing over Alaska on Thursday, the state’s Department of Public Safety said.

The plane, which was carrying nine passengers and a pilot, was flying from the remote community of Unalakleet to Nome when it was reported missing at around 4 p.m. local time (0130 UTC).

The airline, Bering Air, said officials lost contact with the the Cessna Caravan less than an hour after it took off from Unalakleet.

“Staff at Bering Air is working hard to gather details, get emergency assistance, search and rescue going,” said Bering Air’s director of operations David Olson.

Rescue crews battle poor conditions

Alaska’s Department of Public Safety said rescue crews were “working to get to the last known coordinates” of the missing flight.

Meanwhile, the Nome Volunteer Fire Department said it was conducting a ground search around Nome and White Mountain.

“Due to weather and visibility, we are limited on air search at the current time,” it said.

Residents have been warned against forming their own search parties because the weather is too dangerous.

The missing flight is the latest in a string of serious aviation incidents in the United States this year, including a passenger jet that collided with a helicopter over Washington and a medevac flight that crashed in Philadelphia.

Edited by Wesley Dockery

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Elon Musk’s crusade to slash US government spending suffered setbacks on Thursday after a federal judged barred the Treasury department from handing data from its payments system to outsiders and one of the billionaire’s staffers was forced to resign over racist social media posts.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly put the temporary order in place after Musk boasted that his team at the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) was “rapidly shutting down” Treasury remittances. They apparently gained access to the system that disburses trillions of dollars, including social security payments and Medicare, each year.

Hours after the judge’s decision, 25-year-old coder Marko Elez, who was working for Doge at the Treasury, abruptly resigned after apparently racist comments from a dormant social media account were unearthed. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the historic remarks.

Elez was one of a handful of young engineers recruited by Musk’s Doge and installed in various government agencies. When asked about their roles this week, President Donald Trump called the coders “very smart” and defended their work.

Representatives of government employees and retirees had earlier this week sued to stop the sensitive data — accessed by Elez — being shared with Musk and others at Doge, arguing that such moves were “depriving them of privacy protections guaranteed to them by federal law”.

Although the US government reassured the court that only two of Doge’s emissaries, Cloud Software Group chief executive Tom Krause and Elez, had access to the sensitive system, Kollar-Kotelly pushed for an order preventing any information being shared outside the Treasury, while she considers a more permanent injunction. 

As a result, Musk himself will not be able to review data pulled from the payments system. 

The legal challenge comes as Treasury officials and the White House have sought to quell fears over Musk’s and Doge’s purported access to the system, and his broader authority, after the entrepreneur suggested his team was unilaterally cancelling “illegal” payments. 

On Monday, Trump said Musk, who has been made a special government employee, “can’t do — and won’t do — anything without our approval”. 

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt also confirmed that Musk would extricate himself from any situations where he might have a conflict: “If Elon Musk comes across a conflict of interest with [his companies’] contracts and the funding that Doge is overseeing, then Elon will excuse himself from those contracts . . . he has abided by all applicable laws.”

Doge, whose emissaries have infiltrated the networks of various government agencies, including USAID, Health and Human Services and the Department of Transportation, has been sued multiple times by groups claiming the body is circumventing various legal protections.

Separately on Thursday, a judge in Massachusetts ordered a deadline for federal employees to accept or reject a buyout package — part of a personnel reduction effort spearheaded by Musk — to be extended at least until Monday.

The White House also confirmed that only 40,000 workers had thus far accepted the offer, well short of the hundreds of thousands it had previously forecast.

Additional reporting by Steff Chávez in Washington