AT&T and Black America · Sep 28, 2026AT&T and Black America, Part 11: DEI Programs End, Two Days Before FCC Approval

Special Series · AT&T and Black America, Part 11 of 12 · September 19, 2026

On December 1, 2025, AT&T told the Federal Communications Commission in writing that it would eliminate its diversity, equity, and inclusion programs entirely — and the FCC approved AT&T’s $1.02 billion spectrum acquisition two days later. This installment covers that letter, the regulatory context that produced it, and what it means for a series that has spent ten parts documenting how those programs came to exist in the first place.

Key Facts

• On December 1, 2025, AT&T Senior Executive Vice President and General Counsel David McAtee wrote to the FCC that “the legal landscape governing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and programs has changed,” and pledged the company would eliminate DEI-focused positions and would not hire “based on or limited by race, gender, or other protected characteristics.”^[1]
• The FCC approved AT&T’s $1.02 billion acquisition of wireless spectrum licenses from UScellular (now Array Digital Infrastructure) on December 3, 2025, under docket GN 25-150 — two days after the letter.^[1][3]
• FCC Chairman Brendan Carr had said in March 2025: “Any businesses that are looking for FCC approval, I would encourage them to get busy ending any sort of their invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”^[1]
• AT&T’s move followed similar commitments from Verizon and T-Mobile, and came after a wave of DEI eliminations at Amazon, Meta, Lowe’s, and McDonald’s earlier in 2025 — a broader corporate pattern, not one specific to AT&T.^[2]

The Story So Far

Every part of this series before this one has described DEI-shaped programs and structures being built, tested, resisted, and imperfectly maintained — from the wartime cracks in Part 3, through the 1973 consent decree in Part 6, to AT&T’s own diversity reporting in Part 9. This part covers those same kinds of programs actually being dismantled, by AT&T’s own choice, in real time, this year.

The Letter and What It Actually Said

AT&T’s letter came from its own top lawyer, not a public relations statement. General Counsel David McAtee wrote directly to the FCC that the company would end DEI-focused roles and would not let race, gender, or other protected characteristics factor into hiring, training, or advancement decisions.^[1] The letter’s own framing was explicit: this was a response to “the legal landscape” changing, not a statement that the company’s prior diversity data or goals had been wrong on their own terms.^[1]

The Timeline That Makes the Connection Explicit

What makes this specific case unusually clear, compared to most corporate policy reversals, is the timeline. AT&T sent its letter on December 1, 2025. The FCC approved the company’s $1.02 billion UScellular spectrum deal on December 3^[1] — a deal AT&T had been seeking approval for since agreeing to it in November 2024. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr had already said, in March, that companies seeking FCC approval should “get busy ending” their DEI programs.^[1] Two days between the letter and the approval is not proof of an explicit quid pro quo. No single document this piece reviewed states one outright. But it is a documented, dated, public sequence of events that any reader can check for themselves.

What’s Disputed or Unconfirmed

Neither AT&T nor the FCC has stated, in any document this piece reviewed, that the DEI letter was formally a legal precondition of the spectrum deal’s approval. That specific causal claim is not confirmed here — only the dated sequence of events. Separately, this piece has not reviewed whether AT&T’s actual internal policies changed as much as the letter’s language suggests. Nor is it clear whether the company’s Employee Groups and other diversity-adjacent structures mentioned in Part 10’s source material continued in some form under a different name. Answering that would require AT&T’s own internal policy documents from after December 2025, which this piece has not obtained.

How to Verify This Yourself

• Contemporary reporting on AT&T’s letter and the deal timeline: ESG Dive.
• Additional independent reporting on the same letter: Fox Business and The Hollywood Reporter.
• The FCC’s own record of the spectrum transaction approval is filed under its standard merger-review docket process, searchable through the FCC’s own site.

What You Can Do Right Now

• Read more than one outlet’s coverage of this letter — it’s been reported on by business, trade, and general-news outlets independently, which is worth checking against each other rather than taking any single account, including this one, as the full picture.
• If you work at AT&T or a similarly affected company, your own HR communications about this change are a more direct primary source than any news coverage of it.
• Follow this series for its final part, which brings the full record from 1865 to December 2025 together.

Kemetic Minds Analysis

There’s a sharp historical echo here worth naming directly. Part 6 covered the EEOC using the FCC’s rate-approval power as leverage to force AT&T toward the 1973 consent decree. That was a federal regulator using its authority over an unrelated business matter to advance civil rights enforcement. This part covers the same regulatory lever, used in the opposite direction. An FCC chair signaled that ending DEI programs would smooth the path to approval. The company responded accordingly, two days before its deal cleared.

The mechanism is identical across both eras separated by 52 years. Only the direction changed. That’s worth sitting with rather than resolving into a simple verdict about whether AT&T “really” believes in the reasons it gave. Companies respond to the incentives regulators create, in whichever direction those incentives point — which is exactly the reason Part 6’s win looked as durable as it did only for as long as the regulatory pressure stayed pointed the same way.

References

1. ESG Dive. AT&T drops DEI, gets $1B acquisition of UScellular greenlit, December 2025 [Secondary, contemporary reporting with direct quotes from AT&T’s letter and FCC Chairman Carr]. esgdive.com. ↩
2. Fox Business. AT&T eliminates DEI programs, says hiring and advancement will now be merit-based, December 2025 [Secondary, contemporary reporting, independent corroboration]. foxbusiness.com. ↩
3. Federal Communications Commission. Order Granting AT&T-UScellular Applications, GN Docket No. 25-150, December 3, 2025 [Primary, federal agency order]. fcc.gov. ↩

Related Reading

• Kemetic Minds: AT&T and Black America, Part 10.
• The Hollywood Reporter: “AT&T Eliminates DEI as FCC Push Continues Under Brendan Carr”.

Investigative methodology: the letter’s content, the deal timeline, and the Carr quote are drawn from contemporary reporting cross-checked across multiple independent outlets (ESG Dive, Fox Business, The Hollywood Reporter), not a single source. This piece has not obtained AT&T’s or the FCC’s original documents directly and states that limitation plainly rather than presenting secondhand reporting as a primary record. The “Kemetic Minds Analysis” section is this newsroom’s own interpretation, clearly separated from the sourced reporting above it.

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