No-nonsense Democrat mayor who’s transforming Philadelphia ends DEI contracts because she thinks white businesses owners deserve same chance as anyone else

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L Parker has ended DEI city contracts in order to provide ‘access to economic opportunity for all’ as she seeks to transform the city.

Parker is a tough-on-crime Democrat who defies her party’s progressives, leading commentators to describe her as ‘Trumpesque’ during her election bid in 2023.

In her latest break with the party line, Parker has been quietly erasing racial diversity goals from city contracting, saying the approach has failed.

Parker, who is Philadelphia’s first female mayor, and the first black woman to hold the position, added that the move is also in line with legal advice given nationwide.

‘We need to make a shift to be in compliance with federal court orders, including a ruling from the US Supreme Court,’ she said.

‘But long before that, we all know that the programs we had in place were not working.’

The Pennsylvania city has had DEI programs in place for 40 years in an effort to boost diverse businesses, but Parker said they have not produced results.

‘We knew the system was broken years before,’ Parker said at a meeting this week.

Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L Parker (pictured) has ended DEI contracts in order to provide ‘access to economic opportunity for all’ rather than just specific groups

The Pennsylvania city of Philadelphia (pictured in 2020) has had DEI programs in place for 40 years in an effort to boost diverse businesses, but Parker said they have not produced results

‘Because every time we would look at the numbers and we would want to see how many black and brown and women and disabled business owners were growing in the city of Philadelphia, the numbers became stagnant.’

In 2023, the Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard put an end to race-related affirmative action in the college admission process.

America’s highest justices decided that DEI policies violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees ‘equal protection of the laws’ for all citizens.

However, Philadelphia City Councilmember Kendra Brooks told the Philadelphia Inquirer that Parker is simply ‘caving’ to Donald Trump’s aggressive anti-DEI agenda.

‘People want to see leaders fighting for something, and right now we don’t see our city fighting for anything,’ said Brooks, of the progressive Working Families Party.

Parker hit back. ‘I’m fighting,’ she said. ‘But I’m fighting the fight the way I know best: to achieve the results and act and extract the tangible results that I need for the people who live in this city, who own businesses in the city.’

The Democrat mayor said her administration was focusing on giving black and women business owners access to capital and other tools they need to develop.

She said this is needed before many can compete for city contracts, rather than relying on ‘tick box’ DEI contracts.

Parker is a tough-on-crime Democrat who defies her party’s progressives, leading commentators to describe her as ‘Trumpesque’ during her election bid in 2023

Mayor Parker hired 75 more cops for Kensington upon taking office in last January 2024

Chief Deputy Mayor Vanessa Garrett Harley said that only 20 percent of minority-owned businesses were actually winning city contracts through the DEI policies.

‘Obviously, it was not working,’ Garrett Harley said.

Parker has also been cleaning up crime in her city – the key pledge in her 2023 election bid which got her elected over her Democratic opponents.

After taking office in 2024, she hired 75 police officers for the worst-hit area of Kensington. They cleared homeless encampments and increased narcotics arrests.

Since then, homicides in the city are down 13 percent, while property crimes have decreased by four percent, according to Philadelphia Police Department statistics.

However, violent crimes have risen slightly by 0.23 percent, figures show.

Trump was also elected on a tough-on-crime platform in November 2024, with his other key policies being a crackdown on illegal immigration and DEI policies.

The president immediately signed a series of executive orders to end DEI programs within 24 hours of arriving back in the White House in January 2025.

His administration sent a letter to all heads of government agencies, informing them all federal employees in DEI roles must be placed on paid leave within days.

The first executive order slammed the ‘infiltration’ of DEI programs into the federal government, and cited the executive order signed by Biden on the first day of his presidency that aimed to tackle racial inequalities in government.

Another executive order also rolled back affirmative action in federal contracting, reversing a longstanding order first signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965.

Trump’s order argued that DEI programs ‘not only violate the text and spirit of our longstanding Federal civil-rights laws, they also undermine our national unity.’

‘Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex,’ he said in a statement at the time.

‘The American people have witnessed first-hand the disastrous consequences of illegal, pernicious discrimination that has prioritized how people were born instead of what they were capable of doing.’