1792 Insights
The 1792 Exchange is committed to delivering sharp, data-driven analysis of corporate America’s political entanglements. Discover what investors, executives, and concerned citizens should know regarding why businesses should return to neutral, mission-focused operations.
The Founders Built a Business Charter: The U.S. Constitution
On September 17, 1787, 39 men signed a document we celebrate as the world’s most successful and enduring political charter. In our nation’s 250th year, it is worth remembering that the Constitution is not only a charter of limited government and ordered liberty; it is also the greatest business charter ever written. No governing charter has done more to create the conditions in which enterprise can flourish: stable laws, secure property, enforceable contracts, free exchange, individual liberty, and protection from arbitrary power. The men who gathered in Philadelphia knew commerce under the “old system.” They lived as colonists in a mercantilist empire where the right to trade was a favor dispensed by the Crown, where charters went to the well-connected, and where a merchant’s property and contracts were secure only so long as he stayed in the government’s good graces. When they wrote a new charter, they were determined that American commerce would rest on a solid foundation of law, not on the shifting sands of political favor. Consider what they built. The Commerce Clause, with related provisions, created a continental free-trade zone. The Constitution transformed 13 competing states into a vast common market. It gave Congress authority over interstate commerce and …
Faith-based investors should act like owners
Earlier this summer, the rating service Morningstar released its second-ever report on faith-based investing, a market that has grown to roughly $169 billion in assets. The report analyzes hundreds of faith-based funds, comparing their screening methodologies and how those screens affect portfolio construction and performance. The report offers valuable insight into a complex and rapidly growing segment of the investment industry, but it overlooks several important aspects of the broader faith-based investing landscape. For starters, the universe of investors making decisions based on values is much broader than the funds formally labeled “faith-based” because no investment strategy is truly values-neutral. Every fund makes choices about which companies and industries to include, which to exclude, and how heavily to weight them. Even a broad-market index reflects a set of rules determining what qualifies for inclusion and how much representation each company receives within the portfolio. Every investor has some worldview or set of values that informs how he or she lives. Faith-based investing simply makes the connection between those values and investment decisions more explicit and, hopefully, more consistent. Investors who fall outside the Islamic, Catholic, and Christian categories examined by Morningstar may still make investment decisions based on deeply held beliefs about …
Two DEI Settlements, One Clear Warning for Federal Contractors
As the saying goes, “To be forewarned is to be forearmed.” American companies doing business with the federal government have once again been forewarned about the risks of engaging in DEI practices. To ignore these warnings can be very costly for the company, its shareholders, and employees. Just four months ago, IBM paid more than $17 million to resolve allegations that it maintained illegal diversity, equity, and inclusion practices while performing federal contract work. That settlement was the first resolution under the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Fraud Initiative. It was also a clear warning. Last week, President Donald Trump’s DOJ announced that another top federal contractor has agreed to pay $21.5 million to settle similar allegations. The Justice Department alleged that Deloitte violated the False Claims Act by certifying compliance with federal nondiscrimination rules while applying race and sex preferences in hiring, promotions, and staffing. Business units tracked “demographic goals” with color-coded scorecards, and roughly 150 of the firm’s most senior leaders were evaluated, and in some cases compensated, based in part on progress toward those targets. The government further alleged that promotion classes for partners were assigned racial and sex targets, that staffing for federal contracts was managed with a priority toward demographic parity …
Delayed Study From Pro-Gender Ideology Researcher Finds Puberty Blockers Don’t Help Kids
A major taxpayer-funded study initiated in 2015 to observe the effects of puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormone therapies was finally released. The results are anything but shocking. While the authors were hoping to demonstrate that these unsupported therapies would prove beneficial, the study confirmed what every other credible study has shown: These drugs do not deliver the promised positive health outcomes for minors. The long-delayed findings from the NIH-funded Trans Youth Care study led by Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy have now been reported. It is notable that the final report was released only after the Oversight Project sued. Without these efforts, this data might still be buried. The study followed roughly 95 youth ages 8 to 16 on puberty blockers and tracked depression symptoms, emotional functioning, and parent-reported behavioral measures over a 24-month period. The results showed no significant improvement. Nada. Mental health metrics remained essentially “stable,” which was a kinder way of saying that the serious mental health conditions of the patients before receiving these controversial treatments remained serious afterward. There was no evidence of the positive clinical gains that had been repeatedly asserted to justify these interventions on developing children. These children not only had to continue suffering from their unfortunate mental health issues; now these …
The EEOC’s mission is opportunity for all, not demographic bean-counting
In the Superman comics, Bizarro World is a place where everything is exactly backward. It is a cube-shaped planet where ugliness is admired, failure is celebrated, lies are preferred to truth, and the normal rules of logic are turned upside down. What is obviously true on Earth becomes false, and what is plainly false is treated as a self-evident fact. Donna Brazile recently accused the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission of abandoning its purpose by proposing to end mandatory annual race-and-sex workforce reporting. Her argument reads like a dispatch from Bizarro World. In truth, the commission’s July 21 Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to rescind the EEO-1 and related demographic reports is a long-overdue course correction that reorients the agency to the actual text and original intent of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Title VII forbids discrimination against any individual based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin. It does not authorize the government to compel every covered employer, regardless of whether a single discrimination charge has been filed, to annually sort its workforce into racial and sex categories and submit the tallies to Washington. That regime, in place for decades, imposed nearly $275 million in annual compliance costs on employers and roughly …
Gender Surgery for Minors Faces a Legal Reckoning
Last year, a federal court in Washington State ruled that Premera Blue Cross unlawfully discriminated when it refused to cover elective double mastectomies for two young girls. The decision read like a harsh warning to every employer: exclude gender-transition procedures for children from your health plan and risk an Affordable Care Act discrimination claim. But the story doesn’t end there. In July 2026, the United States filed a brief urging the Ninth Circuit to reject that court’s misguided reasoning. In a 39-page brief supporting Premera’s appeal, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division argues that declining to fund these elective sex-denying surgeries for minors is not sex discrimination. “Far from being discrimination on the basis of sex,” the brief states, “this sensible policy is rooted in biological reality, developmental psychology, and medical diagnosis.” The brief anchors its argument in the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in United States v. Skrmetti, arguing that “regulating medical procedures on the basis of diagnosis does not automatically amount to discrimination on the basis of sex.” Premera covers a mastectomy for a teenage boy with gynecomastia and for a girl with breast cancer but declines to cover the same surgery when it is performed on healthy adolescents—boys and girls alike. The distinction, the brief argues, is …