FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson praised the Trump administration Thursday for its work “protecting white American men from discrimination,” speaking at a White House press conference alongside Vice President JD Vance.
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The press conference was about the administration’s crackdown on what it calls fraud and abuse of the H-1B work visa program. Ferguson runs the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that polices unfair business practices and consumer protection, and he is also vice chair of the White House task force on fraud. He used part of his time at the podium to celebrate Andrea Lucas, who chairs the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC is the federal agency that enforces laws against workplace discrimination based on race, sex, religion, national origin, age and disability.
“I also want to acknowledge the work of Andrea Lucas, who is the chairman of the EEOC,” Ferguson said. She is the greatest chairman of that institution, since Clarence Thomas back in the 1980s.” Thomas ran the EEOC under Ronald Reagan before becoming a Supreme Court justice.
Ferguson then explained what he admired about her. “On every issue that previous EEOCs refused to touch: protecting white American men from discrimination, protecting American citizens from national origin discrimination,” he said, Lucas “has led the EEOC headlong to defend Americans from these abusive practices.”
Lucas has made white men a public focus of her tenure. In a video posted to social media last year, she asked, “Are you a white male who has experienced discrimination at work based on your race or sex? You may have a claim to recover money under federal civil rights laws.” Federal civil rights law does protect workers of every race and sex, including white men, and the Supreme Court ruled in 2025 that workers from majority groups do not have to clear a higher bar to bring discrimination claims.
Ferguson has made fighting diversity programs a signature of his time at the FTC. “DEI is a scourge on our institutions,” he posted on X in January 2025, adding that the agency was “done with DEI.”
The numbers on who actually holds power in corporate America paint a different picture than the one Ferguson described. White men make up roughly a third of the U.S. population, yet as of 2020 they held 85.8 percent of Fortune 500 CEO jobs, according to UC Santa Cruz researcher Richie Zweigenhaft, who has tracked the data for decades. In 2000, that number was 96.4 percent.
Black executives remain rare at the top. Fortune counted 11 Black CEOs on the Fortune 500 this year, a record high that still works out to about 2 percent of the country’s largest companies. Only two of them are Black women: Thasunda Brown Duckett at TIAA and Toni Townes-Whitley at SAIC. Women of all races run 11 percent of Fortune 500 companies.
White men lost their majority on the boards of the 50 largest American corporations in 2023, but their share climbed back up from 2024 to 2025 as companies like Meta added more white men to their boards. The shift has come as many major corporations have scaled back or eliminated diversity programs under pressure from the Trump administration.
