How Politics Influences What Businesses do for Pride

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Well, it's the first week of Pride Month 2026 Happy Pride. And we will turn now to Pride Month sponsorships heading into this year. You know, The Wall Street Journal reported the other day a new trend for the second consecutive year. Pride organizations nationwide are facing budget shortfalls as companies including PepsiCo, Nissan, MasterCard, Citibank, and others have pulled back or withdrawn entirely. The recent piece written by reporter Patrick Coffey cites economic pressures and fear of political backlash from the Trump administration's anti-DEI stance. So what does this all say about corporate allyship? And what does it reveal about how businesses navigate political risk or maybe what's going on in the broader political moment? And why does what corporations do or don't even matter to human rights? Joining us now is Reilly Steel, Associate Professor of Law at the Columbia University Law School.
Reilly's research focuses on the intersection of business and law and politics. He published a major peer-reviewed 2025-2026 study in the American Political Science Review that used empirical data on nearly 100,000 corporate directors and executives to track how corporate America's political orientation has shifted over two decades, with a specific focus on how individual ideology drives firms' public stances on LGBTQ-related legislation. I know that it's a lot, but it really, really spotlights the current moment. Hey, Reilly, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

**Reilly Steel** (1:57)
Hey, Brian. Thanks so much for having me. I'm delighted to be here.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:00)
So your research tracks the political preferences of tens of thousands of corporate directors and other executives. How much are you seeing companies pulling back from pride sponsorships that their companies used to fund since President Trump got re-elected?

**Reilly Steel** (2:17)
So anecdotally, we're definitely seeing a lot of that. There are some examples you cited up top.
MasterCard, Nissan, for example. Also some federal defense contractors, who's Alan Hamilton. So we're seeing a broad but not complete retrenchment because many firms have continued to maintain their sponsorship levels. So I think we're seeing a pretty varied corporate landscape here.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:41)
And what does it tell you about how corporate political behavior or even business decisions actually work depending on who's in power?

**Reilly Steel** (2:49)
Yeah, I think it tells us something that might seem obvious, which is that corporations are not human beings. They do not have principles that they're going to stick to no matter what.
Instead, they're artificial legal persons that are subject to all sorts of pressures from all sorts of different stakeholders. That includes employees, managers, shareholders, customers, and which is especially visible right now, the government, including the federal government. So corporate leaders are going to have to balance all these different pressures. And when the balance of power shifts among the stakeholders or the preferences of the stakeholders change, we should expect the company's behavior to also change. And I think we're seeing exactly that right now.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:30)
Yeah, I guess another way to put it might be that companies in general, not every company, but companies in general, do have a set of principles or a guiding North Star principle that they stick to, and that is that they have a fiduciary responsibility to make as much money as they can for their shareholders. And if that means changing behavior to some degree based on who's in power in Washington, then so be it.

**Reilly Steel** (3:54)
Yeah, the shareholder primacy norm is very strong. It's basically indoctrinated into MBA students in business schools.
And I think that corporate leaders take that pretty seriously. So if that means what you need to do to make money is to abandon your prior commitments to, let's say, pride sponsorship, and that's what a lot of companies are going to do.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:16)
The NBA is unifying in New York City right now. MBA is not so much. Is there a way to quantify these impacts from the last two years? Do we know how much money is lost for New York Pride events this year? Or if the scope of celebrations has actually become smaller because the money isn't there to do what they were doing?

**Reilly Steel** (4:41)
I'm not aware of anyone who has tried to systematically quantify the impacts. I know that some city pride organizations have been in the red because of the lost sponsorship money, but others have found alternative sources of funding. But I'm not sure exactly how the counting breaks down.
But anecdotally, it seems like it's having an effect.

**Brian Lehrer** (5:05)
Listeners, we can take calls on two tracks here. First, for those of you helping to organize Pride Month events, have you seen corporate sponsorship drop since the second Trump administration began?