As part of a rapidly escalating war on corporate and government diversity, equity and inclusion programs, President Donald Trump’s administration and allies are relying heavily on a two-year-old Supreme Court precedent that says virtually nothing about diversity in the workplace.

A series of lawsuits and threatening letters filed after Trump took office a month ago have cited the landmark 2023 decision that gutted affirmative action on college campuses — and have suggested that the ruling also requires companies to end their DEI programs.

“The Supreme Court said it best: ‘Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,’” Republican attorneys general from 19 states wrote to Costco recently, urging the retail giant to suspend its diversity efforts. “For the good of its employees, investors, and customers, Costco should ‘do the right thing’ by following the law and repealing its DEI policies.”

But legal experts say that the notion that the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard spells out rules for the private sector is wishful thinking on the part of DEI critics.

Critics of DEI are “kind of deliberately overreading the decision in order to engage in a lot of bluster and threats,” said David Glasgow, a New York University law professor and executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.

“The case didn’t say anything about private employment or DEI at all,” said Brent Siler, a labor lawyer at the Adams and Reese law firm. “DEI is not illegal, in and of itself, though some of it could be.”

The litigation dealt specifically with admissions policies at Harvard and the University of North Carolina that considered race as one of several factors in deciding whether an applicant would be accepted.

The Supreme Court’s six justice conservative majority held that the way the schools considered race — sometimes giving a plus-up to minority applicants to ensure a diverse student body — violated the equal protection clause. The decision was a significant victory for conservative legal groups who for decades had fought affirmative action policies.

While DEI efforts drew renewed interest and attention following the police killing of George Floyd in in 2020, experts note the programs have been around for decades. The initiatives are generally geared at leveling the playing field for people who have historically not enjoyed the same opportunities as White employees. That can include ensuring that hiring mangers are reaching out to minority candidates, for instance, and that they do not face discrimination once on the job.

Discrimination on the basis of race and sex in the workplace was already illegal under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, said Rebecca Baker, a labor and employment attorney at the Vinson & Elkins law firm. But neither that historic law nor the Supreme Court’s recent decision bars companies from ensuring they have a diverse pool of applicants, for instance, or requiring certain kinds of training.

“The landscape of employment law — and the law itself — have not changed,” she said.

Critics tend to define DEI efforts more narrowly: hiring targets for minority candidates. And they believe the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, will apply its previous decision more broadly.

“The Supreme Court is just not going to be looking favorably on many — if any — attempts to inject race into decision-making processes,” said Jonathan Berry, an attorney who wrote about limiting DEI policies as part of Project 2025, which was intended to serve as a blueprint for Trump’s presidency.

“President Trump is delivering on a promise for a colorblind Constitution, for colorblind laws,” he added. “For a long time now, DEI programs have been injecting race where it doesn’t belong.”

Political pushback against DEI has exploded since Trump took office, forcing companies across the country to scramble to revisit diversity policies and wade into a murky area of law in which terms — including “DEI” itself — are not well-defined. Some companies, including Walmart and McDonald’s, have already rolled back DEI programs.

Trump, who repeatedly hammered on the programs during his campaign, signed a series of executive actions during his first week, including one that asserted DEI programs “violate the text and spirit of our longstanding federal civil-rights laws” and “undermine our national unity.” He required diversity programs to be eliminated throughout the government, attempted to cancel “equity-related” contracts and ordered the Department of Justice to develop a plan to “encourage the private sector to end illegal discrimination and preferences, including DEI.”

One of Trump’s orders cited the Supreme Court case briefly.

A federal judge in Baltimore temporarily shut down part of Trump’s effort late Friday. In a 63-page opinion, Judge Adam Abelson wrote that the vagueness of the terms used by the White House “invites arbitrary and discriminatory enforcement.” Abelson, nominated to the bench by President Joe Biden, said that Trump’s executive order likely violates the First Amendment.

“The possibilities are almost endless, and many are pernicious,” Abelson wrote. “If an elementary school received Department of Education funding for technology access, and a teacher uses a computer to teach the history of Jim Crow laws, does that risk the grant being deemed ‘equity-related’ and the school being stripped of funding?”

The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision clearly bars universities from giving candidates an advantage to applicants based on race, and experts said that logic will likely apply in other contexts, too. But the Trump administration and Republican attorneys general appear to be reading far more into the decision than that.

Earlier this month, the US Department of Education sent a detailed and aggressive letter to schools, threatening to cut funding within weeks if they did not remove all programs that touch on race. Programs teaching students that “certain racial groups bear unique moral burdens,” the letter claimed, “stigmatize students” and therefore deny them “the ability to participate fully in the life of a school.” According to the letter, the Supreme Court’s decision barred that kind of instruction.

“Although SFFA addressed admissions decisions, the Supreme Court’s holding applies more broadly,” the letter asserted.

The letter also claimed that schools may not consider race-neutral factors — such as median income or geography — as proxies for race. But the Supreme Court’s decision in the Harvard case didn’t address that issue. And the justices have so far declined to take up a series of appeals attempting to clarify that very point.

Asked to square the letter’s demands with the opinion it relies on, Candice Jackson, deputy general counsel at the Department of Education, told CNN in a statement that its insistence on “upholding the Constitution” is “no threat.” Instead, she said, it is “a promise to American students and educators that the days of race-based discrimination ostensibly to fight discrimination, are over.”

As the Trump administration tries to root out diversity programs within the government, state officials are increasingly pointing to the Supreme Court’s admissions decision to lean on private companies to do the same.

Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, sued Starbucks in federal court this month, alleging that the coffee chain’s compensation and training practices are discriminatory and violate federal law. The very first ruling cited in that lawsuit was the Supreme Court’s decision on university admissions.

The principle at the center of that decision, Missouri asserted, “applies not only to college admissions, but also, as here, to employment decisions.”

Starbucks has countered that its practices are “inclusive, fair and competitive,” and, according to a statement provided to CNN, “lawful.”

Much of the anti-DEI focus on Harvard has focused on broad points made by Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the opinion.

For too long, Roberts wrote, universities had wrongly concluded that “the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned but the color of their skin.

“Our constitutional history,” he said, “does not tolerate that choice.”

The court’s three liberals dissented, though Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson recused herself from the case involving Harvard because she had served on its board of overseers.

“Ignoring race will not equalize a society that is racially unequal,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent. “What was true in the 1860s, and again in 1954, is true today: Equality requires acknowledgment of inequality.”

In their letter to Costco, the Republican attorneys general noted that the company’s board had unanimously recommended against a proposal from a conservative think tank that would have required the company to evaluate and issue a report on the risks of maintaining its diversity and inclusion goals.

That, the Republican attorneys general asserted, “runs contrary to the Supreme Court’s recent decisions.”

But the letter didn’t discuss which policies, specifically, Republican officials believe violated the law.

The offices of Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird and Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, who led the letter, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Costco also did not respond to a request for comment.

In a statement to shareholders in December, the company said that, after reviewing the Supreme Court’s decision, it believes its policies are “legally appropriate.”

“A diverse group of employees helps bring originality and creativity to our merchandise offerings,” the company said in its statement. “Our focus on diversity, equity and inclusion is not, however, only for the sake of improved financial performance but to enhance our culture and the well-being of people whose lives we influence.”

CNN’s Tierney Sneed and Nicquel Terry Ellis contributed to this report.