Is the title “Chief People Officer” just corporate vanity — or something that could run afoul of federal law? That’s the provocative question raised in a recent column for American Thinker, where author Noel S. Williams takes aim at a job title that has quietly migrated from tech startups and HR conferences into the upper reaches of the C-suite.
Williams’s piece, published September 26, 2026, is less a legal brief than a full-throated complaint about what he sees as the bureaucratic self-aggrandizement of human resources departments. But buried inside the sarcasm is a substantive claim worth examining: that to the extent a CPO’s core function is diversity, equity and inclusion work, the role may be legally untenable in the federal government and among its contractors.
The Case Against the Title
Williams pulls no punches in characterizing who ends up in these roles. In his telling, the personnel clerks who have historically handled payroll and hiring are the ones who “top the list” whenever an organization’s payroll increases. They invent grand-sounding titles, he writes, then cobble together duties to match the salary. The result is a title that sounds, to his ear, uncomfortably close to “Chief Police Officer” — which he suggests may actually be more honest, since these executives spend their time policing staff.
The discomfort with the title itself is part of the argument. Williams notes that a CPO can be mistaken for a CFO, and argues that in DEI-influenced thinking, the similarity is the point: it confers parity with the finance chief and earns a corner office in the executive suite. He compares the arrangement to a famous movie droid — a jab meant to suggest that CPOs are essentially automatons executing programmed directives rather than exercising genuine business judgment.
What makes the column more than a rant is the leap it makes next. Williams contends that DEI is “one of the main functions” of a Chief People Officer, and that the role effectively exists to strategize about workplace inclusion. From there he poses the question that gives the piece its headline: if that’s the job, isn’t it illegal — at least in the federal government and for federal contractors?
Trump’s Meritocracy Push as Legal Backdrop
The column leans heavily on the contemporary policy environment. Williams writes that President Trump has “made it perfectly clear” that the operating principle for the federal workforce is meritocracy, not DEI. That framing is doing a lot of work in the argument: it treats the shift away from DEI as settled executive policy and then asks whether a role whose stated purpose is DEI programming can survive inside an institution that has formally rejected that framework.
Williams doesn’t cite a statute, regulation, or court ruling to close the loop. The question is posed rhetorically, aimed less at lawyers than at readers who already believe the answer is yes. Still, it’s a question that has been circulating more broadly as federal agencies unwind DEI offices and contractors scramble to certify compliance with new executive orders. The column gives that conversation a sharper edge by applying it not to a program or a training session but to a job title itself.
He also flags a variant that he finds even stranger: “Chief Human Capital Officer,” or CHCO, a title used in some federal agencies. In Williams’s reading, the rebranding is cosmetic — the same DEI pursuits under a more ominous-sounding name. He speculates that the phrase sounds like something socialists might devise to ensure an “equitable” distribution of capital, and suggests the title was the product of a two-day retreat staffed by people too timid to object.
Who Gets Hurt, and Who Gets Hired
The column’s most pointed accusation is about consequences. Williams argues that in the pursuit of making workplaces “welcoming and inclusive,” CPOs achieve the opposite — creating environments that are unwelcoming and exclusive, particularly, he writes, for “a smart, imaginative, white male who can actually further the underlying business.” He adds that even minority employees end up navigating the latest CPO pronouncements “on eggshells.” The claim that “everyone” hates HR is offered as the punchline, but it reflects a broader complaint about the gap between stated inclusion goals and lived workplace experience.
That’s a contested assertion, and Williams presents it as his own observation rather than as the finding of any study or survey. The column offers no data on hiring outcomes, employee satisfaction, or the demographic effects of DEI programs. What it does offer is an argument about incentives: that a role whose performance is measured by inclusion programming will inevitably prioritize that programming over the business itself — and that the people who lose out are those the business most needs to keep.
The Prescription: AI Instead of HR
Williams’s proposed fix is characteristically blunt. Ditch the CPOs and CHCOs entirely, he writes. In their place, deploy artificial intelligence — and its supposed successor, which he notes President Trump has referred to as “Super Intelligence” — to handle the busybody tasks that currently fall to human resources. Whatever AI can’t cover, he says, should go back to “unpretentious personnel clerks.”
The prediction attached to that prescription is that a workforce managed this way would be “welcoming, fair, and, most importantly, productive.” It’s a vision of HR stripped down to administration: no culture strategy, no inclusion programming, no executive-level advocacy. Whether that would produce the fairness he promises or simply a different set of problems is, of course, an open question — one the column doesn’t attempt to resolve.
Read as a whole, the American Thinker piece is best understood as a stylistic entry in the ongoing argument over what DEI’s retreat means in practice. It pushes a rhetorical question — are CPOs illegal? — that it never fully answers, because the answer isn’t really the point. The point is that the title, the function, and the salary attached to it have, in the author’s view, outlived whatever justification they once had.
For readers inclined to agree, the column supplies ammunition and a memorable label. For those who don’t, it supplies a useful case study in how the backlash to corporate DEI is now moving from program budgets to org charts — and from the question of what companies should do, to the question of who should even hold a seat in the C-suite.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/aren-t-chief-people-officers-illegal/