LTP News Sharing:
CVS has dropped its corporate sponsorship of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC).
The National Center’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP) has long called for corporations to distance themselves from this polarizing institution, and now we’re finally beginning to see the fruit of our persistence.
Just a few months ago FEP targeted CVS Health specifically, submitting a shareholder proposal calling on the pharmacy giant to end its participation in HRC’s Corporate Equality Index (CEI). When CVS blocked our proposal from appearing on its ballot, we continued to hound the company, attending the virtual shareholder meeting in May and submitting the question:
CVS is a platinum partner of the Human Rights Campaign and has scored 100% on the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index, even though the Human Rights Campaign has been accused of pushing transgenderism on children and undermining women’s sports and spaces. In a letter submitted to the SEC, CVS claimed that its status as a Platinum Partner of HRC, as well as the policies that earned CVS a 100% score on HRC’s Corporate Equality Index, are “not controversial” but rather “mainstream and customary.” Does CVS stand by this characterization of its relationship with HRC?
While we received no answer at the meeting, we have just received something even more satisfying: Mere months after that engagement, we’ve learned that CVS is no longer on HRC’s list of platinum partners. In fact, it’s not listed as a corporate partner at all.
And when we compare the list of HRC’s corporate partners between 2024 and 2025, we find something astonishing:
The Human Rights Campaign has lost 38% of its corporate partners over the past year.
We’ll have more on that interesting development soon…
In the meantime, does CVS’s step away from HRC corporate partnership mean that its own internal policies are blameless? Of course not. CVS still seems to be participating in HRC’s CEI survey, and most recently received a perfect score of 100%, which can only be attained by abiding by the organization’s hyper-partisan, divisive and increasingly radical criteria.
In a RealClearMarkets commentary, FEP Executive Director Stefan Padfield noted:
CVS is a health care company, which raises the very disturbing specter that part of the reason it is supportive of transing kids (assuming you agree with that characterization) is so that it can benefit financially by, for example, providing the drugs associated with transitioning.
Even so, what makes this a particularly notable win is that it happened without our proposal making it onto the ballot. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) granted CVS’s no-action request, meaning shareholders never got to vote on our proposal.
But we have often said that just submitting a proposal creates myriad “impact opportunities” even if we get no-actioned — and we believe we can fairly claim this win as evidence of that.
Author: The National Center
