4 Takeaways as Lawmakers Probe Pentagon’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Efforts

President Joe Biden has extensively promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion as the focus of government agencies, including the Defense Department and its armed services.

The House Armed Services Committee held a subcommittee hearing Thursday to address whether these programs are making the military stronger or actually are wasting resources, creating more division, and contributing to record-low recruitment numbers.

Here are four takeaways from the hearing.

1. Rise of DEI Administration, Fall of Meritocracy

Rep. Jim Banks, R-Ind., chairman of the Armed Services subcommittee on military personnel, spoke about the problems with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in his opening statement.

Banks said that the meritocratic nature of the military, which allows people of diverse backgrounds to succeed, is an important principle to uphold. However, he warned, this ethos may be waning under Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who was appointed by President Joe Biden.

“We are now in danger of losing those meritocratic principles to the politicization of our armed forces, thanks first and foremost to the ever-expanding bureaucracy of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, regulations, and trainings,” Banks said.

The Indiana Republican then said this growing effort is based on “faulty science and misguided principles,” and that anti-bias training used by the military in fact may be causing more bias.

“In a review of 418 prejudice-reduction experiments, [Princeton psychology professor] Elizabeth Levy Paluck and co-authors concluded that much of the anti-bias training is, quote, misguided,” Banks said.

“And even in the few studies that showed any effect at all in reducing bias, those effects disappeared over a short period of time. Yet the Department of Defense and the [armed] services have embraced DEI training full cloth.”

Banks then noted that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,  had said in a Senate hearing that the Defense Department “expended 5,359,311 man hours for Secretary Austin’s extremism standdown and an additional 529,711 man hours for DEI-specific training.”

DEI  is an acronym for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“That is a lot of training hours spent away from honing warfighting capabilities, knowledge, and skills,” Banks said. . . . (read more on Daily Signal)