By Spencer Lindquist | Daily Wire
The Biden-Harris Defense Department paid outside organizations millions of taxpayer dollars to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, including race-based career advancement programs, in the U.S. military, documents shared exclusively with The Daily Wire reveal.
The documents, first obtained by the Functional Government Initiative, highlight the extent of the Pentagon’s efforts to embed leftwing, race-based ideology in the military, in partnership with academic institutions and consulting firms.
The outside organizations received taxpayer dollars to set up hiring pipelines that gave candidates preferential treatment on the basis of race and sex, advise the government agency on DEI policy, and combat internal and external resistance to said policies.
The contracts are the latest evidence of the Biden-Harris administration’s push to impose DEI policies and practices throughout the federal government, including the military.
Critics have blasted the administration for this push, arguing that their ideological focus detracts from military readiness and may even cause some Americans to sour on military service amid an ongoing recruiting crisis, compromising our national security in the process.
The Functional Government Initiative slammed the DOD’s decision to push a political agenda rather than focus on military readiness.
“The U.S. and its allies are facing challenges and threats all over the globe. Despite the increased concern for military preparedness, the DOD continues to prioritize DEI initiatives,” FGI spokesman Peter McGinnis told The Daily Wire.
“Rather than maximizing readiness training to ensure a capable military, the DOD’s training seems calculated to foster sowing internal discord with aggressive efforts to promote controversial ideologies,” McGinnis added.
“Americans join the military to serve their nation and protect the homeland, not to sit through sensitivity training. The DOD owes them better.”
The Defense Department went beyond pushing DEI on members, paying academic institutions to build career pipelines that disadvantaged men and white people on the basis of their sex and race.
The Department of the Navy awarded the University of Missouri Kansas City $760,000 to design a program that would give preferential treatment to non-white students and women in STEM applying for Defense Department jobs. The program’s designers openly acknowledged that it would give preferential treatment to applicants on the basis of their sex and race.
“To meet our equity-focused programmatic goals, campus internship selection will be equitable such that qualified applicants from underserved and underrepresented cohorts … will be provided first choice,” the designers said.
The Defense Department awarded Cornell University around $202,000 “to provide Diversity training that is mission imperative to ensure readiness and addressing discriminatory behavior from a cognitive perspective.”
The DEI program sought to train 35 employees of the Air Force Materiel Command to deliver DEI training to an estimated 70,000 employees, with a focus on “counteracting unconscious bias,” “fostering an inclusive environment,” and “diversity and inclusion at work.”
The Defense Department also paid the RAND Corporation an undisclosed sum of money for a project titled “Research and Analysis Support for the Department of Defense Board on Diversity and Inclusion.”
Among other things, RAND’s report offered the DOD advice on how to combat growing resistance to military DEI initiatives.
“Across organizations, a resistance to DE&I is growing, while discriminatory and xenophobic expressions are increasing,” the report reads. “Some researchers describe the presence of ‘denial perspectives’ and ‘diversity defiance,’ or ‘White fatigue,’” the report went on to say before cautioning the Defense Department to “watch for” these perspectives “and exercise caution to guard against them.”
RAND urged the Department of the Air Force to “develop techniques and tools to mitigate resistance” to the DEI agenda among its employees and enlisted members.
The Defense Department paid DEI consulting agency BCT Partners just under $2 million in 2021 to create a “DEI Action Plan” for DOD-operated schools, called the DOD Education Activity.
In its performance work statement, BCT deploys typical DEI boilerplate. It notes that Critical Race Theory “is an approach to grappling with a history of white supremacy” and ““Systematic racism [that] is part of the American life.” The document also decries “microaggressions” and “implicit bias.”
The Biden-Harris administration has continuously worked to embed the far-left DEI agenda throughout the federal government, from the military and intelligence community to the bureaucracy writ-large.
The Daily Wire previously revealed that the Pentagon requested nearly $270 million in taxpayer funds for the DEI agenda from 2022 to 2024 under the leftwing administration.
President Joe Biden signed multiple executive orders institutionalizing the leftwing doctrine, and his federal agencies have even worked to enable gender transition attempts among government employees, barring the use of biologically accurate pronouns in the process.
Former President Donald Trump has pledged to gut the bureaucracy through executive orders if he is reelected in November, cutting down the size of the administrative state and firing those who may otherwise work to undermine his policy agenda.
See: Air Force DEI grant to RAND (pdf)
See pdf page 63, “Talking About Race and Diversity”
Military Readiness or Diversity Training? The Biden-Harris DoD has Made its Choice. (Functional Government Institute)
Records show that concepts are embedded in DOD training.
(Washington, DC) – Today, government watchdog Functional Government Initiative (FGI) announces it has obtained documentation of the Department of Defense (DoD)’s efforts to inject social justice theories and practices into the U.S. military. Documents FGI requested via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) provide details on numerous contracts to train military members on a variety of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) topics.
DEI initiatives have taken corporations and academics by storm and proceed from the belief that so-called “white privilege” and “systemic racism” taint the American merit-based system. DEI and “anti-racism” indoctrination are attempts to “even the playing field.” Rather than focus on the military preparedness concerns, the DoD is spending time and taxpayer money on furthering progressive propaganda.
The Biden-Harris administration has faced myriad issues that necessitate a strong and capable military force. The Afghanistan withdrawal in August 2021 destabilized Afghanistan, despite reassurance that Kabul would not fall. Russia invaded Ukraine months later, and Hamas brutally attacked Israel in October 2023 and continues to hold Americans hostage. Iran-backed Yemeni rebels threaten one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world and attacks on American bases in the Middle East have accelerated since 2021. All while, our military is facing a recruiting crisis unlike any seen before.
Instead of increasing preparedness efforts, the DoD has steadily increased financing to train warriors on the perils of systemic racism and unconscious bias. One of the grant records from the DoD states that, “Systematic racism is part of the American life and challenges the beliefs that allow it to flourish.”
A grant to the University of Missouri sought to improve recruitment and accessibility in STEM undergraduate research experiences (URE), because “hand-picked selection perpetuates the exclusion of underrepresented students from STEM fields, including women, minorities, and veterans as these students suffer disproportionate achievement gaps.” This prevalent threat requires that the “underrepresented groups [receive] first priority” for STEM grants, according to documents from the Office of Naval Research.
The Air Force considered a contract to Cornell University to “train the trainers” with the goal of enabling Air Force employees to teach “unconscious bias” training. These trainings use metacognition, the practice of being aware of one’s own thinking, to teach about “unconscious racism.” Not only did the DoD want to change members’ thinking, but also it considered enacting “grooming and uniform changes” as part of an effort “more-sweeping ways to advance equity.” These conversations took place with the goal of increasing “diversity in hiring.”
Peter McGinnis, spokesman for FGI, issued the following statement:
“The U.S. and its allies are facing challenges and threats all over the globe. Despite the increased concern for military preparedness, the DoD continues to prioritize DEI initiatives. Rather than maximizing readiness training to ensure a capable military, the DoD’s training seems calculated to foster sowing internal discord with aggressive efforts to promote controversial ideologies. Americans join the military to serve their nation and protect the homeland, not to sit through sensitivity training. The DoD owes them better.”
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