When it took office four years ago, the Biden-Harris administration promised to make “equity” the center of its governing philosophy. The president, vice president, and hundreds of unelected regulators quickly unveiled an ambitious, “whole-of-government” plan to engraft critical race theory (CRT) and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) into every facet of government.
A new report from the government watchdog organization OpenTheBooks.com reveals how successful they have been. The report focuses on one department alone: The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
HHS “— with a budget surpassed only by the Pentagon — employs 294 DEI staffers at an annual cost of $38.7 MILLION,” the group’s researchers found, further pointing out that the total “doesn’t even include another $29.4 million in payroll for seven Offices of Minority Health embedded within various HHS agencies.” In all, 84% of these DEI employees make more than $100,000 in base salary, not including benefits.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a part of HHS, decided to implement equity by focusing on the recipient’s race, reaching out to LGBTQIA+ activists and co-opting black pastors alike:
“One recent CDC program pushed for ‘vaccine equity’ in Atlanta, Georgia by distributing 5,500 monkeypox vaccine doses to Black ‘LGBTQ+ men who have sex with men’ to help ‘celebrate diversity and the impact of distinctly Black gay and queer culture on the community.’
“The CDC has even deployed to Black churches in the name of ‘vaccine equity.’ The agency ‘trained’ 4,300 faith leaders as ‘vaccine advocates and influencers’ who could convince their congregations to get vaccinated — and give out ‘incentives’ for doing so. The program included 1200 church vaccination sites and distributed 650,000 doses while issuing public service announcements aimed at reducing ‘vaccine hesitancy’ and ‘debunking myths.’”
The focus on equity was also shoehorned into other unrelated programs. For instance, the Trump administration established the Rural Communities Opioid Response to fight opioid addiction and overdoses in 2019, Two years later, the Biden-Harris administration tasked grant recipients with fighting overdoses only if they also fight “systemic racism.”
On Thursday, John Hart, CEO of OpenTheBooks.com, joined “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” to unpack his organization’s report on the level of spending on equity occurring in the federal government.
“We’re in an age where we’ve really lost our foundational understanding of this question of identity,” he contended. “The Founders wrote [in] the Declaration of Independence that our rights are endowed to us by a creator. They’re not dependent on the king, the state, our race, or ethnicity. And we’ve moved so far away from that. We’re really institutionalizing another form of discrimination through this woke DEI framework. And it’s a hyper-racial sensitivity that actually makes people less sensitive towards other people of different races. I think it’s really a racist ideology in many respects.”
Hart further argued that such a heavy emphasis on equity ideology is detrimental to public health. “This hyper-racial focus has nothing to do with health,” he maintained. “… [I]t’s worth asking, are the dollars we’re spending on DEI employees doing anything to help health care, help make health care more affordable or accessible or transparent to low-income Americans? And I think the answer to that is probably no, it doesn’t advance that primary focus.”
Notably, Tuesday’s release of OpenTheBooks.com’s report coincided with President-elect Donald Trump announcing the formation of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which will be led by tech billionaire Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. The new department will be tasked with uncovering “waste and fraud” that can be eliminated within the federal government’s budget, which experts like Hart say is likely to target DEI initiatives like HHS’s.
“I’m glad Elon Musk and Vivek and President Trump are working together with this Department of Government Efficiency because we need to look at every agency at every level and ask, ‘Are these programs advancing the central mission of the agency, and does the agency’s mission even make sense?’ And so HHS really ought to be focused on things like improving health outcomes.”
Hart concluded by arguing that ideologies focused on identity undermine human dignity.
“It gets to this … kind of perversion of what the Founders’ vision of identity is, that our identity doesn’t come from our race,” he insisted. “It comes from natural law or nature’s God. That’s what America was built on, this concept. And so when you add on these other identities and these sort of equity concepts, you’re not actually advancing people’s human dignity. The way I think of it is every human being has worth and dignity by being a child of God. So, there are no amount of acronyms or plus symbols or letters you can add to a human being that gives them more dignity. In fact, every acronym could be a subtraction because it takes us away from the value that we all have as children of God.”
Ben Johnson is senior reporter and editor at The Washington Stand.
Dan Hart is senior editor at The Washington Stand.