A group of Republican lawmakers is mounting an all-out assault on the Biden administration’s diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) regime with a bill to ban it and ensure that it never returns.
Introduced Wednesday by Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Representative Michael Cloud (R-Texas) and cosponsored by five other GOP senators, the Dismantle DEI Act would overturn a raft of President Joe Biden’s DEI-related executive orders, shutter federal DEI offices, prohibit federal DEI training and grants, and prevent federal contractors from employing DEI practices.
“The DEI agenda is a destructive ideology that breeds hatred and racial division. It has no place in our federal government or anywhere else in our society,” Vance said in a press release. “I’m proud to introduce this legislation, which would root out DEI from our federal bureaucracy by eliminating such programs and stripping funding for DEI policies anywhere it exists. Americans’ tax dollars should not be co-opted to spread this radical and divisive ideology — this bill would ensure they are not.”
The Washington Free Beacon called the Dismantle DEI Act “the most comprehensive legislative effort yet to excise DEI initiatives from the federal government and regulated entities.” Such an effort is sorely needed, the website noted:
From NASA and the National Science Foundation to the Internal Revenue Service and the [U.S.] Army, all federal agencies require some form of diversity training. Mandatory workshops have drilled tax collectors on “cultural inclusion,” military commanders on male pregnancy, and nuclear engineers on the “roots of white male culture,” which — according to a training for Sandia National Laboratories, the Energy Department offshoot that designs America’s nuclear arsenal — include a “can-do attitude” and “hard work.”
Vance and company are serious about ridding the government of this kind of divisive drivel. Their bill would not only put a stop to these trainings and the DEI offices that conduct them, but “would also,” penned the Free Beacon, “prevent personnel laid off by those closures from being transferred or reassigned — a move meant to stop diversity initiatives from continuing under another name.”
Some DEI bureaucracy existed before Biden took office, but it has grown by leaps and bounds during his presidency thanks to his orders imposing DEI requirements on many federal agencies and creating new ones, such as the White House Gender Policy Council, to advance such initiatives.
Doing away with the federal DEI apparatus would also save taxpayers a significant chunk of change. “In 2023, the Biden administration spent over $16 million on diversity training for government employees alone,” wrote the Free Beacon. “It requested an additional $83 million that year for DEI programs at the State Department and $9.2 million for the Office of Personnel Management’s Office of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility — one of the many bureaucracies the bill would eliminate.” On top of that, it would scotch the numerous DEI-related grants awarded by agencies such as the National Institutes of Health.
Biden’s DEI regime isn’t limited to the federal government. The president has also imposed DEI regulations on federal contractors, which the Free Beacon reported elsewhere are responsible for massive delays in federally funded projects. “All applicants for federal funding must in many cases submit reports that can total hundreds of pages about how they will pursue ‘equity’ every step along the way,” penned the website. No wonder Biden’s 2021 plan to build half a million electric vehicle charging stations has resulted in the construction of a mere seven to date.
In addition to ridding federal contractors of those onerous requirements, which one senior Department of Transportation official told the Free Beacon “are screwing everything up,” the Dismantle DEI Act could also spell the end of contractors’ own DEI programs. The bill would prohibit the government from awarding contracts to entities that engage in DEI practices, meaning companies such as Lockheed Martin, Pfizer, and Verizon would have to choose between diversity and dollars. With one-fifth of the U.S. workforce employed by federal contractors, this has the potential to free millions of Americans from the clutches of the DEI dragon.
The bill doesn’t stop there. It also forbids accreditation agencies recognized by the Department of Education from imposing DEI requirements on educational institutions as a condition of accreditation, which is necessary for schools to receive federal funds. This, the Free Beacon contended,
could remove a key driver of DEI programs in professional schools. The American Bar Association and the Liaison Committee on Medical Education, which accredit all law and medical schools in the United States and derive much of their power from the U.S. Department of Education, have both made DEI material — including course content on “anti-racism” — a requirement for accreditation, over the objections of some of their members.
While these requirements have affected law schools, their effects have been “even more acute at medical schools,” wrote the Free Beacon. “At the University of California, Los Angeles [UCLA], David Geffen School of Medicine, students must complete a ‘health equity’ course that promotes police abolition, describes weight loss as a ‘hopeless endeavor,’ and states that ‘biomedical knowledge’ is ‘just one way’ of understanding ‘health and the world.’” (UCLA insiders recently told the Free Beacon that DEI mandates have turned it into a “failed medical school” with “incredibly unqualified” students.)
Unfortunately, the Dismantle DEI Act faces a steep uphill battle in Washington given that Democrats control both the Senate and White House. But, as they say in Cleveland, there’s always next year.
