President Joe Biden speaks before signing executive orders at the White House, January 28, 2021. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
By Alex Welz
November 12, 2024 6:19 PM
The Department of Health and Human Services has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds carrying out President Biden’s DEI initiatives, according to a new nonprofit government watchdog report released Tuesday.
Biden issued an executive order in June 2021 calling for federal agencies to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion in recruits and when considering promotions. DEI quickly became a dominant theme within the federal government over the next four years.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) currently employs 294 DEI employees, costing the agency $38.7 million in taxpayer funds each year, according to a report from OpenTheBooks. In Fiscal Year 2023, 247 of those workers made over $100,000, while four took home double that sum.
An additional 207 HHS employees oversee Biden’s “health equity” efforts in the Offices of Minority Health at a cost of $29.4 million for salaries alone each year.
“At the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion is organized like its own corporation,” OpenTheBooks wrote in a statement. “It has separate departments for Guidance, Education & Marketing, Data Analytics & Customer Outreach, and an ostensibly redundant Diversity & Inclusion Division.”
Some of the spending choices that are receiving the most blowback include $5 million to “diversify the doula workforce” and another $25 million for “nursing workforce diversity.”
Since Biden assumed the Oval Office in 2021, grant applicants for the Rural Communities Opioid Response have been required to complete a “Disparate Impact Statement” that explains how systemic racism will inform their efforts in addressing the opioid crisis. Applicants remain encouraged to defer to groups that have suffered from disproportioned historical iniquities.
Another controversial program is Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST), which “awards grants to top universities to hire scientists from minority backgrounds — specifically considering a scientist’s ‘commitment to diversity’ as equally important to their academic ability.” The NIH Common Fund has committed $241 million to the program over the course of nine years.
A $102 million allocation was given to the Health Resources and Services Administration for “training for diversity.” Part of this allotment is also to be spent on the FIRST program, funding “Centers of Excellence” on campuses seeking to advance “recruitment, training, and retaining underrepresented minority students and faculty at health professions schools.”
Variations of the term “equity” could be found 829 different times in HHS’ 2025 congressional budget request, the report uncovered. OpenTheBooks also discovered 92 DEI employees working under the direct oversight of HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.
“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 report read.
Thousands of black church leaders were even recruited to serve as “vaccine advocates and influencers.”
“Records of both vaccine equity programs have been removed from the CDC’s website,” the report claimed.
By Alex Welz
November 12, 2024 6:19 PM
The Department of Health and Human Services has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds carrying out President Biden’s DEI initiatives, according to a new nonprofit government watchdog report released Tuesday.
Biden issued an executive order in June 2021 calling for federal agencies to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion in recruits and when considering promotions. DEI quickly became a dominant theme within the federal government over the next four years.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) currently employs 294 DEI employees, costing the agency $38.7 million in taxpayer funds each year, according to a report from OpenTheBooks. In Fiscal Year 2023, 247 of those workers made over $100,000, while four took home double that sum.
An additional 207 HHS employees oversee Biden’s “health equity” efforts in the Offices of Minority Health at a cost of $29.4 million for salaries alone each year.
“At the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion is organized like its own corporation,” OpenTheBooks wrote in a statement. “It has separate departments for Guidance, Education & Marketing, Data Analytics & Customer Outreach, and an ostensibly redundant Diversity & Inclusion Division.”
Some of the spending choices that are receiving the most blowback include $5 million to “diversify the doula workforce” and another $25 million for “nursing workforce diversity.”
Since Biden assumed the Oval Office in 2021, grant applicants for the Rural Communities Opioid Response have been required to complete a “Disparate Impact Statement” that explains how systemic racism will inform their efforts in addressing the opioid crisis. Applicants remain encouraged to defer to groups that have suffered from disproportioned historical iniquities.
Another controversial program is Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST), which “awards grants to top universities to hire scientists from minority backgrounds — specifically considering a scientist’s ‘commitment to diversity’ as equally important to their academic ability.” The NIH Common Fund has committed $241 million to the program over the course of nine years.
A $102 million allocation was given to the Health Resources and Services Administration for “training for diversity.” Part of this allotment is also to be spent on the FIRST program, funding “Centers of Excellence” on campuses seeking to advance “recruitment, training, and retaining underrepresented minority students and faculty at health professions schools.”
Variations of the term “equity” could be found 829 different times in HHS’ 2025 congressional budget request, the report uncovered. OpenTheBooks also discovered 92 DEI employees working under the direct oversight of HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra.
“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 report read.
Thousands of black church leaders were even recruited to serve as “vaccine advocates and influencers.”
“Records of both vaccine equity programs have been removed from the CDC’s website,” the report claimed.
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