DEI

  • Normally, DEI offices are separate from Equal Employment Opportunity offices. The latter enforces a 1972 federal law designed to ensure fair and equal treatment in the workplace. DEI, on the other hand, is ostensibly designed to create inclusive environments that take various perspectives into account, but in practice promotes oppressors-versus-oppressed narratives and monomaniacally fixates on supposed “privileges” (or lack thereof) conferred by sexual, racial and gender “identities.” DEI posits that people should not be treated equally, but rather treated based on their sexual orientation, gender, race, and groups deemed to be “oppressed.”

  • It’s not just about giving people opportunities for jobs and college admissions, it’s about giving certain people jobs and admissions beCAUSE of their race/gender/sexual orientation. Companies, universities, and government agencies with DEI initiatives mandate that a certain % of staff/students/agents HAVE to fill a certain quota of race/gender/sexual orientation. This is not merit-based. This is racism & sexism, plain and simple. And it’s costing tax-payers billions of dollars - mostly in inflated salaries of “DEI officers” that oversee these sorts of programs.

  • The SPENDING for these programs is absolutely out of control - see below.

By the Numbers

From https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/diversifying-doulas-hhs-spends-hundreds

  • The Department of Health and Human Services — with a budget surpassed only by the Pentagon — employs 294 DEI staffers at an annual cost of $38.7 MILLION.

  • That’s doesn’t even include another $29.4 million in payroll for seven Offices of Minority Health embedded within various HHS agencies.

  • Resulting funds pour out across the country to achieve equity and “justice” in public health — to Black churches recruited to push vaccinations; to universities for hiring diverse researchers; and to special outreach for anyone from criminals, to the LGBTQ+ community, to the indigenous, and…doulas

  • Most of these workers — 247 of them — made over $100,000 in base salary for FY 2023. 4 of them made more than $200,000. Benefits typically represent an additional 30% of base salaries.

NOTE: The above costs may still be undercounting: HHS lists 52 diversity employees in its staff directory whose salaries are not listed in our open records request for the agency’s 2023 payroll. The department did not answer whether they were new hires, had left the department, or were omitted from their records production. https://directory.psc.gov/employee.htm

Above: 207 employees making $29.4 million. The vast majority of them — 182 — make six-figure salaries. Eliseo Pérez-Stable, director of the NIH’s Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, was the highest-paid by far with a $385,000 salary last year.

  • The CDC’s Office of Minority Health was founded in 1988. But in 2021, the office gained a new purpose: pushing all medical researchers to incorporate “diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging” into their scientific work. https://www.cdc.gov/health-equity/core/health-equity-fact-sheet.html?CDC_AAref_Val=https://www.cdc.gov/healthequity/core/fact-sheet/index.html (Again, when it comes to my doctor, most people DO NOT CARE ABOUT HIS/HER RACE! I want the best possible medical care, period. Shouldn’t that be the priority?)

  • When it comes to DEI and health equity spending, payroll expenses are a drop in the bucket. Promoting these topics can be lucrative for federal employees looking to expand their agency’s budget, and for private scientists hoping to win grants. The word “equity,” or variations thereof, appears in the HHS 2025 Budget Request 829 times. Putting a dollar total on all of it is impossible; it can be difficult to find a funding initiative that doesn’t incorporate equity in some manner. Here’s a sampling of some of the spending: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R48060/1

⁃ $608 million for agency-wide General Departmental Management, which lists its top three priorities as: “racial equity, environmental justice, climate change.”

⁃ $5 million for the agency-wide “Office of Climate Change and Health Equity” and “Office of Environmental Justice”

⁃ $98.6 million for the Medicaid Integrity Program, which helps fund an “Equity Dashboard.”

⁃ $5 million for the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) to “diversify the doula workforce” and

⁃ $24.3 million for “Nursing Workforce Diversity.”

  • The NIH Common Fund plans to spend $241 million over nine years on its Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST). Similar to HRSA’s “Training for Diversity” program, FIRST awards grants to top universities to hire scientists from minority backgrounds. FIRST grants are awarded to institutions considering a scientist’s “commitment to diversity” as equally important to their academic ability. (This is insane.) Candidates are penalized for wanting to treat everyone the same regardless of their background, according to documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-nih-sacrifices-scientific-rigor-for-dei-f828a6c7?st=s5ors9oz6hushg3 and https://dpcpsi.nih.gov/sites/default/files/CoC_Jan_2020_1115_FacultyDiversity.pdf

  • The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) was allocated $534.4 million this year, $10 million more than they actually requested. https://www.nami.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/20240328AdvocacyResourceonMentalHealthFunding.pdf

  • Congress directed the NIH to develop “a strategic plan with long-term and short-term goals to address the racial, ethnic, and gender disparities at NIH.” In short: less focus on curing cancer, and more attention to making sure no one cures cancer without acknowledging his “responsibility to correct systemic racism and inequities.” https://www.edi.nih.gov/our-communities/advancing-racial-equity

  • The NIH also bankrolled several bizarre initiatives focused on LGBT issues. It granted Yale University $3 million to study HIV risk by tracking gay men with GPS monitors; the project’s ultimate goal was to develop “a real-time phone app” partially on the tracking data. The agency also awarded Stanford $3.7 million to study “[s]ex hormone effects on neurodevelopment” in “transgender adolescents,” which researchers hope will “advanc[e] the empirical basis of clinical care for this vulnerable population of youth.” https://reporter.nih.gov/search/V4HJsedKp0aF_XqFmSksng/project-details/10153830 and https://reporter.nih.gov/search/mrPrr6lN9U2-KobDRlfA7A/project-details/10479828

  • “Taken together, these initiatives raise a troubling point: taxpayers have agreed to fund the NIH on the understanding that their money will be used by talented scientists to expand our knowledge of the natural world and to cure illness and disease. But the federal government is using that money to fiddle with the demographics of elite institutions, design an HIV tracking app, and build AI that can tweet like a black person—whatever that means.” https://www.city-journal.org/article/how-dei-corrupted-the-nih

  • The Department of Justice (DOJ) awarded over $100 million in grants to promote restorative justice and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) measures. The report found that from 2021 to 2024, millions of dollars were spent on federal funding in 36 states and 946 K-12 school districts, serving over three million students to promote restorative justice practices, social emotional learning and DEI in the classroom with many projects aimed at improving school climates for specific demographic groups, such as LGBTQ+ and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color). Another example provided was Ypsilanti Community Schools in Michigan, which obtained $15.5 million in grant funding and spent $19,500 on a consultant for one day for professional development centered around “culturally responsive” teaching. The school system also dished out $19,250 for copies of that consultant’s book. The School District of Philadelphia received a nearly $4 million grant for a restorative justice program. Other instances cited included a $4 million grant used to back a three-week summer camp tethered towards “student identities underrepresented in the computing field,” a $1.2 million grant for training 40 elementary school teachers how to “enact equity-centered education” and a $306,209 grant for teaching school counselors “trauma-informed, antiracist social-emotional learning.” https://defendinged.org/investigations/granted-u-s-department-of-justice/

  • Since 2021, the federal government has spent over $1 billion in diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, grants. Broken down, roughly $490 million went to DEI hiring, $343 million went to DEI programming and $169 million went to DEI based mental health/social emotional learning, according to the report. Schools have received grants funding antiracist social-emotional learning counseling for students, youth activism and race-based teacher affinity groups. https://defendinged.org/investigations/granted/

  • Ohio State University Spent $13 Million on DEI-Related Salaries in 2023, including two employees who make nearly $300,000 each: chief of diversity James L. Moore and VP of the Office of Institutional Equity Keesha Mitchell. https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/dei-blitz-reaches-buckeye-nation

  • The Department of Defense (DOD) could drop nearly $270 million in taxpayer funds to further the diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEI) agenda from fiscal years 2022 to 2024. The DOD has scaled up its spending on DEIA in the past three years, jumping from $68 million in fiscal year 2022 to $86.5 million in fiscal year 2023. But the figure surged another $28.2 million to $114.7 million in the department’s initial request for fiscal year 2024. https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudget/FY2023/FY2023_Budget_Request_Overview_Book.pdf

  • The National Security Agency (NSA), which is part of the DOD, internally published a 34-page diversity, equity, and inclusion document. The leaked document pushes Critical Race Theory and transgender ideology, with terms like “white fragility,” “transmisogny,” “settler colonialism,” and even the pronouns “ze” and “zir.” https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2023/11/NSA-DEI-GLOSSARY-WM-FINAL.pdf

  • The National Science Foundation (NSF) recently spent close to $300,000 on a DEI initiative for bird-watching groups. “In yet another shining example of wasteful government spending, the National Science Foundation has decided that the world of bird watching needs a dose of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Paul writes. “To that end, they’ve approved a grant of $288,563 to create ‘affinity groups’ within ornithological societies—basically, birdwatching clubs—based on identity characteristics…The goal, they say, is to ensure that birdwatching communities are more ‘inclusive.’” Regardless of where you stand on DEI, this kind of spending should raise a red flag on fiscal responsibility grounds alone. Surely there are more pressing needs than this? (Do the birds care about the gender identity of the people watching them?) https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/FESTIVUS-REPORT-2024.pdf

  • Facts, with sources: https://thefga.org/research/why-states-should-defund-dei/

⁃ Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs have been on the rise.

⁃ DEI trainings are not effective and can make biases worse.

⁃ DEI efforts are costing taxpayers millions.

⁃ During a diversity training put on by Clemson University at a cost of nearly $27,000, participants were instructed that valuing punctuality was culturally insensitive.

⁃ The Ohio State University’s College of Medicine calls for medical students to learn to evaluate everything through the lens of race and identity, rather than evaluating patients individually.

⁃ Federal employees at the Department of the Treasury were subjected to training that taught that “virtually all White people contribute to racism.”

⁃ A school district in Missouri provided teachers with a training program that asked them to rank their privilege, referred to parents as oppressors of their children, and told educators that it was their duty to support socialism in the classroom and with their vote.

DEI in LA fire department

  • Many questions surfaced about the preparation and response to the firestorm which led us to investigate the LAFD. The LAFD leadership has been laced with DEI policies that have set up the state for failure.



  • Firstly, you have Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who took a taxpayer-funded trip to Ghana while her city was on fire.

  • Additionally, Bass was responsible for cutting over $17 million from the Los Angeles Fire Department budget.

Other funds allocated:

  • LAFD Fire Chief Kristin Crowley has repeatedly stated that pushing for a “more diverse and inclusive” fire department is one of her top objectives. (Shouldn’t it be to put on fires and keep LA safe?)
This has led to complaints that the California firefighting force has too many white males. As you can imagine, California ended up with a shortage of wildland firefighters.

Californians overwhelmingly voted to spend billions on water storage and reservoirs but to this day, not a single one has been completed.