Commentary: Big Tent Ideas

JEREMY PORTNOY: It’s Time To Downsize The DEI Headcount At HHS

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Under President Joe Biden, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has created a “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) infrastructure of dizzying complexity.

The agency’s 2025 budget request contains the word “equity” 829 times, adding onto a dollar total that is already impossible to fully tabulate.

HHS employed at least 294 DEI staffers at a cost of $38.7 million last year, according to a new report from OpenTheBooks. There were 247 with salaries above $100,000.

It can be difficult to grasp just how bureaucratic HHS’ DEI system truly is. The agency-wide “Office of EEO, Diversity & Inclusion” has 92 employees. Within that are seven more DEI offices for specific health agencies like the Food and Drug Administration.

Some of the smaller offices have several more divisions. The National Institutes of Health’s “Office of Equity, Diversity & Inclusion” has yet another “Diversity & Inclusion Division,” a marketing team, a customer outreach team and more.

The DEI expenses do not stop there.

The agency has $5 million budgeted for its “Office of Climate Change and Health Equity” and the “Office of Environmental Justice.” Another $5 million will go toward “diversifying the doula workforce.”

The Health Resources and Services Administration received $102 million this year for “training for diversity.” A third of it is to help universities “enhance the academic performance of minorities.”

The NIH plans to spend $241 million over nine years on its FIRST program, which pays universities to weigh a candidate’s “commitment to diversity” as equal to their academic ability when hiring scientists.

Even the NIH’s $1.2 billion “Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnology” program now has an “emphasis on diversity and inclusion in the research community,” according to its budget request.

Background: DEI has also transformed HHS’ seven Offices of Minority Health, which have 207 employees earning $29.4 million in total. Add that to the $38.7 million from the general DEI staff at HHS, and pay is $68 million.

The Offices of Minority Health have existed since 1985, but once Biden took office, he directed them to focus on “addressing historical and contemporary injustices.”

Quickly, the Center for Disease Control’s Office of Minority Health renamed itself to the Office of Health Equity and “declared racism a serious public health threat.”

Critical quote: “In medical research, lives depend on putting excellence first. The NIH distorts that value, subordinating it to political ideology and endangering those it’s supposed to serve,” National Association of Scholars fellow John Sailer wrote in the Wall Street Journal.

Political agendas from the left or the right have no place in science and medicine.

This article was republished with permission through RealClearPolitics Wire.

Jeremy Portnoy is an investigative journalist at OpenTheBooks. 

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.