The Biden administration’s Department of Defense leaned on debunked McKinsey and Company studies touting the benefits of diversity as justification to embed the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda into the military.
The consulting giant’s debunked studies, with titles such as “Diversity Wins” and “Diversity Matters,” are referenced in multiple reports from the Navy, a Pentagon newsletter, and a document from the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, all of which advocate for the DEI agenda to be embedded deeper into the operations of the U.S. military.
McKinsey and Company published a number of studies claiming that the use of DEI policies led to increased profitability for corporations, stating that companies become more profitable as their executive levels become more diverse. But now the results have come under scrutiny, with a study from Econ Journal Watch finding that McKinsey’s studies were deeply flawed.
“Caution is warranted in relying on McKinsey’s findings to support the view that US publicly traded firms can deliver improved financial performance if they increase the racial/ethnic diversity of their executives,” the study reads. It goes on to point out that the McKinsey study measured “firm financial performance over the four or five years leading up to the year in which they judge the race/ethnicity of firms’ executives,” a testing structure that the Econ Journal Watch says is unable to substantiate the claims of the McKinsey study.
The flawed findings from McKinsey were used to justify the DEI agenda, not just by corporations, but by the Biden administration’s Department of Defense. The DOD’s embrace of the far-left ideology came in the wake of Biden’s Executive Order 14035 in June of 2021, which directed the federal bureaucracy to embrace the DEI agenda.
The revelation comes as the Pentagon and other federal agencies work relentlessly to embed the DEI agenda into policies and practices, spending hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to do so.
Various different entities within the DOD justified their DEI policies by appealing to the flawed McKinsey studies. One edition of the Defense Civilian Personnel Advisory Service Newsletter explicitly referenced studies from McKinsey.
“[T]here is a business case for the Department’s prioritization of DEI as normal operations,” the newsletter reads. “McKinsey & Company reports diversity in executive teams makes them stronger and ‘the most diverse companies are now more likely than ever to outperform less diverse peers on profitability,’” it goes on to say, referencing a study called “Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters.”
Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN), who serves as the Chairman of the Anti-Woke Caucus and is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, warned that Biden is leveraging faulty studies to further an explicitly political agenda.
“The Biden administration is using junk science to transform our military into a far-left social experiment and push conservatives away from service. DEI divides, shrinks, and weakens our military, all to the benefit of Communist China,” Banks told The Daily Wire.
At least two different documents published by the Navy also rely on the findings of the flawed McKinsey studies. The Navy’s “Health of the Force” report in 2021 reads “Gender-diverse organizations are 15% more likely to outperform other organizations, and diverse organizations are 35% more likely to outperform their non-diverse counterparts,” citing McKinsey’s 2015 study, “Diversity Matters.”
Then again in the Navy’s “Task Force One” report, the military branch asserted that “gender-diverse” organizations are likely to outperform “non-diverse counterparts,” again citing the same study from McKinsey.
There’s also a collection of news articles compiled by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute, which exists to “advance an agile and inclusive force.” The Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute highlighted one article that touted the flawed McKinsey studies.
“They found companies in the top quartile of gender diversity and those in the top quartile of racial/ethnic diversity were more likely to generate financial returns above their national industry median,” the article says, also directly referring to a McKinsey study.
While the DOD has used the flawed studies to grant legitimacy to Biden’s DEI agenda, the Pentagon has aggressively pushed leftwing ideological material and policies on the federal bureaucracy and armed forces at great cost to the taxpayer. The DOD has spent as much as $270 million on the DEI agenda from fiscal years 2022 to 2024.
The ideological bias within the military was exemplified recently when the United States Air Force Academy hosted a transgender military official who led the effort for the military to recognize “transgender day of visibility” at a leadership symposium, where he told the cadets to push for transgender inclusion within the military.
WATCH🎥: The U.S. Air Force Academy hosted a transgender Pentagon official for a symposium on inclusion. Our military is focused on transgender dogma while wars rage on two continents.
Here he is at a pride celebration calling for "intentional inclusivity" in the military 🧵 pic.twitter.com/6BAbEwrS4j
— Spencer Lindquist 🇺🇸 (@SpencerLndqst) February 29, 2024
There was also a DEI glossary produced by the National Security Agency (NSA), exclusively obtained by The Daily Wire, that included terms like “white fragility,” “queer theory,” “settler colonialism,” and the gender-neutral pronouns “ze” and “zir.”
Even the United States’ top intelligence office, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), has been captured by far-left ideologues. A newsletter sent by ODNI to the entire Intelligence Community, including intelligence components within each branch of the military as well as the FBI, CIA, and NSA, urged agents to avoid using “hurtful” language when discussing Islamic terrorism. It even included an article from an anonymous intelligence official who claimed that crossdressing makes him a better intelligence agent.
While the Biden administration has worked to embed far-left beliefs on race and gender into the military and other aspects of the federal government, policy architects from the former Trump administration have crafted plans to gut the administrative state if Trump is reelected, using tools like Schedule F, an executive order, to strip civil service employment protections from bureaucrats who have influence over the policy-making process.
“We will pass critical reforms making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States,” Trump said at a rally, touting the plan. “The deep state must be brought to heel.”
Others are preparing to fill in the gap left by outgoing officials, assembling a personnel database of those who might serve in the next administration through the Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project, an initiative from the Heritage Foundation that seeks to “pave the way for an effective conservative Administration.”