President Joe Biden’s State Department privately disclosed to Congress that it spent $77 million taxpayer dollars on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts in the last two years — and it plans to eclipse that total in the final year of Biden’s first term.
The administration was forced by a provision in last year’s spending bill to disclose to Congress exactly how much it has spent on DEI. That private report, obtained exclusively by The Daily Wire, shows Biden has spent $77 million in 2022 and 2023 on DEI-related initiatives.
Its spending calculations, however, are based on a narrow definition of DEI — the spending, according to the disclosure, went entirely towards DEI efforts in the Bureau of Global Talent Management, which states on its website that its primary goal is to “sustain a diverse, talented, and inclusive workforce.”
Meanwhile an undisclosed amount of “central funds” are used to pay for 12 full-time employees in the Office of Diversity and Inclusion (Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Constance Mayer enjoys an annual salary of nearly $180,000).
Congressional leaders who forced the disclosure say it shows that “the State Department’s ideological overemphasis on DEIA has come to penetrate every bureau and embassy under the Biden administration.”
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX), the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was responsible for inserting the provision that required the State Department to tell Congress how much it was spending on DEI. He told The Daily Wire that the massive spending sends the message to every employee that they better fall in line behind the ideology.
“Now, foreign and civil service officers must pledge allegiance or else risk not being promoted,” said McCaul.
Information delivered to Congress by the Biden administration / The Daily Wire
All indications are that the Biden administration will only step up its spending on DEI. The agency has requested up to $83 million to push DEI in fiscal year 2024, threatening to bring the official 3-year total to $160 million.
“The Budget includes up to $83.3 million for continued expansion of programs to foster diversity and inclusion to further support the President’s Executive Orders,” a fiscal year 2024 budget justification reads.
The appendix provided by the administration to Congress says that it failed to monitor how much was spent on DEI in 2021, making a determination on the total amount spent under Biden impossible.
“Until Executive Orders pertaining to DEIA were issued in 2021, the Department did not monitor funds spent on DEIA-related initiatives,” the appendix reads. “Accordingly, the Department is able to provide the requested funding information only for FY 2022 and FY 2023.”
The State Department defended their DEI funding requests to The Daily Wire, lumping it in with spending to meet legal non-discrimination obligations. “All federal agencies routinely spend on accessibility and non-discrimination to comply with U.S. law—including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973—as well as non-discrimination guidance and obligations from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC),” the State Department told The Daily Wire.
“The Department of State takes seriously the need to follow the law and create an inclusive environment for all employees. Spending on DEIA helps the Department address these legal requirements,” the agency said before calling the diversity agenda a “national security imperative.”
The narrow view of DEI spending in the disclosure, however, appears to massively undercount how much Biden’s State Department is actually spending to promote the ideology.
The State Department hasn’t limited itself to simply ensuring non-discrimination standards are met, and has instead pushed efforts both at home and abroad that cost sums that greatly exceed the amount disclosed to Congress.
In 2021, for example, the State Department pledged an annual $10 million grant to the Global Equality Fund, a public-private partnership that bankrolls LGBT activist groups across the world. The Global Equality Fund boasts that it provides “critical resources to civil society organizations (CSOs) and human rights defenders, including those working to increase the visibility and empowerment of queer women, transgender, intersex people, and members of other marginalized LGBTQI+ communities.”
The State Department also employs a Special Envoy to Advance the Human Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex Persons, paying former activist Jessica Stern $180,000 a year to travel the globe pushing transgenderism. Stern has visited at least 22 different countries across all six habitable continents, even attending a “transgender visibility” march in Brazil and a meeting for the Global Equality Fund in Stockholm, Sweden.
There was also a whopping $2.6 billion taxpayer dollars request to “advance gender equity and equality across a broad range of sectors” for fiscal year 2023, a State Department press release explains. Another $111 million was requested that same year to fund USAID’s “Global Development Partnership Initiative,” a program designed to create 200 roles focused on “climate change, democracy and anti-corruption expertise, global health security, national security,” and “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility advisors.”
The largest DEI-related request in 2024 lumped the controversial ideological material along with other expenses, obscuring the true sum requested for the diversity agenda. A full $435 million was requested by the State Department for “central support,” a request that “includes funding for IT; office space, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility activities.” It is unclear how much of the requested sum was intended to be used for DEI efforts.
Another $1.4 million was requested for 2023 to fund a USAID effort to “support the development of resilient democratic societies,” in part by advancing the “administration’s localization, diversity, and inclusion goals” and working with the Gender Equity and Equality Action Fund. A slightly higher sum of $1.5 million was requested by the State Department for a similar USAID effort for 2024 for “inclusive development that ensures the rights, safety, and well-being of marginalized and underrepresented groups like LGBTQI+ persons.”
The State Department recently reaffirmed its commitment to embed “equity” throughout the agency, and within the foreign policymaking process, in a new Equity Action Plan which claims that “inequity is a national security challenge with global consequences.” The plan touted efforts to build connections between Jamaican law enforcement and LGBT people, as well as to provide access to HIV pre-exposure drugs in Ukraine.
The powerful federal agency has even pushed gender ideology on foreign countries, with a $50,000 effort to “develop active transgender employee recruitment plans” in the Indian cities of Chennai and Hyderabad. There was also another $30,000 granted to a pro-transgender group in Kyrgyzstan to “prevent gender-based violence against the transgender community and increase acceptance through sensitivity and advocacy training, and media campaigns.”
The State Department also pushed gender ideology on its employees here at home, with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken recently sending out a memo warning employees not to engage in misgendering.
While powerful federal agencies, from the State Department to the Pentagon and beyond, have institutionalized leftwing dogmas on race and gender, Trump and his former administration officials have discussed plans to gut the administrative state should he be elected in 2024.
Some are advocating for a complete shutdown of DEI offices, as well as a policy called Schedule F, which could remove civil service employment protections from those who may obstruct the president’s policy objectives. 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.”