Hours after his 2021 inauguration, President Joe Biden signed his executive order on “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.” Until the ascent of the second Trump administration, federal bureaucrats used this order to force grant applicants to pledge support for diversity, equity, and inclusion practices — even for projects otherwise devoid of ideological trappings.
The Washington Examiner identified nearly $1 billion worth of federal grants earmarked for ostensibly nonpolitical purposes, such as “nuclear reactor safety training” or “landslide hazard mapping,” that evaluated applicants based on their willingness to embed DEI within the federally funded programs. This analysis covered only 10 funding opportunities, meaning the true extent of this dynamic was likely much greater under the Biden administration, affecting a large portion of the hundreds of billions of dollars in grant funding disbursed under the former president.
Among the largest items in the Washington Examiner’s review was a federal grant project designed to improve energy infrastructure in rural and remote regions of the nation, boasting an estimated cost of $400 million. Organizations seeking government funding to modernize rural infrastructure were required to complete an entire section in their applications concerning how “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility objectives will be incorporated into the[ir] project.” Examples provided by the Department of Energy include pledging to partner with businesses owned by racial minorities and documenting how federal resources will flow to “underrepresented” communities.
“Affirmatively advancing equity, civil rights, racial justice, and equal opportunity is the responsibility of the whole of our Government,” Biden wrote in his racial equity executive order. “Because advancing equity requires a systematic approach to embedding fairness in decision-making processes, executive departments and agencies must recognize and work to redress inequities in their policies and programs that serve as barriers to equal opportunity.”
Another Biden-era grant program, ostensibly to “research, map, assess, and collect data on landslide hazards,” informed applicants that they were “strongly encouraged” to include a statement articulating their “plan for ongoing synergistic work to address diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” in order to receive funding. The U.S. Geological Survey made $1 million available for the project.
Critics have long decried diversity statements as a way to discriminate against people who dissent from liberal beliefs on race and sexuality.
“Diversity statements are loyalty oaths which violate applicants’ freedom of conscience and discriminate on the basis of philosophical belief,” University of Buckingham politics professor Eric Kaufmann wrote in a June 2024 piece for Newsweek. “This requirement discriminates against conservative and classical liberal applicants who, reflecting the views of a majority of Americans, prioritize equal treatment, objective truth, and freedom of speech above equal outcomes and emotional safety for minorities.”
Left-of-center voices, meanwhile, defend mandated support for diversity by arguing that universities are obligated to treat everyone with fairness.
Few commentators, if any, have commented on the merits of weighing applicants for nuclear safety programs based on their support for diversity. Despite this, the Biden administration ran a $100 million grant program that did just that.
The program, which sought to improve the safety and reliability of American nuclear reactors, required that applicants submit a DEI-focused “Community Benefits Plan” as part of their funding appeal. This plan had to include “specific and high-quality actions to meet DEIA goals.”
Federal grant spending became the focus of policymakers and pundits in April when President Donald Trump announced he would cut off awards to Harvard University until it met his demands related to clamping down on alleged antisemitism and racial discrimination. Some right-of-center groups, such as Open The Books, have pointed out that Harvard’s billions of dollars in federal funding pay for what they argue is a bloated staff and “far-left research.”
OVER 99% OF POLITICAL DONATIONS FROM TOP HARVARD OFFICIALS WENT TO DEMOCRATS
Federal research grants disbursed to Harvard and singled out by Open The Books included $2.5 million for improving “diversity in biomedical sciences via personalized research and education programs” and $85,000 to “support studies assessing the feasibility and fidelity of a digital music-based mindfulness intervention developed for black American adults experiencing race-based anxiety.”
Mandated support for DEI extended beyond domestic federal programs. Grant funding approved by the Biden administration to fund English language education in Pakistan and to improve trade practices in Indonesia, for instance, both selected grantees partially based on their support for DEI. Other ostensibly nonideological federal grant programs that required applicants to affirm the value of DEI included a $95 million project that focused on expanding trade apprenticeships, a $1.9 million agricultural research facility program, $28.7 million for a “National Center for Construction Safety and Health Research and Translation,” $2 million for weather research, and $300 million to carry out directives from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
While Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has placed emphasis on canceling grants that explicitly pushed DEI, grants with innocuous purposes nonetheless embedded with DEI have received less public attention.
