(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) In Congress’s massive new bipartisan defense bill, enormous sums of money have been allocated to bolster the Pentagon’s “diversity” budget, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.
Congress has allocated $131.7 million in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act to projects aimed at diversity and inclusion in the military, justified by the perverted logic that diversity is our strength.
“The FY23 NDAA makes major investments in the research, innovation, and diversity that make our country safer and stronger,” House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith of Washington wrote.
The nation’s military has long prioritized “diversity and inclusion” over winning wars and defending the nation’s interest from foreign influence. The move is a continuation of a 2020 Department of Defense initiative to recruit military officers specifically from Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
According to Maiya Clark, senior research associate at the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, Congress’ attempt to direct how the Pentagon spends funds is a major overstep.
“As a general rule, when Congress specifies what research and development projects that the Department of Defense should undertake and who should perform them, the more inefficient the use of research and development funding becomes,” she argued.
“Designated funding specifically directed to HBCU and MSI for specific purposes falls into that category too.”
The DOD’s pursuit of diversity goes back decades, but the most recent initiative began two years ago.
The DOD is looking to #HBCUs to craft future military leaders as diversity and inclusion remain top priorities for the department. https://t.co/Bvda9xrwbi
— Department of Defense 🇺🇸 (@DeptofDefense) November 21, 2020
“The DOD is looking to #HBCUs to craft future military leaders as diversity and inclusion remain top priorities for the department,” the DOD tweeted at the time.
At the time, Congress has commanded the DOD to deepen their relationship with HBCUs in order to form even more state-university partnerships by following the directives of the National Academies committee, which “found no examples in which partnerships were incentivized or directed by DoD.”
“Social justice norms would also argue that DoD — the nation’s largest agency in terms of funding and employees — should demographically look more like the nation as a whole, which is projected to be ‘majority minority’ within 25 years,” the report said.
The plan is to move HBCUs from “high research status” to “very high research status”, which means granting them even more funding than they already receive from the state.
