WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The U.S. Department of Defense under President Joe Biden is seeking to spend millions more on so-called “diversity, equity, inclusion, & accessibility” (DEIA) initiatives within the U.S. military in the latest reminder of where the current administration’s priorities lie.
The Daily Wire reported that the Pentagon is requesting an additional $114.7 million for diversity programs in the upcoming fiscal year. If approved by Congress, it will lead to a total of $269.2 million in taxpayer dollars just on military diversity since Biden took office.
“DEIA has impacts on both the Department’s workforce and its mission, and therefore it should be examined beyond the traditional human resources lens by which it historically has been viewed,” the Pentagon claims in its Strategic Management Plan for fiscal years 2022 to 2026.
It’s not yet known what exactly the military would spend the additional sum on, but past funding has gone to support programs such as “unconscious bias diversity training” and scholarships for cadets from “underrepresented” demographic groups, as well as an internal glossary that promotes Critical Race Theory, which holds that society is structurally biased to favor whites at the expense of minorities, left-wing transgender ideology, and terminology, including “white fragility,” “settler colonialism,” and pronouns denoting so-called third genders such as “ze and zir.”
“Our military is not focused on lethality. They’re focused on diversity and climate,” lamented Republican member of Congress and former Army Green Beret Mike Waltz of Florida. “That’s going to result in our enemies not fearing us and respecting us as they should.”
The steady rise of “woke” ideology within the military, which has persisted and grown since the Clinton years despite the presidencies of Republicans George W. Bush and Donald Trump, has been intensified by Biden, who upon taking office quickly moved to open the military to recruits suffering from gender dysphoria in a reversal of Trump administration policy, then had Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin launch a review of supposed “domestic extremism” within the military that many saw as a pretext to purge conservative views from the ranks.
In March 2023, the Center for Military Readiness (CMR) published an update on the administration’s work to infuse the armed forces with left-wing gender ideology, ranging from enforcement of preferred pronouns to allowing cross-dressing and the use of opposite-sex showers and restrooms on military bases to making it harder to access information on the negative consequences of such policies.
Until last December, Biden’s Pentagon leaders also enforced COVID-19 vaccine mandates on American service men and women, provoking lawsuits and threatening soldier and pilot shortages in the tens of thousands, which only added to broader problems of force strength, troop morale, and public confidence.
During a Pentagon press briefing in April 2022 on the Army’s budget for Fiscal Year 2023, Under Secretary of the Army Gabe Camarillo announced the Army had “proactively made a decision to temporarily reduce our end strength from 485,000 soldiers to 476,000 in FY ’22, and 473,000 in FY ’23.” The Military Times reported at the time that this “could leave the service at its smallest size since 1940, when it had just over 269,000 troops.”
Gallup and Ronald Reagan Institute polls have both shown that the public has lost confidence in the military’s leaders, which presumably also has a significant effect on prospective soldiers’ willingness to sign up.
Republican U.S. Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama is currently putting a hold on en masse confirmations of nominees to Pentagon positions until the Biden administration backs down on its insistence on subsidizing abortions in the military, which National Security Council spokesman John Kirby claims is necessary to maintain a “ready force.”