U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) says a council of federal inspectors general is pushing the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) agenda, charging that the institution is encouraging Offices of Inspectors Generals to illegally consider race in its hiring in a letter exclusively obtained by The Daily Wire.
The letter from Cruz is addressed to Mark Greenblatt, the Chairman of the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), in response to an October 2023 report on the council’s DEI agenda. The report from CIGIE, an independent government agency, specifically encourages Offices of Inspectors General to consider race in their hiring practices and administer unconscious bias training to employees.
“Inspectors general play a crucial role in holding federal agencies in check and protecting taxpayer dollars,” Cruz noted in the opening of his letter. “That is why it is so disappointing that, instead of focusing on its important mission, CIGIE is blindly advancing the Biden administration’s partisan policy goal of diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
Senator Cruz’s letter comes as federal agencies have worked to embed the DEI agenda throughout the bureaucracy following a June 2021 executive order from President Joe Biden that cemented the ideology in the government.
The letter says that CIGIE “provides a comprehensive manual for creating and implementing race-based employment practices at every federal [Office of Inspector General] when employment decisions should be based on merit.”
“Considering skin color in employment practices is immoral, and claiming that such actions are necessary to advance DEI — an inherently racist ideology — does not change that,” Cruz writes. “It is also plainly illegal.”
Cruz in his letter outlines the guidance given by the CIGIE, which includes the development of “quarterly reports on professional development, attrition, rewards, retention, and promotion action by race,” as well as annual “human capital planning discussions with senior leaders, hiring officials, and managers to develop a targeted hiring and recruitment plan” for increasing ‘demographic diversity.’”
The guidance also tells Offices of Inspector Generals to track workforce demographics, “develop plans of action, and “improve the diversity of applicant pools.”
In addition to alleging that the policies are illegal, Cruz contends that they are “unconstitutional in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.”
Cruz says the group is pushing DEI training on employees who might not readily accept the far left agenda. He specifically highlighted the guidance’s support for “‘continuous education’ on DEI principles to get ‘people who are ambivalent or actively resistant to [DEI] programs’ to ‘buy-in’” as well as “annual mandatory unconscious bias training for leaders, managers, and staff involved in staffing, recruitment, and hiring activities.” But the guidance goes beyond just advocating for DEI training, instead recommending that Offices of Inspectors General include DEI elements “in annual performance plans for senior executives and hiring officials.”
Cruz ultimately demanded that the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency provide a number of different documents pertaining to its DEI agenda, including an “ally newsletter,” training materials on DEI, unconscious bias, and Critical Race Theory, and a New Manager Course that includes DEI concepts.
Biden officials in federal agencies have been aggressively working to institutionalize the DEI agenda in the inner workings of the bureaucracy. The Internal Revenue Service, for example, recently hosted a diversity training that utilized material from an extreme transgender academic who called for the “death of whiteness. State Department Secretary Anthony Blinken told employees not to use gendered language like “mother/father,” “son/daughter,” and “husband/wife,” and to avoid “misgendering.”
Large sums of taxpayer dollars have also been used to push the far-left ideological agenda, with the Pentagon spending as much as $270 million on DEI initiatives under Biden. The United States Air Force Academy has promoted transgenderism while the National Security Agency created a DEI glossary with terms like “settler colonialism” and “transmisogyny,” the Daily Wire exclusively reported.
Even federal contractors have embraced the far-left ideology, with one major Pentagon contractor even hosting Critical Race Theorist Robin DiAngelo for a speaking event and providing copies of her book “White Fragility.”
But while the far-left agenda has taken root throughout our federal agencies, former President Trump has signaled that he will gut the bureaucracies and potentially shut down DEI offices if he is reelected.
As president, he could reimpose an executive order called Schedule F, an action that would enable the president to fire thousands of bureaucrats who have influence over policy. “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.
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.”
