AMAC Exclusive – By B.C. Brutus
Earlier this year, President Joe Biden signed another “racial equity” executive order mandating that every federal agency create a so-called “equity action plan” to “remove barriers for underserved communities.” Despite the benign-sounding language, however, the resulting “action plans” have made clear once again that the left’s “equity” agenda is antithetical to the principle of equality and effectively amounts to state-sponsored discrimination.
In short, “promoting equity” is the left’s euphemism for using government or institutional power to manufacture equal outcomes across so-called “underrepresented communities.” Rather than creating equality of opportunity and allowing individuals to achieve success on their own merit, the “equity” doctrine says that everything from jobs to government benefits must be distributed in order to ensure everyone achieves the same outcome.
If the concept sounds radical, that’s because it is – so radical, in fact, that even avowed “democratic-socialist” Senator Bernie Sanders voiced tacit opposition to it during an interview with liberal talk show host Bill Maher last month.
Nonetheless, the Biden administration has been obsessed with equity since day one. Just hours after taking office, President Biden issued an executive order on “advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities through the federal government.” The order specifically mandates, “The head of each agency, or designee,” must “within 6 months of the date of this order… deliver a report to the President describing the best practices” to advance equity.
In total, 92 agencies submitted such a report last year. While it went largely unnoticed by the media, the content of those reports was truly terrifying for Americans who believe that the government should not treat people differently based on race.
Take, for example, the IRS’s report, which was released in October 2021. The document makes reference to “taxation equity,” raising the alarming possibility that the IRS – which just received funding for 87,000 new agents thanks to the “Inflation Reduction Act” – may soon move to make a person’s race, gender, or sexual orientation a determining factor in tax collection and enforcement. Current law does not allow the government to use demographic data from other government agencies in enforcement actions, but there are indications that the Biden IRS may move to change that.
The Department of Transportation went a step further, promising to add “racial equity and barriers to opportunity as a consideration for awarding discretionary grants.” This plainly means that a grant applicant who is a person of color will be given preference over a white applicant purely because of their race. The Government Services Administration similarly pledged to “increase overall contract dollars awarded to underserved and disadvantaged communities.”
The State Department equity plan specifically says that the agency will “prioritize engagements with diplomatic partners and individuals from underrepresented and underserved communities worldwide.” In other words, the Department admits it is conducting diplomacy in accordance with the left’s equity agenda, rather than to advance the best interests of the United States – a fact that should perhaps be unsurprising given the Biden administration’s numerous foreign policy fiascos.
Amid mounting concerns about wokeness in the military driving down recruitment numbers, the Defense Department’s equity plan, released last April, emphasizes a “four-year strategic initiative” to promote equity “in the areas of recruitment and retention, promotion and development, and teaching and learning.”
As yet more evidence of the disastrous consequences of implementing “equity” ideology through government actions, the Biden Department of Education equity plan touts the agency’s complete gutting of Title IX. The changes not only force radical gender ideology on the American public by hijacking the education system, they also reverses hard-won victories for women and girls by destroying female-only spaces and sports.
Despite the path of destruction left in its wake, however, Biden was not content with just one equity executive order, and issued a second order on February 16 of this year. Although billions of taxpayer dollars had already been directed toward overhauling the entire federal bureaucracy in service of the left’s equity agenda, an effort that Biden describes as “embedding a focus on equity into the fabric of Federal policymaking,” the president insisted that it still was not enough.
“Members of underserved communities still confront significant barriers to realizing the full promise of our great Nation,” the order says. Therefore, Biden orders agencies to create an equity action plan every year – a burdensome mandate that will lead to more wasted time and money.
The new executive order also calls on every federal department to create an “agency equity team” that will “coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives and ensure that their respective agencies are delivering equitable outcomes for the American people.” In effect, these teams will act as “equity police” within government agencies, enforcing Biden’s equity mandate in order to advance the left’s mission of radical social transformation.
The sprawling federal bureaucracy was largely ineffective and inefficient long before Joe Biden took office. Now, government agencies aren’t just incompetent, they’re actively working to dismantle core American values like equality – leading to disastrous outcomes for the taxpayers who fund those agencies in the process.
B.C. Brutus is the pen name of a writer with experience in the legislative and executive branches.
