AMAC Exclusive – By Katie Sullivan
In a fiery new video posted to his Truth Social page late last week, former President Donald Trump blasted a recent Joe Biden executive order on advancing “equity” in the federal government, marking the latest forceful response from the 45th president to the far-left policies of the current administration.
In the 90-second clip, Trump vowed to eradicate all the “equity” mandates from the Biden administration if he’s elected president again. Equity has become a “catch-all phrase for the Radical Left to justify every one of their crazy programs,” Trump said. “Instead of treating everyone equally, making decisions based on merit or qualifications, equity means that benefits are awarded and policies are enforced based on skin color and sexual identity.”
Trump released the video following a February 16 executive order from President Biden on “further advancing racial equity and support for underserved communities in the federal government.” According to administration officials, the order is a whole-of-government approach to combatting racial discrimination by redressing unfair disparities and by removing barriers to government programs and services. The order specifically mandates each agency head to “make advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility a priority component of the agency’s management agenda and agency strategic planning.”
In practice, this means treating Americans differently based on skin color. Rather than actual data and research on how best to allocate government resources, government agencies have now been ordered to make those determinations based on the race, gender, or sexuality of prospective recipients.
Biden’s order applies across the entirety of the federal government. As Trump points out, when agencies like the IRS are making decisions about tax enforcement based on race, “freedom and equality are dead.”
Trump also alludes to the Marxist roots of the far-left “equity” agenda and its intimate connection to other ideologies like Critical Race Theory. Both equity policy and CRT traces their origins to “Critical Theory,” a philosophy developed by a group of 20th century sociologists at the University of Frankfurt who based their thinking on Karl Marx’s writings on the economy, society, and politics.
The Biden administration has enthusiastically embraced equity as a foundational aspect of its governing policy since day one. Biden’s very first executive order mandated all government agencies to create “Equity Plans” and conduct “Equity Assessments.” Just five months later, in June 2021, federal agencies were ordered to create “Agency Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Strategic Plans” pursuant to a second executive order on “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility in the Federal Workforce.” Now, federal agencies are tasked with creating and running “Agency Equity Teams.”
Most terrifyingly for ordinary Americans, federal agencies have hired legions of woke bureaucrats in order to enforce this new equity agenda. For instance, every federal agency now has a designated “environmental justice officer” and a “special coordinator” to work with Biden’s “Gender Policy Council.”
Notably, Biden’s newest executive order explicitly elevates “advancing equity” above the traditional missions of federal agencies – namely, serving taxpayers. The order mandates that each “Agency Equity Team” have “sufficient resources, including staffing and data collection capacity, to advance the agency’s equity goals.” Agency heads must also ensure that “their respective Agency Equity Teams serve in an advisory and coordination role on priority agency actions.”
In order to meet this goal, agencies are ordered to use their “policy, budgetary, programmatic, service-delivery, procurement, data-collection processes, grantmaking, public engagement, research and evaluation, and regulatory functions” – in other words, every bit of their organizational capacity.
What this all means is that taxpayer dollars will now be re-allocated toward serving the left’s equity agenda rather than the interests of the American people. Furthermore, data collection will now be “equity focused.” Rather than an objective tool for improving lives, data will now be a subjective tool for advancing an ideological agenda.
In recognition of how dangerous and destructive such politicization of the federal bureaucracy would be, Trump has pledged to instruct the Department of Justice to make clear that any such discrimination is illegal if he is elected. He also promised to investigate potential civil rights abuses carried out by the Biden administration, terminate all bureaucrats hired under Biden’s equity orders, and even create a restitution fund for Americans who have been unjustly discriminated against by equity policies.
With the 2024 presidential race now heating up, the “wokeification” of the federal government and Biden’s equity policies could become a major issue for voters. Particularly as the White House fails to competently respond to crises like the Chinese spy balloon and the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, Americans will likely be none too happy to see Biden and his Democrat allies preoccupied with identity politics and virtue signaling.
Katharine “Katie” Sullivan was as an Acting Assistant Attorney General and a senior advisor to the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Trump. She previously served 11 years as a state trial court judge in Colorado.
