Pentagon Was Compelled To Drop Discriminatory DEI Program After Supreme Court Ruling

 The Department of Defense and a contracting organization were compelled to abandon a racially-driven hiring pipeline following the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision overturning affirmative action, The Daily Wire has learned.

The Defense Department awarded almost $760,000 in taxpayer funds to the University of Missouri-Kansas City to create a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) career pipeline program that discriminated against white and male students in an attempt to reach “equity-focused” goals, The Daily Wire exclusively reported.

The proposed DEI pipeline was kneecapped when the Supreme Court ruled that affirmative action policies were unlawful in the June 2023 case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.

“Immediately following the summer 2023 Supreme Court decision, the internship criteria was revised in compliance with the ruling,” Stacy Downs, the Director of Strategic Communications for the University of Missouri-Kansas City, told The Daily Wire.

That revision comes as public and private institutions alike embrace the DEI agenda, which often justifies the use of discriminatory selection criteria in jobs and internships as a means to address the systemic racism proponents claim exists in American society.

Before the High Court’s ruling, the university was explicit about its intent to help the Defense Department discriminate against white and male students.

“To meet our equity-focused programmatic goals, campus internship selection will be equitable such that qualified applicants from underserved and underrepresented cohorts … will be provided first choice,” the designers of the career pipeline program explained.

Downs says that the current criteria for involvement in the program does not include any race or sex-based requirements, instead focusing on applicants’ status as full-time students, grade-point average, and specific coursework.

But the program is only one of several contracts between the Defense Department and outside organizations that sought to advance the leftwing DEI agenda. 

The RAND Corporation received an undisclosed amount of money from the Defense Department to provide the Pentagon with guidance on implementing the controversial DEI agenda. RAND authored a report explaining how the Pentagon could implement DEI policies and mitigate resistance to them, claiming that “resistance to DE&I is growing, while discriminatory and xenophobic expressions are increasing.”

“Some researchers describe the presence of ‘denial perspectives’ and ‘diversity defiance,’ or ‘White fatigue,’” the report read, before warning the Defense Department to “exercise caution to guard against” resistance to the leftwing political ideology.

Two other contracts obtained by the Functional Government Institute and reported by The Daily Wire include a $2 million deal with a consulting organization for the creation of a “DEI Action Plan,” and a $202,000 contract with Cornell University for DEI training.

The Biden-Harris administration has worked to embed the far-left DEI agenda throughout the federal government, from the military and intelligence community and the wider bureaucracy. An exclusive report from The Daily Wire revealed that the Pentagon requested nearly $270 million in taxpayer funds for the DEI agenda between 2022 and 2024.

President Joe Biden has signed multiple executive ordersinstitutionalizing the DEI agenda, and his administration has worked to enable gender transition attempts among government employees, barring the use of biologically accurate pronouns in the process.

The federal government’s DEI agenda could be on the chopping block, pending the results of the November election. Former President Donald Trump pledged to gut the bureaucracy through executive orders if he is reelected, slashing the size of the administrative state and firing those who may otherwise work to undermine his policy agenda.