Staff Reports
Americans are finally watching the long, costly experiment called DEI come apart at the seams, and good. For years taxpayers tolerated an ideology that replaced merit with quotas, accountability with virtue signaling, and truth with slogans — and now the new administration has moved to shut it down at the federal level. President Trump signed executive orders in January 2025 directing agencies to end illegal DEI preferencing and to restore merit-based hiring and contracting across government, a corrective long overdue for hardworking Americans.
The National Institutes of Health has been a frontline battleground in this fight, and the internal chaos there tells you everything you need to know about what DEI did to science. Under Director Jay Bhattacharya, the agency has pulled back on equity-driven projects and likely terminated grants tied explicitly to DEI, prompting outrage and confusion among researchers who watched priorities flip on a dime. This is exactly why taxpayers were right to question politically driven research priorities replacing true biomedical inquiry.
Washington’s public safety apparatus also offers a dramatic example of DEI’s perverse incentives. A Justice Department and congressional review found that D.C. Police Chief Pamela A. Smith presided over a culture that pressured officers to downgrade and undercount serious crimes, and her emotional, defiant exit speech only underscored how little accountability had been expected of insiders. When policing is managed for optics and narratives instead of facts and results, neighborhoods suffer and crime victims are betrayed.
The corruption scandal of a former DEI executive at big tech should settle one myth forever: these programs were never just benign training seminars — they became cash flows and patronage networks. A former diversity manager at Facebook and Nike was sentenced after siphoning nearly five million dollars through fake vendors and kickbacks, a criminal reminder that concentrating power without oversight breeds theft and abuse. Conservatives warned that turning large corporate budgets into ideological slush funds would invite exactly this sort of graft, and now the courts have confirmed it.
DEI also metastasized inside our universities, where administrative bloat and ideological rent-seeking have inflated costs for students and families. OpenTheBooks and watchdog groups exposed that Ohio State employed roughly 200 DEI staffers at a cost exceeding thirteen million dollars in a single year — money that could have eased tuition burdens for real students instead of underwriting campus grievance bureaus. These figures show a university class that forgot its core mission: teaching and preparing young Americans for honest work, not indoctrination.
Make no mistake: dismantling DEI is not about silencing concerns that legitimate conservatives support — it’s about ending a government and corporate cartel that preferred identity tests over individual achievement. Republicans like Sen. JD Vance and commentators have rightly framed this moment as an end to an apology culture that punished pride in one’s country and one’s work. Restoring equal opportunity under the law means enforcing civil rights for everyone, not weaponizing the machinery of government to redistribute guilt and privilege.
The media and left-wing nonprofits cheered DEI when it delivered jobs, grants, and power to their networks, but they ignored the damage done to merit, morale, and public trust. Now that oversight and prosecutions are following, watch how fast the same people who sold DEI as progress suddenly discover the limits of their immunity. We should celebrate an era when public policy again rewards competence, not conformity.
Patriots who love this country must stay vigilant — dismantling an entrenched bureaucracy is messy and will face every procedural stunt and courtroom delay the Left can muster. Support real reforms that protect scientific integrity, public safety, and taxpayer dollars, and don’t be fooled by the same institutions asking for more time while they rebrand and resurface under new titles. This is our chance to reclaim institutions for the American people, and we cannot let it slip away.
