Sacrificing Excellence for Ideology: The Real Cost of DEI
House Subcommittee on Health Care and Financial Services
2025-06-25
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Source: Congress.gov
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Without objection, the chair may declare a recess at any time. I recognize myself for the purposes of making an opening statement. But before I do that, just a little bit of house cleaning. I'm going to ask that Congresswoman Beth Van Dyne and Congressman Scott Perry be allowed to sit in here. And they both expressed an interest in showing up, and of course, the more the merrier. Okay, now welcome to the Subcommittee on Healthcare and Financial Services. Today's hearing will focus on the destructive diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI policies that radical Democrats have tried to insert in American institutions, and really going back a little bit more than that, all the way back to affirmative action and the executive order put into place by President Johnson in 1965. I think it's important we all understand the effect and the scope of these policies have had on American life the last 60 years. On September 24th, 1965, we gotta remember to celebrate that anniversary, almost 60 years ago, Lyndon Johnson signed Executive Order 11246, which mandated affirmative action programs and policies which facilitated discrimination. In 1965, minority groups, had faced a generation of despicable and repugnant discrimination, though I know individual universities were already practicing affirmative action 10 years before that. I know Princeton was practicing in 1955. At the time, these nation DEI policies were nobly aimed at reversing that harm. Unfortunately, even well-intentioned bad policy is still bad policy. Discrimination should never be fought with more discrimination. That is exactly what affirmative action and DEI policies have done over the last 60 years. These policies have infiltrated nearly every type of institution in America, including higher education, corporate workplaces, the military, and more.
In my opinion, it really hasn't been gradual over the last 60 years. I think if you look back even in the 1970s, the 1960s, these policies were around. These policies... divide Americans by putting them all in groups and educating people that they should not view themselves as an individual, they should view themselves as a group, which is why I think people who want to destroy America are so in favor of them. Categories, I might add, these arbitrary categories, are entirely self-reported. Rather than focusing on the whole of somebody's circumstances, DEI assumes that anyone who checks a box for a certain race is disadvantaged. Of course, we don't want to be a society where we go back and try to give preferences based on other factors as well. On President Biden's first day in office, he signed an executive order to promote DEI and federal employment. This order went further than any before it by expanding racial divisions, including immigrants. Thankfully, President Trump rescinded this executive order in decades after
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