Robert F. Kennedy Jr. surely faces a tough confirmation battle in the Republican-led Senate, and you can be sure that Big Pharma's minions are even now readying their heavy artillery to deliver round after round of explosive character assassination and misrepresentation.
But those volleys might not be RFK Jr.'s biggest obstacle as President Donald Trump's Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). No, his biggest problem could easily turn out to be the deeply entrenched career civil service bureaucracy and its ideological battering ram of programs advancing the fundament falsehood of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI).
That bottomless falsehood is that the color of one's skin is the defining characteristic in every human being, and its corollary, that the perspectives, habits and thoughts associated with particular skin colors cannot be altered.
That is, if you are a white man or woman, you are unalterably racist and a beneficiary of the "White Privilege" that allegedly has been the underlying justification for the Constitution, the political system it establishes and every law that has ever been approved since 1789.
"But wait a minute Tapscott," you say, "What on Earth does DEI have to do with COVID origin and vaccine lies, billions of tax-funded self-serving research grants, a deeply reinforced buddy system that protects the insiders and continuously growing reach of intrusive federal regulations that are steadily killing what is left of what was once the finest health care system in the world?"
Simple. DEI is the tip of the spear for the Left's long-running domination of the 2.1 million-member federal career civil service. If you oppose any of the Left's favored programs, regulations or management initiatives, then you are by DEI definition a racist tool of White Privilege who has no credibility, and must either be isolated or eliminated entirely from government service.
In the Reagan era, when I served at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which manages the civil service, there was still room for honest debate and differences of opinion within the career bureaucracy. Remnants also remained of the expectation of the Pendleton Civil Service Act of 1883, that professional civil servants carry out the policy agendas of elected Presidents, regardless of whether or not they agreed with them.
That's rapidly becoming a lost memory, as the Baby Boomer generation of career employees retires and is replaced by younger, much more ideologically motivated workers, steeped in leftist perspectives that mock the very idea of professional neutrality among public servants.
A new analysis from Open the Books (OTB) reveals just how incredibly dug-in the DEI Establishment has become at HHS:
The Department of Health and Human Services — with a budget surpassed only by the Pentagon — employs 294 DEI staffers at an annual cost of $38.7 MILLION. That’s doesn’t even include another $29.4 million in payroll for seven Offices of Minority Health embedded within various HHS agencies! While their roles are dedicated to DEI, related efforts have permeated through virtually every area of the department.
Further illustrating the extent of DEI presence, OTB went through the most recent HHS budget request submitted to Congress by the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, and found the word "Equity" appeared 829 times. Thus OTB points out:
Resulting funds pour out across the country to achieve equity and “justice” in public health — to Black churches recruited to push vaccinations; to universities for hiring diverse researchers; and to special outreach for anyone from criminals, to the LGBTQ+ community, to the indigenous, and…doulas??
The DEI push was given "whole of government" presidential imprimatur when Biden signed Executive Order 14305, which reads like something jointly drafted by Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, two of the most prominent DEI advocates.
Biden's EO contains a couple of paragraphs that illustrate why spending hundreds of millions of tax dollars to hire battalions of bureaucrats to enforce DEI concepts on federal workers and programs is not merely unnecessary but effectively undermines existing laws barring racial discrimination in hiring and promotions in the civil service.
Here's the first paragraph, where Biden declares:
As the nation’s largest employer, the federal government must be a model for diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, where all employees are treated with dignity and respect. Accordingly, the federal government must strengthen its ability to recruit, hire, develop, promote, and retain our nation’s talent and remove barriers to equal opportunity. It must also provide resources and opportunities to strengthen and advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility across the federal government."
That paragraph makes no sense apart from the unstated assumption that the government has failed to treat its workers with "dignity and respect," and must therefore now "provide resources and opportunities" to ensure its recruiting works to "remove barriers to equal opportunity" and "advance" DEI "across the federal government."
But if that paragraph is an honest description of the status of the federal workforce, what does that say about this paragraph from Biden's EO?
Federal merit system principles include that the Federal Government’s recruitment policies should “endeavor to achieve a work force from all segments of society” and that “[a]ll employees and applicants for employment should receive fair and equitable treatment in all aspects of personnel management” (5 U.S.C. 2301(b)(1), (2)).
What that paragraph says is that the federal government already requires a workforce that represents all segments of American society and that bars racial discrimination in any aspect of hiring and promotion.
And let's not forget the fact the 1964 Civil Rights Act and multiple statutes and regulations enacted since then have already achieved a federal workforce that has in key aspects attracted and hired a workforce that "looks like America," and more.
According to the OPM DEI office, 18.19 percent of all federal career workers are black, but blacks make up 13.6 percent of the general population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Similarly, Asians make up 6.49 percent of the federal workforce and 6.4 percent of the general population.
The one ethnic group that still lags in the federal workforce, according to these data sources, is Hispanics, who make up 9.53 percent of the federal workforce and 19.5 percent of the federal population.
In other words, the system didn't fail to produce the kind of federal workforce DEI advocates incessantly accuse it of not being, so why impose and empower DEI to accomplish what is already becoming a documented reality?
But don't expect RFK Jr.'s detractors to mention these facts. Here are more facts OTB uncovered that will not be mentioned in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC or NBC:
We identified 92 DEI employees working directly under HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra, most of them at the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, Diversity & Inclusion. Seven subagencies, like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have separate diversity offices with their own complex infrastructure of 202 employees, for a grand total of 294.
Most of these workers — 247 of them — made over $100,000 in base salary for FY 2023. Four of them made more than $200,000. Benefits typically represent an additional 30% of base salaries. The Food and Drug Administration alone has three separate related DEI entities: an Office of EEO and Diversity Management, a DEI Working Group and a DEI Center of Excellence.
Don't expect these highly compensated ideological battalions to go quietly. But maybe RFK Jr. will be able to leave that problem to Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
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