House GOP slams billions in DEI-based federal contracts

House Republicans criticized the Biden administration’s diversity equity and inclusion practices for costing billions in tax dollars by awarding contracts to “minority owned companies.”

The House Oversight and Government Reform’s subcommittee on healthcare and financial services held a hearing on Wednesday discussing the effect of DEI policies on federal contracts and student admissions.

“You’re trying to just destroy America by doing to America what they do in other countries and trying to set one ethnic group against another ethnic group,” Rep. Glenn Grothman, R-Wis., said about DEI practices in federal contracts.

Judge Glock, a witness before the committee and director of research at the Manhattan Institute, said laws and regulations for federal grants have required portions of contracts to go be awarded to customers based on race and sex, rather than the quality of the contract.

Glock pointed to a Biden administration goal of requiring up to 15% of federal contractors to go to “disadvantaged businesses.”

“These minority contracting programs cost taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, degrade our infrastructure and national defense, and do nothing to help the truly disadvantaged,” Glock said.

Glock called on members of Congress to challenge the 8(a) business program, and the business development program, which gives federal contract preferences to disadvantaged businesses, minority and women owned businesses. 

Glock said DEI programs have allowed businesses to access federal funds by fraudulently claiming “disadvantaged” status and collecting revenue.

“Preferences for already successful businesses based on their owners’ race or sex are unconstitutional, expensive, and detrimental to the core functions of government,” Glock said.

House Democrats, alongside one witness before the committee, argued that America “owes” minority groups and women for years of “unpaid labor.”

“America owes the enslaved Africans who built the White House and the US Capitol building,” Erec Smith, a professor at the university of Southern California said.

“Neither they, nor family members of theirs and subsequent generations were rightly compensated for their magnificent contributions or for centuries of additional unpaid labor,” Smith added.

Rep. Wesley Bell, D-Mo., agreed with Smith and the history of racism in the United States necessitates protections for DEI initiatives.

“This country that we all love has a history of racism; racism towards the very individuals that make up our diversity, racism towards those striving for an equitable society and an inclusive America, [because] inclusion, that part of DEI, just means everybody,” Bell said.