HHS keeps 294 DEI staffers on payroll, most making $200,000+
The Health and Human Services Department employs 294 people whose jobs focus on diversity, and the department maintains seven “minority health” offices spread across its agencies, according to a report that suggests unwinding it all will be tough for the incoming Trump administration.
The majority of those staffers, 182 workers, are paid six-figure salaries. The top diversity job earner, who works at the Food and Drug Administration, collected $221,000 in 2023, OpenTheBooks said in its report Tuesday.
The watchdog said spending on the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda “permeated” the department, appearing 829 times in its 2025 budget and totaling hundreds of millions of dollars in direct spending.
Among the costs were vaccine programs explicitly aimed at gay Black men, money earmarked for opioid programs that vowed to tackle “systemic racism,” a $5 million proposal to “diversify the doula workforce” and $5,000 to pay for an appearance by Ibram X. Kendi, a leading “antiracism” voice. A doula is a person who provides support for people undergoing significant health-related experiences such as childbirth.
“When it comes to DEI and health equity spending, payroll expenses are a drop in the bucket. Promoting these topics can be lucrative for federal employees looking to expand their agency’s budget and for private scientists hoping to win grants,” the analysts said.
DEI backers say the approach to government advances important missions by focusing money and attention on specific communities that need help.
OpenTheBooks said every dollar spent on equity in HHS’s bureaucracy is money that doesn’t go to health.
It also ends up justifying other bad policies, said John Hart, head of OpenTheBooks.
“DEI at HHS is concierge Marxism,” he said. “Academia is delivering a boutique and racially charged permission structure that helps bureaucrats feel morally innocent about imposing top-down, command and control policies that can disproportionately harm low-income Americans.”
HHS is one of the largest federal departments in terms of budget and has some 80,000 employees across more than a dozen divisions.
OpenTheBooks says HHS’s focus on DEI sprang from President Biden’s demand for a “whole of government” effort to advance the issue.
The study found that 92 DEI employees are working under Secretary Xavier Becerra at HHS.
More than 200 others were spread among various agencies. The FDA alone had three DEI-related divisions: one for diversity management, a diversity working group and a DEI “excellence” center.
The incoming Trump administration has chided the Biden team for its focus on DEI and has promised a reversal, but OpenTheBooks’ Christopher Neefus said that would be tough.
“Academia is already saturated with the DEI worldview, and now we can see there are public dollars and cents attached to keeping it that way,” he said. “It’s a self-reinforcing model that will take time to unwrap. If the new administration plans to get rid of this misguided focus on equity, there’s a very long walk back from the 2025 budget request.”
Officials at the National Institutes of Health invited Mr. Kendi to make a virtual appearance in 2022. He read from his bestseller “How To Be an Antiracist,” and NIH gave staffers free access to the tome in ebook or audiobook format.
One of the stipulations written into a contract document was that the appearance be available only to NIH staff, encrypted so it couldn’t be downloaded and expunged from the website after 30 days.
“Sponsor shall use the Recording only for the following purposes and for no other purpose whatsoever,” an agreement between Mr. Kendi and NIH said. “The recording must be removed on 10/27/22. The recording must be encrypted so it cannot be copied or downloaded. It is Sponsor’s sole responsibility to ensure that appropriate web security measures are in place.”
The contract documents also made clear that employees would be offered a link to buy Mr. Kendi’s books.
One email obtained by OpenTheBooks through its open records request was from an employee complaining that the video was no longer available.
“This is very disappointing,” the staffer wrote.
In response to the open records request, NIH seemed to justify the odd arrangement with Mr. Kendi and the expungement of the video as privileged commercial or financial information.
The Times has reached out to HHS and to NIH’s Big Read program, which sponsored the Kendi event.
OpenTheBooks said a large part of the DEI spending is attributable to the minority health offices.
The 42-member minority health office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began in 2021 to push medical researchers to incorporate “inclusion, accessibility and belonging” into their work, the watchdog said.
The CDC has also touted “vaccine equity,” with pushes to inoculate Black Americans, particularly the monkeypox vaccine for Black “men who have sex with men.” OpenTheBooks said that the details of that program have been scrubbed from the CDC website.
OpenTheBooks said agencies usually separate their equal employment opportunity efforts from their equity efforts, and for a good reason. The former aims to ensure fair treatment in the workplace, while the latter promotes particular diverse populations.
For most of HHS, the two roles are tied in the same office, the analysts said.
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