EXCLUSIVE: House Anti-Woke Caucus Calls for Defunding DEI Across the Government
'[W]e reject dividing Americans based on race, anti-Americanism, radical gender ideology and climate hysteria.
The New House GOP Effort to 'Defund' – Not Police, but Wokeness
Through executive orders and budget requests, the Biden administration has sought to embed “diversity, equity, and inclusion” principles across the entirety of the federal government – and in turn to touch the lives of every American. Now members of the Republican House majority, who see this whole-of-government effort as a woke assault on America and its core values, are working to combat it using the power of the purse.
In a series of letters to House appropriations leaders, Rep. Jim Banks and like-minded colleagues have identified and called for the defunding of all “‘woke’ programs and initiatives that are rooted in discrimination and promote far-left ideology in the federal government” in 2024 spending bills.
The letters, which I obtained exclusively for RealClearInvestigations, are a product of Banks’ Anti-Woke Caucus, a 26-member group of House Republicans launched by the former chair of the Republican Study Committee earlier this year, and notably counting among its members Rep. Elise Stefanik, chair of the House Republican Conference, members of the House Freedom Caucus, and others.
Banks and caucus members delivered the letters to the chairmen and ranking members of each of the 12 House Appropriations Committee subcommittees in late March following the release of President Biden’s $6.8 trillion 2024 budget request.
Each letter flags examples of “woke” offices or policies to which Congress allocated funding in relevant 2023 spending bills, and the associated dollars, and calls for those “and all programs that discriminate based on race, gender, and sexual orientation or seek to disparage our nation’s core ideals and history [to] be decreased to $0” in the 2024 versions of the bills.
A narrow reading of the line items characterized as woke in the letters – which represent only a partial accounting of such programs and initiatives – shows that such programs totaled over $900 million in 2023.
Read the rest of the story at RealClearInvestigations.