The city of Boston pays dozens of diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats six-figure salaries totaling more than $3.6 million, despite its all-Democrat City Council recently dipping into emergency reserves to resolve a multimillion-dollar budget deficit.
Thirty-one DEI administrators occupying senior government posts at Boston City Hall make a minimum of $100,000 annually, according to a Washington Examiner analysis of municipal wages pulled from the city’s 2025 employee earnings report.
The payroll data shows that Boston employs almost three dozen highly paid equity officers within the city’s Equity and Inclusion Cabinet, which works to “embed equity into all city operations.”
“Community liaisons,” policy analysts, researchers, administrative assistants, project managers, and department directors from the cabinet’s DEI subdivisions are among the high-ranking city staff taking home executive-level pay.
Lucrative job titles include positions at the city-run Office of Black Male Advancement and the LGBTQIA2S+ Advancement Office, which were created to support Mayor Michelle Wu’s goal of “amplifying underrepresented voices in city government.”
Staffers from the Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement, which works to achieve “menstrual equity,” and the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement, also collect sumptuous salaries while sitting on the city payroll.
Wu’s administration is currently facing criticism over its taxpayer-funded activist training program geared toward immigrants, including non-U.S. citizens and illegal immigrants. The 10-week Immigrants Lead Boston course, run by the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement, teaches political organizing to participants interested in advocating for Boston’s immigrant communities.
Other equity-oriented departments with well-paid staff include the Mayor’s Office of Food Justice, which works to “equitably distribute” “culturally relevant” food to Boston residents, and the Supplier Diversity Office, which helps minority-owned businesses secure city contracts.
These six-figure DEI desk jobs pay more than what new Boston Police Department officers receive in base salaries. Excluding overtime and shift differentials for covering odd hours, officers who have served on the force for three years or less only earn between $80,600 and $99,200 a year, according to the BPD salary chart.
Mariangely Solis Cervera, the city’s chief of equity and inclusion, makes almost as much or even more than BPD police captains in regular yearly pay depending on precinct. Taxpayers fund her $180,178.52 salary to “advance racial justice and social, economic, and health equity in the City of Boston,” while police captains average around $176,000 to $194,000 when factoring out overtime.
The Equity and Inclusion Cabinet has added several full-time staff positions over the past year. According to the city’s recommended operating budget for fiscal 2027, the offices of Language and Communications Access, LGBTQIA2S+ Advancement, Women’s Advancement, and Immigrant Advancement all increased in personnel, “reflecting the filing of critical vacancies.”
Earlier this year, Boston city government faced a $70 million budget shortfall at the end of fiscal 2026 due to unexpected snow-removal costs, higher Boston Public Schools employee health insurance expenditures, and increased school utility spending.
To cover the year-end funding gap, the Boston City Council decided to tap the city’s rainy day fund, then storing $1.2 billion in emergency reserves.
BOSTON TRAINED 100 PEOPLE IN CITY-FUNDED MIGRANT ADVOCACY PROGRAM — MOSTLY FROM OTHER COUNTRIES
Amid relatively slow revenue growth, the City Council adopted a $4.9 billion fiscal 2027 budget that shifted, with Wu’s approval, funding away from public facilities personnel, emergency employees at the Parks and Recreation Department, public works, and the Boston Centers for Youth and Families, among other critical civic offices.
Boston reallocated those funds toward mostly cultural initiatives, including a combined $1.45 million in grant money earmarked for the offices of Black Male Advancement, Food Justice, LGBTQIA2S+ Advancement, Women’s Advancement, and Returning Citizens, which supports former convicts recently released from prison.
The Washington Examiner contacted Wu’s office for comment.