When he thought no one was paying attention, Secretary Miguel Cardona made it the official policy of the Education Department to award grants based in part on how thoroughly applicants embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The department doles out billions of taxpayer dollars every year in the form of competitive grants to state and local education agencies, colleges, and nonprofit organizations. To decide which organizations will receive these grants, it uses a playbook called the Education Department General Administrative Regulations.
EDGAR contains a list of judging criteria that can be applied to grant competitions, and the Biden-Harris administration just revamped that list for the first time since 2014. The new version allows department leaders to judge applicants based on how thoroughly they embrace DEI.
Effective this week, department officials are encouraged to decide grant competitions based in part on the diversity of the applicants’ employees. Applicants will be looked upon favorably if they have hired, or at least plan to hire, “personnel who are members of groups that have historically encountered barriers, or who have professional or personal experiences with barriers, based on one or more of the following: economic disadvantage; gender; race; ethnicity; color; national origin; disability; age; language; migration; living in a rural location; experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity; involvement with the justice system; pregnancy, parenting, or caregiver status; and sexual orientation.”
In other words, the department will consider identity when making grant awards that ought to be based on ability. Federal taxpayer dollars will flow to organizations that practice DEI hiring, even if those organizations may not be the most qualified to carry out the project.
If this seems straight out of critical race theory, that’s because it is: Ibram X. Kendi advanced the idea of discriminating today to fix historical wrongs in his book How to be an Anti-racist.
The Biden-Harris administration is chipping away at whatever is left of meritocracy. In doing so, it is creating a system that will not accomplish the equity it wants. The new rules assume that all people of the same race or sex will have encountered similar “barriers.” However, people know that those who share the same demographic profile could have vastly different life experiences.
The harmful changes don’t stop with program staff. Under the new rules, department officials will also judge grant applicants on the hypothetical demographic makeup of their program participants. A grant-seeking organization will be viewed favorably if it plans to prioritize students who belong to EDGAR’s list of marginalized groups. This sets the stage for violations of federal civil rights laws, which bar federal funding from going to programs or activities that discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, ethnicity, or sex.
Under the earlier version of EDGAR, department officials were supposed to consider a prospective grantee’s ability to ensure “equal access and treatment” for people belonging to historically underrepresented groups “based on race, color, national origin, gender, age, or disability.” While progressive administrations may have used equity ideology in the past, Cardona is baking DEI into the cake of federal education grantmaking, likely as a parting gift for a future Harris administration that would make grants to organizations that share its social worldview.
A second Trump administration would do well to eradicate wokeness from EDGAR so that federal bureaucrats aren’t making grant decisions based on DEI. But it would do even better to ensure federal bureaucrats aren’t making grant decisions at all.
Competitive grants take paperwork, deliberation, and committees, which all take government employees’ time, which costs taxpayers money for the privilege of having far-away bureaucrats decide where more money will go.
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These decisions belong at the state and local level, with leaders who know what students need and how to make it happen. Instead of spending billions on the Education Department, the next administration should get rid of this expensive middleman and give federal education funding to the states through block grants.
Dismantling the department would take time and authorization from Congress, both of which are limited resources for any presidential administration. While working toward that goal, restoring merit to the center of grantmaking decisions is a worthwhile step.
Angela Morabito is a former Education Department press secretary. She is the spokeswoman for the Defense of Freedom Institute and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.