House Republicans are expected to support three amendments calling for the Pentagon to audit and eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training programs when the House Armed Services Committee convenes June 21 to begin vetting the proposed $874.2 billion fiscal year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (FY24 NDAA).
“Here are the three amendments,” he said, waving three pieces of paper for viewers to see. “We are very interested in getting ‘wokeism’ out of the military.”
The amendments, which had not been formally filed by midafternoon on June 20, would prohibit the Department of Defense (DOD) from using any FY24 NDAA allocations for the Pentagon’s Countering Extremism Working Group targeting “extremism”; freeze salary and operational monies for a deputy inspector general “for diversity and inclusion and extremism in the military” position authorized under the FY21 NDAA; and mandate an audit assessment of staffing within the Pentagon’s DEI office.
“We got to eliminate these, what they call diversity, equity and inclusion programs [and] these investigations into what they call ‘extremists in the military,’” Alford said. “These are patriots who love our Constitution, who love our institutions, love how voting is supposed to be. They want nothing more than to show patriotism in their country, and they’re being rooted out, maybe because they don’t get the vaccine. They get kicked out of the military. These are not reasons to be kicking them out for ‘extremism.’”
Two Years of Mounting Angst
Conservatives have argued for years that DEI training, as it was being implemented in the military, was a misguided attempt to impose political correctness with little relevance in the ranks and was, in fact, hurting morale and exacerbating tensions, potentially degrading force readiness.That angst has been pin-pricked by a series of executive orders issued by President Joe Biden since 2021, beginning with a directive issued the day of his inauguration that revoked a September 2020 order issued by former president Donald Trump, lifting its restrictions on DEI-related training in the military.
A later 2021 Biden directive required “federal employees [including DOD], managers, and leaders to have knowledge of systemic and institutional racism and bias against underserved communities … and have increased understanding of implicit and unconscious bias.”
Conservatives were further agitated when Biden’s newly appointed secretary of D]defense, former U.S. army general Lloyd Austin, ordered a 60-day stand down “to address extremism in the ranks” in the wake of the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021.
That criticism has intensified in 2023 with Republicans in 2022 midterms regaining a narrow House majority and the military’s most significant recruiting shortfalls in the half-century history of the all-volunteer force.
Through winter and spring, congressional Republicans have maintained the military’s recruiting shortfalls can be at least partly attributed to negative publicity generated by requiring DEI training and point to the U.S. Navy’s “digital ambassador” elevation of a petty officer who moonlights as a drag queen as glaring evidence of a disconnect between marketing and the most likely prospective recruits.
The DOD and service branch chiefs have attributed the shortfalls to a strong job market, residual post-pandemic upheaval, perceived quality-of-life issues, and the facts that only 23 percent of eligible-aged Americans are fit to serve and only 9 percent are willing to consider doing a stint in armed forces.
Alford said the amendments are “critical to eliminating the ‘wokeness’ in our military” and getting rid of the “unnecessary extremism working group” would stop the Pentagon from “wasting man-hours and taxpayer dollars on programs that do nothing to benefit our military but rather hamper recruitment and retention efforts.”
Amendments Encoded in Proposed ‘Warrior Act’
The amendments appear similar to initiatives included in HB 3278, ‘The Warrior Act,’ co-sponsored by representatives Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) and Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.).Waltz told The Epoch Times that his ‘Working to Address Recruiting and Retention to Improve Our Readiness (Warrior) Act’ will “provide much-needed reforms to prevent the Biden administration from further politicizing the Department of Defense and improve military readiness.”
Like Alford’s amendments, the proposed “Warrior Act” would require DOD to institute “a hiring freeze of Equal Opportunity and Equal Employment Opportunity personnel, require an audit of DEI programs including “a description of … how many man-hours were spent participating in the program … and the total costs associated with each program.”
Joint chiefs of staff chair Army general Mark Milley in 2022 estimated the armed forces dedicated nearly six million hours and about $1 million in additional expenses to training sessions focused on these issues in 2021.
“This averages to just over two hours per service member in a total force of 2.46 million members and is comparable to other Joint Force periodic training requirements,” Milley wrote in a letter.
During the March 28 House hearing, Veterans on Duty, Inc. chair Jeremy Hunt testified that the Pentagon’s DEI program “subjects some service members to 11-week resident DEI training classes—despite the military’s history of leading the fight against discrimination.”
He said in 2022, the army alone spent $114 million on DEI in 2022 and “in some cases we are paying these ‘DEI bureaucrats’ $200,000 a year,” despite there being “no data to determine if it actually works, which we know it doesn’t, and whether there was any type of underlying data that necessities the dramatic increases of this programs.”
Waltz said he filed the bill in May after hearing numerous complaints from the ranks about how divisive DEI training is and how much time is being wasted on the programs.
As the first Green Beret ever elected to the House, Waltz also is a West Point graduate and 26-year Army combat veteran who continues to serve as a colonel in the Florida National Guard. “In the Army, I never had enough time to train my men in all their military tasks,” he said.
He said congressional Republicans are not trying to impose a conservative will on the Pentagon. They are merely trying to blunt a pervasive progressive politicization of the military, not being imposed from within but by civilians in the Biden administration promoting an agenda over national defense.
“Just the latest turn, just this week,” Waltz told The Epoch Times in early June, “a three-star general of the Space Force—I want to have some nuance here—speaking at a pride event.”
Nothing necessarily wrong with that, he said. “Where that lkieutenant general crossed the line was, while in uniform, commenting negatively on laws passed by state legislatures” restricting abortion.
That is unethical by long-standing military regulation and tradition, Waltz said, warning if the armed forces allow active duty members to seek transfers from bases in states where they disagree with state laws, it becomes “a slippery slope.”
“The winds can shift, and we can have military members saying. ‘I don’t feel safe, or my family members don’t feel safe, being assigned to a base in a state without gun control laws,’” he said. “Don’t be cherry-picking political issues. That can backfire.”
Perhaps it already has, Alford said.
House Republicans warned Austin and Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley across more than four months of hearings that “you guys got to start acting more like generals and not politicians, number one.”
Nearly $1 Trillion Other Issues
The DEI amendments will certainly not be the only items on the agenda when the House Armed Forces Committee meets at 10 a.m. June 21 to begin ferreting through the proposed 412-page FY24 NDAA in the first of a summer of defense budget hearings.The committee’s six subcommittees on June 13—and a seventh on June 14—quickly and unanimously adopted their components of the proposed $874.2 spending plan.
The Senate is debating its own version of the NDAA. The defense budget, as with all elements of the fiscal year 2024 federal spending plan, will be deliberated into September in both chambers. Ideally, the budget will be adopted before the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1.
The NDAA spells out $874.2 billion in spending, with $841.5 billion tabbed for the DOD, an increase of nearly $26 billion, or 3.2 percent, over fiscal year 2023’s enacted NDAA, and $32.26 billion for the Department of Energy’s (DOE) nuclear weapons programs.
The ultimate defense budget, once spending by other federal departments, such as the Department of Education and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is factored in, could top $890 billion. The Biden administration’s March budget request called for $886 billion in total defense spending.
Among issues that will be raised in NDAA hearings is an amphibious warship the Marine Corps lobbied for, but the Navy did not request; discord between Colorado and Alabama over the headquarters of the Space Force; boosted funding for the air force’s F-15s and F-16s; a 5.2 percent pay raise for those serving in the armed forces; and about imposing more scrutiny, if not shutting down, funding for Ukraine in its defense against Russian aggression.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) is not one of the 31 Republicans on the House Armed Forces Committee, but she said she’ll be paying attention to discussions over Ukraine funding.
“I will be a hard NO if [money for Ukraine] doesn’t get ripped out of the NDAA,” she wrote in a tweet on June 20. “The NDAA has $300 million for Ukraine in it and an extension of the one-year lend-lease program—a weapons loan that has no accountability and won’t get paid back. No push for peace while the bloodshed continues!”
