Page 258

are best deployed to strengthen the resilience of countries that are most vulnerable to climatic shifts. The agency should cease collaborating with and funding progressive foundations, corporations, international institutions, and NGOs that advocate on behalf of climate fanaticism.

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Agenda. USAID installed advisers on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) committees “in all its Bureaus, Offices, and [overseas] Missions” and created “an agency-wide dashboard and DEI scorecard for all bureaus, offices, and missions” to track staff compliance with the Administration’s DEI directives. A Chief DEI Officer oversees this DEI infrastructure and sits in the Administrator’s office. DEI directives are now part of all agency policies and are incorporated as standard clauses in all contract and grant awards. Those seeking to do business with the agency must “describe the approaches they will use to diversify their partner base.”* USAID often ties DEI to “gender and climate equity,” corrupting every aspect of the agency’s overseas work.

The upshot has been to racialize the agency and create a hostile work environment for anyone who disagrees with the Biden Administration’s identity politics. This pursuit of ideological purity threatens merit-based professional advancement for staff who do not overtly conform, hyperpoliticizes what should be a nonpartisan federal workplace environment, creates an institutionalized cadre of progressive political commissars, corrupts the award process, and discourages potential contractors and grantees that disagree with this radical agenda from applying for USAID funding.

The next conservative Administration should dismantle USAID’s DEI apparatus by eliminating the Chief Diversity Officer position along with the DEI advisers and committees; cancel the DEI scorecard and dashboard; remove DEI requirements from contract and grant tenders and awards; issue a directive to cease promotion of the DEI agenda, including the bullying LGBTQ+ agenda; and provide staff a confidential medium through which to adjudicate cases of political retaliation that agency or implementing staff suffered during the Biden Administration. It should eliminate funding for partners that promote discriminatory DEI practices and consider debarment in egregious cases.

As federal departments and agencies cannot play partisan politics, staff—irrespective of hiring mechanism—as well as implementers and grantees that engage in ideological agitation on behalf of the DEI agenda should be dismissed, and entities should be debarred. The next conservative Administration should return the authority over all civil rights issues at USAID to the agency’s Office of Civil Rights, which is the appropriate locus for ensuring that all Americans have guaranteed equality of career opportunity at USAID.

Refocusing Gender Equality on Women, Children, and Families. Instead of protecting women’s and children’s unalienable human rights and propelling their ability to thrive in society, past Democrat Administrations have nearly erased