The Under-the-Radar Bureaucrats Driving the Federal Government’s ‘Health Equity’ Agenda

The federal government is one of the more overlooked culprits behind efforts to embed DEI into the healthcare profession, as well as into medical education and research. The policies and guidance of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as well as various health agencies inform how the medical field acts with regard to certain issues. So when these agencies embrace DEI, they encourage – and often coerce – medical institutions to do the same.

For instance, when fielding applications for grant funding, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) effectively considered the racial makeup of a research team, and mandated that applicants include how their research will advance DEI. This would naturally create incentives for grant recipients to engage in racial discrimination in order to receive funding.

While many of the federal government’s DEI actions follow executive orders from President Joe Biden tasking federal agencies to implement equity action plans, health agencies’ engagement with DEI predates the current administration and is much more endemic.

Here are several of the positions within the federal government that play a pivotal role in advancing DEI:

Director, Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at the National Institutes of Health

The NIH has been one of the federal government’s chief drivers of DEI in the medical field, through such efforts as the aforementioned discriminatory grants as well as equity initiatives.

The agency currently maintains its office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI) that, per the NIH-Wide Strategic Plan for DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Access), directly guides the NIH director’s DEI strategy and initiatives. The office has over 50 employees, according to City Journal, and is led by its director Kevin Williams, who earned roughly $200,000 in salary in 2020.

What’s more, the office is pretty up-front about its goal to impose racial preferences and racial discrimination through the euphemisms of increasing “diversity,” improving “equity,” and increasing participation of groups “underrepresented” in medicine. The NIH has defined groups “underrepresented” in biomedical research as “Blacks or African Americans, Hispanics or Latinos, American Indians or Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders.”

The office explicitly says its mission concerns “improving the outreach, recruitment, and retention of people of color, women, sexual and gender diverse people, and persons with disabilities.”

The agency also intends to embed DEI into clinical research by enhancing “consideration of DEIA in the biomedical and behavioral research funding cycle.”

“Integral to this, over the next 5 years, NIH is committed to the goal of enhancing the consideration of DEIA at all stages of the funding cycle, including the application process, peer review, funding decisions, and pre and post-award grant management,” the equity plan reads.

The agency also plans to “expand existing efforts and develop new approaches in research funding to promote increased participation of underrepresented and other marginalized groups

in biomedical and behavioral research.”

And as mentioned previously, the NIH considers the racial composition of research teams when awarding grants and requires that applicants explain how their research will advance DEI.

What’s more, the NIH already funds the Enhancing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Educational Diversity (ESTEEMED) grant program, whose recipients explicitly restrict grant funding to applicants of certain races.

Chief Officer for Scientific Workforce Diversity, NIH

As it turns out, the NIH’s DEI efforts are not restricted to one central office.

The Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo recently reported on how Marie Bernard, the agency’s chief officer for scientific workforce diversity, has helmed multiple DEI initiatives and efforts during the Biden-Harris administration. She directly oversees ten employees.

For instance, NIH UNITE, which styles itself as a DEI “think tank,” has originated numerous funding opportunities intended to funnel taxpayer dollars toward DEI research.

This includes the “Assessment of Climate at Institutions Award,” which “solicits applications to conduct institutional climate assessments using validated survey instruments and to develop action plans for positive change in the recruitment, hiring, retention, and advancement of faculty, including those from groups underrepresented in biomedical and behavioral research.”

Another program aims to “increase career opportunities for individuals from diverse backgrounds, including those from groups underrepresented in biomedical research.”

But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s an excerpt from Rufo’s article:

The most important of these initiatives is the NIH Common Fund’s Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program, which was created in 2021 and “aims to enhance and maintain cultures of inclusive excellence in the biomedical research community” by funding the “recruitment of a diverse group of faculty” at research universities. NIH FIRST has subsidized such programs at 16 universities, including Cornell, USCD, Northwestern, and Drexel. The agency says that its efforts to make faculty more “diverse” will help to “ensure[] that the most creative minds have the opportunity to contribute to realizing our national research and health goals.”

According to the most recent salary data from Open the Books, Bernard’s annual salary was $300,000 in 2020.

Director for the Centers for Disease Control and Management’s (CDC) Office of Health Equity

The CDC has also ramped up its DEI initiatives in recent years. In 2021, CDC launched “CORE,” an “agency-wide health equity strategy and CDC’s umbrella framework to transform its work by engaging and challenging every part of the agency to incorporate health equity and diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging (DEIAB) as a foundational element across all of its work.”

Key to this effort is the Office of Health Equity, currently led by director Dr. Leandris Liburd. According to data from Open the Books, her annual salary in 2023 was roughly $240,000.

According to the Office of Health Equity’s mission statement, the director is responsible for a vast array of duties that invariably involve embedding DEI into public health.

These include leading “the advancement of intersectional health equity practices,” incorporating “health equity into existing and future agency policies and programs building on current efforts that have been effective in achieving equity” and leading “the advancement of intersectional health equity practices and principles across the agency.”

Needless to say, this is an enormous amount of power over a federal agency that plays a crucial role in the health of everyday Americans. And as history has shown, the CDC’s equity decisions and agenda have proven to directly impact not just the health but the lives of Americans.

For instance, in 2020, the CDC advised states to give essential workers access to the mRNA vaccine over elderly Americans, reasoning that older Americans are disproportionately white. Several states did, in fact, prioritize minority residents when allocating COVID vaccines.

It is unconscionable for the CDC to subject Americans’ lives to its identity politics agenda, but this is the end result of allowing DEI to run rampant in such a critical public health agency.

Chief Health Equity Officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and Director of the CMS Office of Minority Health

The current Chief Health Equity Officer at CMS is Dr. Martin Mendoza. According to Mendoza’s biography, he is “the primary author of the pivotal FDA guidance recommending that clinical trial sponsors submit a diversity action plan to FDA. Dr. Mendoza’s original idea and recommendation became federal public law in December 2022.” Mendoza’s annual salary was roughly $170,000 in 2023, according to data from Open the Books, with 32 employees working within the Office of Minority Health. 

CMS may not be the first agency one would associate with health equity initiatives; but earlier this year, the Washington Free Beacon reported that CMS released a proposal to prioritize low-income patients for kidney transplants. It turns out this decision was spurred by an attempt to address “health equity” and close racial gaps in health outcomes. 

“The organ transplant industry, like every other part of society, is not immune to racial inequities,” Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Xavier Becerra said, according to the Free Beacon. “Black Americans disproportionately struggle with life-threatening kidney disease, yet they receive a smaller percentage of kidney transplants. The Biden-Harris administration is taking concrete steps to remove racial bias when calculating wait times and rooting out profiteering and inequity in the transplant process.”

Deciding who should receive an organ transplant based on race is morally reprehensible; but unfortunately, the proposal appears in line with CMS’ larger health equity agenda.

According to the CMS Framework for Health Equity, CMS’ goals are to “explicitly measure the impact of our policies on health equity, to develop sustainable solutions that close gaps in health and health care access, quality, and outcomes, and to invest in solutions that address health disparities.” The agency also seeks to “help organizations embed health equity in their programs to reduce disparities.” 

Knowing what that looks like in practice, it’s clear that these equity initiatives will lead to future racial discrimination in the name of ideology.

Needless to say, these practices are harmful to medicine, but also contrary to basic principles of fairness and morality. Although presidential actions and cabinet appointments are by far the most impactful factors in this trend, the aforementioned positions within federal agencies are key to their day-to-day operations.