Commentary

New Report Reveals Depths of HHS’s Discriminatory Funding Initiatives

  • By Do No Harm Staff
  • April 23, 2025

A new report from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) identified dozens of programs and initiatives operated by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that explicitly discriminate based on race or otherwise encourage racial discrimination.

The report, titled “55 HHS Federal Funding Initiatives Discriminate Based on Race,” catalogs various HHS programs that distribute grant funding based on race or encourage grant recipients to put in place policies targeted at specific racial groups.

These programs include the so-called “Centers of Excellence” or “COE” program directed toward “underrepresented minority individuals.”

The COE program distributes grants to health professional schools and nonprofits for the purpose of implementing practices and policies to assist racial and ethnic minorities.

“Among numerous other race-based requirements for recipient schools, schools must agree to use funding to establish, strengthen, and expand programs to support the academic performance of underrepresented minority students,” the report states.

The report also identified racially discriminatory scholarship programs, such as the Scholarship for Disadvantaged Students (SDS).

The SDS program distributes scholarships to “eligible individual[s]” who are “from a disadvantaged background,” “including students who are members of racial and ethnic minority groups.”

Moreover, the report also highlighted the Nursing Workforce Diversity or NWD program, which was the subject of a recent Do No Harm report.

The NWD program funds nursing education programs, conditioning funding on recipients establishing methods to increase the enrollment of “racial and ethnic minorities” and other “underrepresented” groups. And the program was accepting applications as recently as March 18, 2025.

Prioritizing certain racial groups for funding opportunities is cut-and-dry discrimination.

Taxpayers should not be facilitating racially discriminatory practices and programs, plain and simple.