While Military Families Go Hungry, Pentagon Wastes Billions on ‘Equity’

Last year the United States Army recommended that military service members struggling with inflation should apply for Food Stamps. This year, the Military Family Nutrition Access Act was introduced in the Senate to make more military families eligible for food stamps.

In the past, Senate members and elected officials had tried to get military families off food stamps. Measures like the “Remove Service Members from Food Stamps Act” in 2000 set out to boost military pay. Bush and Gore both promised to end the need for food stamps and the number of personnel on food stamps dropped into the low thousands. It’s now over 20,000.

Instead of ending the need for food stamps, politicians are trying to make them easier to access.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has better ideas for where to spend the defense budget. The Pentagon is asking for $114 military to fund its DEI initiatives which would focus on “ensuring our entire workforce lives by fundamental values that bolster unit cohesion”. This is a euphemism for leftist political indoctrination which has already gravely undermined morale.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is a term that represents replacing merit and equality with government intervention or ‘equity’ to achieve the ‘correct’ outcomes through measures such as affirmative action, penalizing people based on their race and spreading the idea that differences in outcomes are due to ‘systemic racism’ and ‘whiteness’ that have to be stamped out.

The millions will be spent on, among other things, fighting “problematic behaviors” and force officers to impose “a climate of inclusion that supports diversity” that ”is free from problematic behaviors.” Not only is the Defense Department determined to function like a college campus, but it wants to spend over $100 million to wreck what’s left of morale in the military.

The $114 million budget request represents a 32% increase from the previous year’s $86 million DEI budget. While the $114 million budget has made headlines, it’s a slice in a much bigger pie.

The Defense Department’s Equity Plan reveals billions in ‘equity’ spending including “investing over $1.4 billion in programs that address legacy impacts from past DoD actions.”

The Pentagon is already spending $400 million on conservation.

What is the national security priority involved in “managing and restoring habitats and wildlife populations” and “the conservation and recovery of threatened and endangered species, as well as common wildlife such as migratory birds and game species”?

Isn’t this properly a job for the Fish and Wildlife Service? Do we not already have enough environmental agencies that the United States military needs to be transformed into one?

The military isn’t allowed to protect the border, but it’s tasked with protecting plants.

The good news is that the San Clemente Island paintbrush is off the endangered species list, thanks to the work of the U.S. Navy, the bad news is that the Navy is unready to fight a war against China. But that is what happens when leftist agenda items, not winning wars, become the mission. The military is asked to do everything except defeat our enemies.

Last year the Defense Department had a $3 billion “climate” request. This year it’s $5 billion.

Meanwhile a quarter of enlisted personnel are having trouble feeding their families. But the Department of Defense is spending $12 million on the 13,000 square foot ‘Guam Cultural Repository’ to hold local artifacts. There’s an entire Department of Defense Cultural Resources Program that works with Indian tribes in America to “manage” cultural resources.

Much of what the military does, does not actually need to be done by the military.

The $114 million DEI funding request is only the tip of a very large iceberg that will expand the command and control of the DEI bureaucracy within the military, but the Defense Department budget request is rotted through with leftist agendas even far beyond those nine figures.

The Pentagon keeps failing annual audits and can’t account for much of its spending. Under Biden, the DOD budget has become a checking account for woke policies. The sheer amount of money passing through the military has made it all too easy for leftists to steal what they want.

All under the guise of national security.

Parts of the DOD that people don’t even think about are going fully woke. After acknowledging poverty among military families, the Equity Action Plan hijacked it with DEI language to help “Latinx” students and promote “inclusive educational experiences” with “Robot-Assisted Instruction”.

The Department of Defense’s education arm, DoDEA, will have a “division that focuses solely on advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion. This division will examine, identify, and eliminate inequities, barriers, and gaps in DEI in all aspects” and force teachers into using “culturally responsive teaching strategies” to indoctrinate students to hate America and support the Left.

Instead of helping the children of military families, the Pentagon is pushing DEI on them.

The DEI agenda claims to stand for social justice, but in reality it’s redistributing money from working class taxpayers and military families to highly paid consultants and DEI personnel like Kelisa Wing, the head of DoDEA’s DEI unit, who had ranted about “white folx” with the “CAUdacity to say that black people can be racist too” who enjoyed a $164,000 salary.

The children of military families are going hungry so that DEI can gorge itself on the defense budget. This isn’t social justice: it’s a shameless act of treason and a horrifying injustice.

Soldiers are on food stamps while military DEI consultants live in mansions.

The right number for the Defense Department’s DEI budget should be zero and less than zero. Past funds allocated to this ideological effort to politicize the military and poison its culture should be clawed back. The Pentagon needs to shed all extraneous equity and environmental responsibilities and focus on national security. And once the government isn’t spending billions on “equity” and “climate”, it will have enough left over to take care of the troops.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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