The Biden-Harris Defense Department paid outside organizations millions of taxpayer dollars to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, including race-based career advancement programs, in the U.S. military, documents shared exclusively with The Daily Wire reveal.

The documents, first obtained by the Functional Government Initiative, highlight the extent of the Pentagon’s efforts to embed leftwing, race-based ideology in the military, in partnership with academic institutions and consulting firms. The outside organizations received taxpayer dollars to set up hiring pipelines that gave candidates preferential treatment on the basis of race and sex, advise the government agency on DEI policy, and combat internal and external resistance to said policies.

The contracts are the latest evidence of the Biden-Harris administration’s push to impose DEI policies and practices throughout the federal government, including the military. Critics have blasted the administration for this push, arguing that their ideological focus detracts from military readiness and may even cause some Americans to sour on military service amid an ongoing recruiting crisis, compromising our national security in the process.

The Functional Government Initiative slammed the DOD’s decision to push a political agenda rather than focus on military readiness.

“The U.S. and its allies are facing challenges and threats all over the globe. Despite the increased concern for military preparedness, the DOD continues to prioritize DEI initiatives,” FGI spokesman Peter McGinnis told The Daily Wire.

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“Rather than maximizing readiness training to ensure a capable military, the DOD’s training seems calculated to foster sowing internal discord with aggressive efforts to promote controversial ideologies,” McGinnis added. “Americans join the military to serve their nation and protect the homeland, not to sit through sensitivity training. The DOD owes them better.”

The Defense Department went beyond pushing DEI on members, paying academic institutions to build career pipelines that disadvantaged men and white people on the basis of their sex and race.

The Department of the Navy awarded the University of Missouri Kansas City $760,000 to design a program that would give preferential treatment to non-white students and women in STEM applying for Defense Department jobs. The program’s designers openly acknowledged that it would give preferential treatment to applicants on the basis of their sex and race.

“To meet our equity-focused programmatic goals, campus internship selection will be equitable such that qualified applicants from underserved and underrepresented cohorts … will be provided first choice,” the designers said.

The Defense Department awarded Cornell University around $202,000 “to provide Diversity training that is mission imperative to ensure readiness and addressing discriminatory behavior from a cognitive perspective.” The DEI program sought to train 35 employees of the Air Force Materiel Command to deliver DEI training to an estimated 70,000 employees, with a focus on “counteracting unconscious bias,” “fostering an inclusive environment,” and “diversity and inclusion at work.”

The Defense Department also paid the RAND Corporation an undisclosed sum of money for a project titled “Research and Analysis Support for the Department of Defense Board on Diversity and Inclusion.”

Among other things, RAND’s report offered the DOD advice on how to combat growing resistance to military DEI initiatives.

“Across organizations, a resistance to DE&I is growing, while discriminatory and xenophobic expressions are increasing,” the report reads. “Some researchers describe the presence of ‘denial perspectives’ and ‘diversity defiance,’ or ‘White fatigue,’” the report went on to say before cautioning the Defense Department to “watch for” these perspectives “and exercise caution to guard against them.”

RAND urged the Department of the Air Force to “develop techniques and tools to mitigate resistance” to the DEI agenda among its employees and enlisted members.

The Defense Department paid DEI consulting agency BCT Partners just under $2 million in 2021 to create a “DEI Action Plan” for DOD-operated schools, called the DOD Education Activity.

In its performance work statement, BCT deploys typical DEI boilerplate. It notes that Critical Race Theory “is an approach to grappling with a history of white supremacy” and ““Systematic racism [that] is part of the American life.” The document also decries “microaggressions” and “implicit bias.”

The Biden-Harris administration has continuously worked to embed the far-left DEI agenda throughout the federal government, from the military and intelligence community to the bureaucracy writ-large. The Daily Wire previously revealed that the Pentagon requested nearly $270 million in taxpayer funds for the DEI agenda from 2022 to 2024 under the leftwing administration.

President Joe Biden signed multiple executive orders institutionalizing the leftwing doctrine, and his federal agencies have even worked to enable gender transition attempts among government employees, barring the use of biologically accurate pronouns in the process.

Former President Donald Trump has pledged to gut the bureaucracy through executive orders if he is reelected in November, cutting down the size of the administrative state and firing those who may otherwise work to undermine his policy agenda.