The Treasury Department is ground zero for the Biden administration’s “whole-of-government” DEI agenda. The agency, which serves as the guardian of the American financial system, has translated critical race and gender theories into official policy—all under the guise of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
We have conducted an exclusive investigation that reveals the stunning capture of the Treasury, which, under the current DEI mandate, has worked to advance the principles of left-wing racialism, directing billions of dollars to favored racial and “underserved” groups, hiring a cadre of radical race “experts” to cement the new orthodoxy within the department, and considering potential auditees’ race in IRS tax investigations.
This ideological shift started at the top. In her first months in office, Treasury secretary Janet Yellen sent a statement to the department’s workers that “commitment to the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion is expected of every employee.” She sent the statement on the anniversary of the May 2020 death of George Floyd, at 9:29 a.m., to symbolize the nine minutes and 29 seconds that police officer Derek Chauvin had pinned Floyd to the ground. The statement set the tone: the Treasury secretary had a new ideological agenda—and expected compliance all the way down.
To implement this agenda, Yellen quickly built a centralized DEI apparatus within the department, establishing an official Equity Hub, tasked with implementing Biden’s executive orders on diversity, and an Advisory Committee on Racial Equity, made up of activists and executives. She also hired left-wing race activist Janis Bowdler as the department’s first Counselor for Racial Equity, a high-level position “charged with coordinating Treasury’s efforts to advance racial equity including engaging with diverse communities throughout the country.”
Yellen and Bowdler wasted no time, working to advance some of Treasury’s most flagrant racial programs, which subordinated lending standards, federal contracting, hiring policy, and even IRS auditing rules to the new racial calculus.
The most significant of these initiatives is the agency-wide effort to redirect billions of dollars toward supposedly oppressed racial groups and other “underserved communities.” In 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary Yellen jointly announced $8.7 billion in investments to increase lending to “minority-owned businesses,” among other groups. Two years later, the Treasury announced that some 30 private companies were committed to raising $3 billion in deposits for “underserved communities,” to be delivered through community-development financial institutions (CDFIs) and minority depository institutions (MDIs).
The State Small Business Capital Initiative is another node of the department’s slush fund for favored racial groups. In 2021, Treasury announced that it was using SSBCI to route $2.5 billion to “businesses owned by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals, including those in communities of color.” The first $1.5 billion of this total was earmarked for small businesses in Treasury-designated areas “owned by individuals that have faced barriers . . . including membership in a group that has been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias within American society.” The other $1 billion went to “incentive funds” aimed at increasing venture capital investments in these businesses.
Secretary Yellen has also intensified Treasury’s commitment to awarding federal contracts based on race. Treasury openly discriminates in favor of “diverse” businesses, reporting to Congress that the department’s Office of Minority and Women Inclusion (OMWI) was committed to “[e]stablish[ing] an organizational climate that advances procurement equity”—that is, “the percentages of contract obligations awarded to minority-owned and women-owned businesses.” Earlier this year, the department reported progress: Treasury had “[i]ncreased federal business with Black businesses” to “over $188 million in government contracts.”
Treasury’s DEI agenda extends beyond its set-asides for “underserved” firms to its contractors, who are expected to comply with the department’s diversity mandates. Treasury’s OMWI, for example, strictly monitors “business inclusion” among its contractors, measuring their commitment “to achiev[ing] a diverse and inclusive workforce.” Such compliance measures have allowed the office to use its economic leverage to pressure contractors into adopting DEI policies. And it works: last year, OMWI reported that “nearly 90 percent of contractors evaluated complied” with the DEI mandate and “100 percent of all others evaluated satisfactorily addressed shortcomings.”
The department’s spending on private DEI consulting is also worth noting. In 2021, Treasury directed $2.8 million to the firm Accenture Federal Services to consult on its DEI office’s “implementation phase.” Public records for fiscal year 2024 show that the department has awarded an additional $889,042 in DEI-related contracts, including for diversity internships and “inclusion training,” directly rewarding the administration’s ideological partners in the private sector.
This year, the Treasury has turned its attention to further entrenching DEI within the departmental culture. To accomplish this, Secretary Yellen appointed a left-wing academic named Rhianna Rogers as the department’s Chief Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility Officer. Rogers is a lifelong DEI activist whose “scholarship” reproduces boilerplate critical-theory claptrap. In one paper, she laments the “demonization” of “pagan practices” through “eurocentric ideas of cultural supremacy.” In another, she idealizes the “reciprocating system of duality existing between men and women in Aztec life and religion,” as compared with the “Spanish patriarchal agenda.”
Rogers now helps to shape the office culture at Treasury, which, the department boasts, “is a testament to [its] forward-thinking approach, ensuring that inclusivity is not just a goal but a lived reality.”
For Treasury employees, that “lived reality” now resembles a college racial studies seminar. This year, Rogers unveiled “a DEI summer learning challenge,” in which “Treasury’s 100k+ staff have been asked to take 3 out of 21 introductory to advanced courses,” from “introductory areas such as DEIA [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility] 101 through to advanced courses like Emotional Intelligence, Psychological Safety, and Managing Multigenerational Employees.” Rogers also began publishing a bimonthly newsletter on Treasury’s ideological programs—“a big step,” she claims, “towards fostering community engagement and representation at the Treasury Department.”
This ideology filters down to the operational level, which has direct implications for taxpayers. For example, this summer, Janis Bowdler, the department’s Counselor for Racial Equity, boasted that the IRS had committed to “reducing disparities in selection for EITC audits” and to “examining audit fairness by other demographic categories.” In plain English, this means potentially allowing favored groups to get away with tax fraud—in the name of “equity.”
For years, many commentators on the left have sought to downplay the impact of DEI programs, arguing that they have little real-world impact. We can lay those arguments to rest. These ideologies are no longer confined to campus humanities departments; they have captured some of the most important federal institutions, such as the Treasury Department, which has been radicalized from top to bottom.
Americans should beware what happens next. The White House has remade America’s economic policy according to racial ideology. It has stocked the Treasury Department with racial “experts” who have subordinated America’s financial health to concerns about “equity.”
All of this is nothing but euphemism. The “whole-of-government equity agenda” will not yield prosperity. It will only divide Americans and stoke resentment while further degrading the nation’s finances. Policymakers must abolish the DEI bureaucracy and restore colorblind equality as the operating principle of the United States government—before it is too late.
Christopher F. Rufo is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America’s Cultural Revolution.
Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer
