$3.5 Million: DEI Groups Funded Through Defense Human Resources Activity

§ 01 / The Program

The Defense Department Built a DEI Bureaucracy Inside the Human Resources Office. $3.5 Million for the Organizations That Ran It.

The Defense Human Resources Activity (DHRA) — the DOD’s centralized HR and personnel services organization — funded $3.5 million in diversity, equity, and inclusion organizations and programs operating across the military services. This included dedicated DEI offices within DHRA, contractor-led DEI training and assessment programs, organizational culture change initiatives, and support for the DOD’s Chief Diversity Officer function, which was created as a new senior leadership role under Biden.

The DHRA DEI apparatus represented the centralized bureaucratic infrastructure for the military-wide DEI push — coordinating across the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Space Force to implement Biden’s defense DEI directives. $3.5 million covered staff, contractors, training development, and organizational programs. The entire apparatus was terminated by EO 14173 in January 2025, which directed all federal agencies to eliminate DEI offices and DEI-related positions government-wide.

What the DEI Bureaucracy Was Actually Doing

The DHRA DEI apparatus funded activities ranging from mandatory unconscious bias training for military officers (which the Senate Armed Services Committee had questioned as displacing readiness training) to demographic tracking of promotion rates across services. Some of that tracking — monitoring whether promotion boards are systematically discriminating against qualified officers — is legitimate oversight. The mandatory ideological training and the culture-change consulting contracts are not. All of it was shut down simultaneously. The legitimate monitoring function will have to be rebuilt under a different name and framing if the military services want to maintain evidence-based non-discrimination oversight.

§ 02 / The Bottom Line

What This Means

$3.5 million for the DHRA DEI organizational infrastructure — dedicated offices, contractors, training programs, and culture-change initiatives across the military services. Terminated January 2025 under EO 14173. The legitimate non-discrimination monitoring functions and the ideological training programs were eliminated together. The military’s equal opportunity enforcement mission now has less dedicated organizational infrastructure than at any time since the 1970s.

Sources · 10 Citations