President Biden’s Treasury Department is expanding its own bureaucracy — hiring woke functionaries bent on chasing the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” goals espoused by lefty mega-investors — instead of building up America’s wealth and economic health, critics told The Post.
Self-described intersectional economist Diane Lim announced Monday that she will head the department’s “Equity Hub” — a new role created to “coordinate efforts to advance equity in all of Treasury’s work,” paying up to $203,700 a year.
Her job description is almost identical to that of another Biden-created post. Counselor for Racial Equity Janis Bowdler — a former activist with the National Council of La Raza — earns $161,813 to “coordinate all offices and workstreams intended to advance equity,” the department’s website states.
“This is just another example of the unprecedented level of wasteful spending by the Biden Administration that’s fueled inflation and cost American taxpayers money,” said Rep. Nicole Malliotakis (R-NY).
Worse, experts say, the department’s equity obsession undermines its actual purpose — the protection and expansion of national prosperity for all.
“Equity, as defined by the architects of critical race theory, means the government must treat individual Americans unequally in order to attain equal outcomes as measured by race,” Heritage Foundation fellow Mike Gonzalez told The Post. “That is very worrisome when it comes to finance or anything else that Treasury does.”
“This push for equity takes no account of an economy that generates wealth and jobs and prosperity,” Gonzalez added. “All it cares about is equal outcomes – which is the Soviet standard, not the American standard — as measured by race.”
The department’s new apparatchiks are layered atop a phalanx of existing civil-rights officials — at least 19 executive-level employees, plus 25 unpaid members of the Treasury Advisory Committee on Racial Equity, another creation of the Biden administration.
Lorraine Cole earns $199,300 as director of the Office of Minority and Women Inclusion, while Tina Lancaster, acting director of the Office of Civil Rights and Equal Employment Opportunity, takes home $176,300 annually.
Meanwhile, 17 separate EEO directors – one for each Treasury bureau – are paid similarly hefty salaries, with staffs to match.
“They’re creating a whole deep state of equity officers,” said Ted Frank, a public interest attorney with the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute.
The bureaucratic bloat is overseen by Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo, Secretary Janet Yellen’s woke point man.
Adeyemo, the onetime president of the Obama Foundation, is a former protege of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink — whose giant investment-management company has made a concerted effort to strong-arm American corporations into supporting leftist causes, The Post has reported.
Adeyemo has pushed Treasury to “center racial equity” in distributing cash from Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID relief law, and is urging the IRS to correct “racial and ethnic disparities” in its audit rates.
The department has also “revised” federal procurement rules to “prioritize equity and supplier diversity,” it boasted last year — ditching old regulations that put “efficiency and savings” in the forefront.
The policies all stem from an executive order signed by Biden within hours of his 2021 inauguration, directing his agencies to pursue “an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda.”
Last week, before heading off to Beijing to schmooze with Communist Party officials, Yellen stopped in at the annual Essence Festival in New Orleans.
There, she told a largely black audience that Treasury had pumped $1.4 billion into “black-owned and operated banks and credit unions” and doled out $200 million in “prime contracts” to African-American businesses — “a 60 percent increase from 2020,” she said.
“It’s just raw politics … boondoggles and racial spoils,” Frank said. “In practice, ‘equity’ generally translates into finding ways to give government largess, or to use government enforcement, to benefit prominent Democratic voting blocs.”
“If this is Bidenomics,” Gonzalez said, “then it really is a disaster.”
