The former head of diversity and inclusion at former President Joe Biden’s State Department was asked point blank at a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee hearing Tuesday to justify DEI in American foreign policy.
Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley, who was chief diversity and inclusion officer at the State Department under Biden, testified before the Oversight and Intelligence Committee and defended her work against searing critiques by the panel’s chairman, Rep. Cory Mills, R-Fla.
She explained to Mills that by the end of her tenure, her office had a budget of “about $7 million.”
“Can you just explain to me, how did this funding advance American interest overseas? … How did DEI and the office within the State Department help our overseas security and national security interests?” Mills asked Abercrombie at the hearing, provocatively titled, “Deficient, Enfeebled, and Ineffective: The Consequences of the Biden Administration’s Far-Left Priorities on U.S. Foreign Policy.”
Abercrombie-Winstanley did not go into specifics, but argued that diversity, equity and inclusion have an effect of improving America’s reputation.
“As we all know from the 1960s, our reputation matters,” said Abercrombie-Winstanley, who served as U.S. ambassador to Malta in the Obama administration.
That’s how we build allies, that’s how we build support … . Our reputation of being a country where merit counts, where if you work hard you can achieve—and that means all of us, going and showing the world that all of us are able to benefit from our hard work, is important. It does help our foreign policy.
To the contrary, Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation, contended in his opening statement that prioritizing diversity is a bane to American military efficiency.
“‘Diversity’ is great when it comes from fair competition and individual choice. ‘Equity’ should mean equal opportunity and equal treatment. ‘Inclusion is good,’ when it is possible,” said Hankinson, who was a Foreign Service officer with the State Department for 23 years, serving in seven countries.
But he added: “The State Department, like so many other institutions, has decided to achieve its diversity goals by lowering standards.”
Hiring people because of how they look, and not what they do, is wrong, and it’s also illegal. The State Department’s guiding principles at home must be equal opportunity, fair treatment, high expectations, and accountability.
Democrats on the panel did not show much interest in the hearing. Ranking member Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., for example, argued that DEI is an issue of the past and that the subcommittee should focus its oversight on the current administration.
“Newsflash to my colleagues across the aisle: You won, we lost! This was one of the issues on the ballot. There’s an [executive order that] has been signed, DEI has ended. But yet, we’re still going to look backwards,” he said.
Peter Parisi contributed to this report.
