California has spent up to $500 million on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in its local government, K-12 school districts, and higher education in the years between 2020 and 2022, according to a report from a nonprofit watchdog group.
The Center for Organizational Research and Education (CORE) researches activist groups to report on their “funding, agendas, and tactics.”
“In recent years, the concept of critical race theory and its variants—often camouflaged as more generic ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ (DEI) activities, has entered the national spotlight, and infiltrated publicly-funded entities,” CORE said.
The analysis summarizes the results of 400 public record requests sent to state and local governments, and higher education and K-12 institutions in California, CORE said.
“The results are unmistakable: spending related to DEI and critical race theory-framed activities is a vast and growing component of taxpayer-funded spending at all levels of California government,” CORE stated.
DEI has become its own $1 billion industry funded by taxpayer dollars, CORE said.
“Based on the responsive documents our team received, we calculated at least $188 million directly linked DEI spending, and $308 million more in adjacent spending, totaling nearly $500 million in possible DEI spending in California,” CORE said in its report.
The total DEI represents 46 percent of requests for public records of DEI spending sent out, CORE said, with less than 11 percent of institutions responding that they had no records related to the request.
“Considering roughly 40 percent of our requests are still unfulfilled, we expect the true amount is much higher,” CORE said. “Our findings are proof that critical race theory and DEI are a vast and growing part of the California government.”
Anti-Racism in the Department of Conservation
CORE points to the Department of Conservation, which, “despite experiencing some of its worst-recorded forest fires and water shortages,” the department spent $180,000 of its environmental budget on including critical race theory in its training.
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