A medical watchdog says that the Cleveland Clinic is taking hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding while pushing race-based programs and policies.

Do No Harm, an organization dedicated to depoliticizing medicine, reported Monday that the Ohio clinic is engaged in a range of “discriminatory behavior.” This behavior includes recruitment strategies explicitly for minorities, minority-exclusive scholarships, and adopting “supplier diversity” policies. 

“The Cleveland Clinic used to be synonymous with excellence,” Do No Harm Director of Research Ian Kingsbury told The Daily Wire. “Now, it’s becoming an avatar for everything that is wrong with American health care. It’s a sorry tale about the displacement of rigor and dispassionate truth seeking in favor of identity politics.”

According to analysis from Do No Harm, the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine is currently the recipient of around $170 million in active grant funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Around $50 million of this goes toward “indirect” costs while the Cleveland Clinic Foundation has over $5 million in active projects from the NIH, according to Do No Harm. 

The clinic has also pushed a number of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. 

One of the examples cited by Do No Harm included a July 2020 $1.2 million five year grant given to the Cleveland Clinic and Cleveland State University with the goal of increasing the “number of minority scientists in Cleveland area.”

The goal was to recruit “underrepresented minority Ph.D. students and students underrepresented in the science and technology workforce,” and which NIH defined at the time as “Blacks or African Americans, Hispanics or Latinos, American Indians or Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders.” This excluded both whites and Asians. 

“In other words, the NIH grant empowered Cleveland Clinic to engage in racially discriminatory recruiting practices,” Do No Harm said of the program. “It’s no wonder, then, that Cleveland Clinic has embraced wholesale the race-centric DEI agenda.”

The clinic told The Daily Wire that it does not discriminate based on race or gender.

“For over 100 years, Cleveland Clinic’s mission has been to care for life, research for health and educate those who serve. We do not discriminate or create preferences based on race, gender or any other characteristics, and we abide by ethical and legal standards of care with respect to our delivery of healthcare services,” the clinic said. “Cleveland Clinic is a nonpartisan organization and we neither have nor promote a political agenda.”

Do No Harm also drew attention to the clinic’s Howley ASPIRE nursing program, an initiative designed for high school juniors interested in nursing. While the program description does not mention race, promotional materials produced indicate it was designed specifically for minorities. 

“In providing these opportunities, ASPIRE seeks to address the underrepresentation of racial and ethnic minorities in nursing. More than 30 percent of the U.S. population is Black/African-American or Hispanic/Latino, according to the Census Bureau — yet less than 13% of nurses fall into those categories,” an article in the Cleveland Clinic Magazine for the fall of 2020 says. 

Another example was the “Scholarship for Underrepresented Students” at the Anesthesiology Residency program at Cleveland Clinic. This opportunity, which was advertised as for “underrepresented” students, has been removed from the clinic’s website though it can still be found on archived pages. 

Do No Harm also pointed out that the Cleveland Clinic has implemented “supplier diversity” goals which are meant to “increase the number of underrepresented vendors doing business with Cleveland Clinic.”

“Do No Harm welcomes additional scrutiny of bad actors like Cleveland Clinic who use their position to inject harmful and radical ideologies into the medical field,” the organization said in its analysis. “These discriminatory practices must be exposed and condemned in order for excellence in medicine to be restored, and for merit (and not race) to be championed.”

The clinic previously came under scrutiny from Do No Harm over DEI-related programming. 

In September, the Department of Health and Human Services’s Office of Civil Rights said that it was investigating the Cleveland Clinic over its promotion of its “Minority Stroke Program” and the “Minority Men’s Health Center.” That investigation came after the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL) filed a complaint with the department on behalf of Do No Harm. 

In recent weeks, the conservative group Consumers’ Research has also been engaged in a public campaign against the Cleveland Clinic, saying that it has pushed racial and gender ideologies. Consumers’ Research Executive Director Will Held told The Daily Wire that the federal funding going toward the clinic needed to be scrutinized. 

“Revelations like this are exactly why President Trump’s executive action against DEI is so important,” he said. “HHS has a duty and obligation to investigate the full extent of the federal government’s funding of Cleveland Clinic. American taxpayers have a right to know if their money is being used to fund an extreme political agenda that includes racial discrimination and the mutilation of vulnerable children’s bodies.”

The clinic responded to the campaign by saying that it is “riddled with inaccuracies and lies.”

President Donald Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office eliminating DEI from the federal government and cutting federal funding for DEI programs.

The Cleveland Clinic told The Daily Wire that it was “reviewing and evaluating our programs following the recent executive orders.”