The Department of Defense spends millions of dollars every year on expanding diversity, equity, and inclusion practices in science and healthcare, a Washington Examiner review of public records found.

From improving racial equity in prostate cancer treatment to increasing diversity in marine mammal research, the Washington Examiner identified $18.4 million in Pentagon grants aimed at inserting DEI into technical fields. While the earliest instance of this spending in federal databases dates back to the Obama administration, most of the grants were disbursed by the Biden administration, and a significant number of these diversity commitments remain under the Trump administration.

“Research and development spending in the Department of Defense contains large sums of money being spent on non-defense spending, ‘centers of excellence’ sponsored as pork spending by congressmen never requested by the Pentagon, and politicized initiatives like DEI and climate change,” Wilson Beaver, Heritage Foundation national security policy adviser, told the Washington Examiner. “This sort of spending needs to be cut and reallocated into the procurement of weapons systems like ships, planes, and munitions that our troops need to protect the national security interests of the United States.”

So far, the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts to the Pentagon have been limited to a handful of contracts funding diversity training and subscriptions to information services such as Politico Pro and Westlaw. 

The largest single STEM DEI item funded by the Pentagon was the Inclusive Cancer Care Research Equity for Black Men Consortium, a group of universities and health organizations that have received over $10 million in military funding since 2022 to optimize prostate cancer treatment, specifically for black men. 

Grants such as this have an unclear future after President Donald Trump issued an executive order in January mandating the termination of DEI from federal contracting and spending. Despite that order, millions of dollars worth of DOD grants for the consortium and other DEI-related STEM projects remain listed as active in the federal government’s spending database.

Some of the DOD-funded grants had explicit racial requirements tied to them.

The Diversity in Research and Engineering of Advanced Materials, or DREAM, program, for instance, received $705,000 in Pentagon funding between 2011 and 2019. The program was intended to increase racial diversity in science and engineering by providing special funding to some college students. One promotional flyer for the program said applicants must be African American to qualify for the program. Another webpage with information about the program said applicants must be from an “under-resourced” group, using language commonly used to describe racial minorities, while a third piece of literature simply said minority students “are especially encouraged to apply.”

Those close to the president have characterized DEI efforts as “anti-white racism.”

PENTAGON SPENT MILLIONS ON TRANSGENDER RESEARCH AND ACCOMMODATION, RECORDS SHOW

Other Pentagon grants funding DEI in science and healthcare include a million dollars to a school district in Colorado to push equity in STEM, $244,775 to help fund “internships for diversity and inclusion in marine mammal research,” $220,000 to strengthen the Navy’s educational workforce through DEI, roughly $83,000 to increase diversity in cybersecurity, about $25,000 to fund an edition of the Oceanography Society’s magazine focused on DEI in the ocean sciences, $380,000 to fund a high school STEM competition aimed at increasing diversity in ocean education, over $750,000 to develop an equity-focused STEM workforce pipeline for the Navy, $1.4 million to promote equity in prostate cancer treatment for “Hispanic/Latinx” men, $1.1 million to promote “equity through a culturally tailored prostate cancer genetics video for African American males,” and another million dollars to fund a group seeking to increase racial diversity in the STEM workforce. 

It costs between $55,000 to $74,000 to send a single Army recruit through training. The $18.4 million spent by the Pentagon on expanding DEI in STEM and medicine could have instead been spent on training between seven and nine additional platoons for the army, according to figures produced by the Pentagon. 

The DOD did not respond to a request for comment.