Joe Biden Turns America’s Government Into Wokeness Inc.

Ben Shapiro / February 23, 2023

As Presidents Day weekend loomed last week, the Biden administration dropped a little-noticed executive order. That executive order happened to be one of the broadest, most transformative executive orders in modern American history; it turned the federal government into one giant machine designed for the propagation of woke principles.

Biden’s so-called Executive Order on Further Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government—presumably titled in jargonistic gobbledygook in order to avoid scrutiny—set out the key guiding principle for the Biden administration. This principle, “equity,” will now be used to redirect the entirety of the federal government’s awesome powers.

What, pray tell, is “equity”? It certainly isn’t equality—the presumption that Americans ought to be treated equally under the law as individuals. Instead, equity presumes that any group disparities must be the result of perverse government policy, and that the only corrective is government interventionism.

The new executive order, a follow-up to the first order Biden signed on his first day in office, suggests that “by advancing equity, the federal government can support and empower all Americans, including the many communities in America that have been underserved, discriminated against, and adversely affected by persistent poverty and inequality.”

Poverty, you see, is purely the outgrowth of discrimination and lack of service. Individuals must never be implicated in their own failures, nor can cultural differences justify group underperformance. As author and university professor Ibram X. Kendi more bluntly puts it, “As an anti-racist, when I see racial disparities, I see racism.”

The solution, therefore, is that government must correct all policy that allows for the annoyingly eternal human conditions of poverty and inequality. Biden’s executive order dictates that equity be “embedded … into the fabric of federal policymaking and service delivery.”

This will not be a “one-time project,” the order says; it must instead be a “multi-general commitment, and it must remain the responsibility of agencies across the federal government.” To that end, virtually every agency of government must establish an “Agency Equity Team … to coordinate the implementation of equity initiatives.”

Every aspect of government down to the design, development and acquisition of artificial intelligence must advance equity.

Nothing gives the president of the United States the unilateral authority to reshape the entire executive branch into an agent of “equity.” That is a legislative function, and the Congress has given no such grant of power. But Biden is doing it anyway. And that means stacking—presumably for generations to come—a deep state of “equity”-driven, left-wing bureaucrats throughout the federal government, systematizing the equity agenda throughout the unelected and unanswerable areas of the executive branch.

This is dangerous, and it must be stopped. It is violative of constitutional principles, both in terms of separation of powers and under the equal protection clause—which is designed to prevent precisely the sort of group-driven resource allocation Biden favors.

Stopping this executive order must become the first priority of the Republican House, and of future Republican presidential candidates.

Biden is deliberately planting a poisonous seed in the fertile soil of the world’s most powerful executive branch. That seed will bear hideous fruit as the years roll by. The only answer is to uproot the seed before it begins to sprout.

The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.