America's Talking - Biden’s Pick to Lead Joint Chiefs of Staff Faces Questions Over DEI Record

Episode Date: July 16, 2023

President Joe Biden’s pick to chair the Joint Chiefs of Staff faced questions from lawmakers Tuesday over his history of backing Diversity, Equity and Inclusion policies. Chief of Staff of the Air Force Charles Q. Brown testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee Tuesday as the next step in his nomination process. The expected questions about Ukraine and munitions were accompanied by a less common line of questioning: how DEI has infiltrated the military and might be hurting recruitment. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Greetings and welcome to America in Focus powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me again today is our Washington D.C. Bureau Chief Casey Harper. Got any weekend plans, Casey? You know, Dan, just going to be working away for you all weekend, just trying to, I might take a couple, a few hours to sleep, but. As it should be, Casey, I guess I should have noted when I asked about your weekend plans that we are recording this on Friday, July. 14th, even though it's in the middle of summer, a lot going on in D.C. nowadays, which is why I make you work through the weekend, give you a couple hours break here and there. Right. So you should be thanking me for that. But you covered a hearing in Congress this week. President Joe Biden's picked a chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, Charles Q. Brown. He's been

under a lot of criticism or seen a lot of criticism from Republicans because of his DEI policies, these diversity, equity, and inclusion policies at the Air Force. And Republicans are pushing back against his nomination because he's prioritizing those policies over, you know, national security. Is that an accurate statement for me? Clarify what's going on here. Yeah, pretty close. Pretty good, Dan, you should do this for a living.

So, yeah, this Charles Brown guy has really become the center of controversy. Often some of these military nominees aren't so controversial. He is Chief of Staff of the Air Force as you laid out. And for those who don't know, cheering the Joint Chiefs, staff is about as powerful as you can get in the military. So he's me directly advising the president, setting a lot of policy. And so, of course, he's getting more scrutiny. Now, I thought the hearing this week was really interesting. And I want to get into why that is, but just to give people some background, what we mean when we say he supported DEI. Of course, the EE is diversity, equity,

and inclusion. It is a big bucket category under which a lot of progressive ideas about race and gender are kind of crammed into. So you have critical race theory ideas. You have ideas about white privilege. Even maybe racial quotas and equity in leadership and different positions can be under that. Gender pronouns can be a big part of that. Transitioning, you know, how you refer to people, getting in trouble for misgendering or using the wrong types of words to describe people, white people admitting kind of their own inherent bias and racism and structural racism, all these kind of things. I'm just kind of giving you a flurry of terms and ideas that can be classified under this DEI, I think, so people kind of are reoriented on what we mean by all this.

Now, a few examples of what this practically looked like. You know, in the last few years, the Air Force has set up a diversity and equity or diversity inclusion task force. There's been a lot of trainings throughout the military and the Pentagon. on things like white privilege, critical race theory, and the Air Force has been part of that as well. One memo that came up in the hearing was signed by Charles Brown, and it basically set racial quotas or ethnic quotas for applicants to officer positions. Right. So it said we want, for example, I think 67.5% of our applicants to be white, 13% to be black, 10% to be Asian. and there's other groups in there, but you get the idea. Setting these racial quota goals for

officer applications is a good example of what this could look like. Let me just pause it there for a second. So essentially then what you're saying is under Brown, the Air Force set up these quota goals where diversity and racial issues were part of any decisions to promote officers within the Air Force, not competency, not achievement, et cetera, but racial factors are being used to determine who gets promoted in the Air Force in one of our military branches. Yeah, so this is where it kind of became interesting at the hearing this week because some of the things you just said are things that Charles Brown has explicitly said in past interviews, in past statements, past videos.

I don't think he's explicitly said that we don't consider merit. You know, we only look at race. I don't think he would say that. But I understand what you mean by that. But he did explicitly say that he hires and promotes for diversity, that he definitely considers diversity as a factor when hiring, which of course, you know, when you're hiring someone, there's a lot of factors to go into it.

Merritt is a big one. But if you have another thing weighing on the scale, you could easily see how someone who's maybe a little bit less qualified could have that, you know, gap between them and the other applicants covered by some kind of ethnic background. It's basically, you know, what we've been talking about about a lot with affirmative action in the Supreme Court, right? So you might have two students who apply and one has like an SAT score that's 100 points higher, but they're a white student. And the student who's not white has an SAT score that's 100 points lower. But, you know,

I mean, how do you, what's the conversion rate of non-whiteness to SAT points? I don't think it's quite that mathematical, but an, but an admissions officer would look at that. say, well, it's only 100 points, and we should give this person who has experienced racism and had to overcome that in their life. Let's give them the admission over the white student who had a better score. And we know for a fact that happened, you know, countless times under affirmative action policies that have now been called unlawful. So it's kind of the same idea in promoting and hiring in the Air Force. And Charles Brown said that he's definitely done that. Now, when he came before the hearing at Congress this week, it was really interesting because some of the senators kind of

tip-towed around it. Senator Eric Schmidt, in particular, Republican for Missouri, he really went after Charles Brown on this. But Brown really, I think, was anticipating this criticism because of a lot of the reporting on it. And he was doubling down, emphasizing the need for merit. And in my opinion, he almost contradicted past statements he had made because he knew how sensitive some of the senators would be to this. And I don't want to be too hard on Senator Schmidt, but I don't think he was really ready to go back and forth. with Charles Brown. Because when Charles Brown pushed back and said, no, no, merit is most important. I would never, you know, hire anyone. Merit is, you know, the foundation. We want to give everybody an

opportunity, but merit's most important. And, you know, we set those racial goals just because they're the goals of the U.S. population. Senator Schmidt wasn't really able to push beyond that and say, well, actually, you said explicitly in this interview that you hire for diversity and you promote for diversity. He wasn't able to bring up some of Brown's exam. of things that he said like that. And maybe he didn't want to, you know, go too far down that road. I don't know. But I think Brown overall got out of this unscathed. And he had multiple Republicans on the committee say that they do back him and hope he's confirmed. So while Brown has faced a lot of, you know, scrutiny on this issue, he had a little bit of it brought up at the hearing. So far, I think he's mostly, to no pun intended, dodge that bullet.

though when he goes, you know, more widely before the Senate, I think it'll be more ready. Yeah. Well, so that was going to be my next, my closing question, Casey. He's going through the confirmation process. This was a committee hearing that happened this week. Because you reported on, and as you just said here, he does have some Republican support, Democrats have a very slight majority in the Senate, which will have the vote to confirm or not confirm. It's looking like he's going to get through the confirmation process.

Agree or disagree? Well, it's complicated because Senator Tommy Tuberville, a Republican from Alabama, is blocking these top military officer promotions. I mean, hundreds of them have been stalled and blocked by Tuberville. And he instituted this a few months ago when the Pentagon said that they would pay to reimburse troops who cross state lines to get abortions, right? So if a service member, she wants to drive somewhere or fly somewhere to get an abortion tax dollars will pay for that. And Tuberville was adamantly opposed to that and used his authority to say, until the Pentagon changes his policy, I'm not going to confirm any promotions. And so Tuberville is under a ton of pressure on this, but so far he stood firm. So there's multiple factors going in here. The fact that a,

joint chiefs of staff chair could be impacted this by this is only going to ramp up the pressure. it's unclear to me to what degree Tuberville can block this chairmanship, but I know he's blocked all the other top military officer promotions. And it's also unclear whether he will cave or maybe make an exception for the chair, but then hold his blockade on the rest to kind of compromise and relieve some of the pressure he's facing. So it's, there's a lot of different political lines that are crossing here. DeiI abortion and the military, all in one story. Thank you for your insight into this, Casey. Of course, our reporting on this issue will not go away. Listeners can keep up at thecentersquare.com, but we are out of time.

We're Casey Harper. I am Dan McAulb. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe.