Biden Education Department spent over $1B on DEI grants

The US Department of Education spent at least $1 billion on grants advancing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in hiring, programming and mental health training in America's schools since 2021, Report informs via Fox News.

Parents Defending Education "PDE", a right-leaning organization that pledges to "reclaim our schools from activists imposing harmful agendas," shared its new report exclusively with Fox News Digital.

Researchers at the organization pored through nearly four years of publicly available data from the Department of Education to determine the number of grants and the dollar amount awarded to students and school districts for grants that had a clear DEI "motive."

From 2021 to present, they found the Biden administration awarded 229 grants across 42 states and Washington, D.C. that met that criteria.

According to the report, $489,883,797 was spent on grants for race-based hiring; $343,337,286 went toward general DEI programming; and $169,301,221 went to DEI-based mental health training and programming, totaling $1,002,522,304.81 spent in all.

The total grant amount "incorporates both awarded (committed) and disbursed dollars, as most of the grant money is distributed [a] period of several years," the report states.

Grants that fit into more than one of these categories were only counted once, Parents Defending Education researcher, Rhyen Staley, explained. He also said that their report likely undercounts the actual number of grants given, because researchers were conservative in determining which ones met their criteria. For example, he said PDE researchers excluded examples where they determined DEI was not the goal of the program, even if the grant's abstract used DEI "buzzwords."