“The Intelligence Community should reflect the diverse makeup of America and demonstrate that we are fostering an environment where every professional can succeed,” Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said on Thursday, announcing the federally mandated report.
“Promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion is fundamental to our democratic values and critical to meeting the IC’s mission. This takes work every single day,” added Haines.
In this instance, the “work” seems to have involved photoshopping a blind man with a guide dog and a woman in a wheelchair into a stock photo of workplace diversity, as some keen-eye people on Twitter quickly pointed out.
One of them was Richard Grenell, who served as acting DNI under the Trump administration. He blasted the cover as “another example of the inauthenticity of the Biden team,” and a “phony moment” the Washington, DC media will be “instructed to ignore.”
Among the first executive actions by President Joe Biden was a commitment of his administration to “equity” in all things, and making all government agencies “look like America.” In practice, this has translated into hiring Democrats from a variety of racial, ethnic and social identity groups.
The report boasted of the ODNI efforts to recruit “minorities, women, and persons with disabilities” and “drive diversity, equity, and inclusion” in all US intelligence agencies. In terms of actual numbers, however, minorities gained half a percentage point since 2019, people with disabilities gained 0.4, and the percentage of women remained unchanged.
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