University of North Carolina System Has Nearly 700 Employees Under Its DEI Rubric
June 10, 2024
Topline: The University of North Carolina spends an estimated $90 million each year on 686 employees who in one way or another push diversity, equity and inclusion into their departments or across the system at large, according to an analysis from OpenTheBooks.com.
Key facts: The UNC public school system’s 16 campuses house 30 DEI-centric groups and 300 departments that employ people with some sort of DEI focus.
UNC’s payroll records show only 288 employees working in DEI roles out of 50,000, but OpenTheBooks’ auditors found another 398 members of DEI committees listed across several UNC websites. There’s another 80 students with similar roles, though most are volunteers.
The full database can be viewed here.
The highest-paid employee working exclusively in a DEI role was UNC-Chapel Hill Chief Diversity Officer Leah Cox, who made $412,800 including estimated benefits.
Others are earning far more while taking on DEI responsibilities as a secondary role. Moe Lim earns an estimated $858,000 as a professor of spine orthopedics at UNC Chapel Hill, but he’s also part of the School of Medicine’s Office of Inclusive Excellence and Community Engagement.
A full count of every DEI employee is almost impossible because the ideology has been weaved into dozens of other university departments. North Carolina A&T has over 200 “diversity enhanced course offerings.” UNC-Pembroke makes “inclusive education” the core curriculum of its education degrees.
Background: Change will soon be coming to the UNC system. In a repudiation of DEI ideology, the UNC Board of Governors voted on May 23 to repeal its diversity policy.
President Peter Hans says the school will now remain neutral on “political controversies.”
The Associated Press reports that the school will aim to discontinue DEI positions without cutting jobs, and that funding meant for DEI departments will go toward “student success initiatives.”
UNC received over 250 responses to an online form asking for feedback on its DEI policy; only 13 people supported keeping the department intact, according to the Associated Press.
UNC joins public universities in Texas, Florida, Utah and more in banning DEI. But those decisions came from state governments, not from the colleges themselves.
Summary: UNC won’t recoup the $90 million it spent each year on DEI, but the school now has an opportunity to put that money to better use.
Nevada Court Stops Referendum to Repeal Stadium Funding
June 11, 2024
Topline: Nevada voters would have had a chance to avoid paying for a new Major League Baseball stadium in Las Vegas, but the state’s Supreme Court banned such a referendum from appearing on ballots.
Key facts: The Nevada government last year agreed to provide $380 million of the $1.5 billion needed for the Oakland Athletics to relocate to Las Vegas.
The political action committee Schools Over Stadiums quickly formed to oppose the spending plan, arguing that the money should go toward education, since Nevada ranks 48th in the country in spending per student.
The PAC added a ballot question for this November, asking voters if they wanted to repeal the $380 million finance deal, but a lower court ruled in May that the full context of the question couldn’t be fully explained in 200 words — the maximum length for a referendum question in the state.
The Nevada Supreme Court upheld the ruling this May, saying the ballot question is “misleading” and "explains the general effect of a referendum, but it does not describe the practical effects of this specific referendum," according to CBS News. The court said the full 66-page funding bill would need to appear on the ballot, which is impossible under current law.
Schools Over Stadiums says it will attempt to have the referendum go to voters in 2026.
Nevada already provided $750 million for the NFL’s Raiders to move from Oakland to Las Vegas in 2020, which at the time was the highest-ever public investment in a stadium.
Background: Pushback over publicly-financed sports stadiums has reached a new gear this year as price tag records continue to be broken.
From 2020 to 2022, U.S. taxpayers paid $750 million of the $1.97 billion it took to build five new stadiums around the country, bringing the public cost above $30 billion since 1990.
That looks like a bargain today. The new Buffalo Bills stadium will cost taxpayers $850 million, and the Cleveland Browns want their city to chip in $1.2 billion for a new stadium.
Lawmakers and team owners say the tourism boost and job creations offset the cost, but that’s often not the case.
Judith Grant Long, a professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, told Colorado Newsline that “mounds of peer-reviewed academic research shows that stadium and arena investments cost more than their economic benefits.”
J.C. Bradbury, economics professor at Kennesaw State University, agreed that stadiums are “really poor public investments … without exception.”
It’s not as if stadiums can’t be financed without taxpayer subsidies. Los Angeles Rams owner Stan Kroenke privately raised all $5.5 billion needed to build SoFi Stadium in 2020, the world’s most expensive stadium.
Summary: Even though the legislators funding the Athletics’ stadium were popularly elected, Nevada taxpayers deserve a more direct voice in how their $380 million will be spent.
ICE Can’t Stay Under Budget — Spent More Than Congress Appropriated
June 12, 2024
Topline: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent nearly $1.8 billion more than was allocated in its annual budgets between 2014 and 2023, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office.
Key facts: ICE’s poor budget execution forced the Department of Homeland Security to transfer in $1.4 billion meant for other programs such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Coast Guard, including over $400 million last year.
ICE — the federal agency tasked with protecting the border and stopping illegal immigration — has also received $365 million in supplemental funding from Congress since 2014, according to the GAO report.
ICE holds monthly meetings to review its spending with the House and Senate appropriations committees, but auditors said the dollar figures it presents are often outdated or incomplete. Congress members said they can’t “fully understand” how ICE spends its money.
Some ICE programs didn’t even submit “spend plans” at the beginning of each year to prevent overspending. When plans were submitted, they were not always updated quarterly as required, the GAO report said.
ICE’s budget office is supposed to approve the spend plans and remind officials to update them, but auditors said it was “unclear” whether that actually happened.
ICE also uses several models to project its spending needs, but auditors said ICE does not check to see if the models are accurate. Its budget team “does not currently have the resources to regularly perform” required reviews.
The budget office is supposed to have 48 employees, but 12 positions were unfilled as of last year.
Homeland Security is supposed to perform a separate review of ICE’s budget models, but they’ve only evaluated four of the 16 models since 2018, GAO said.
Background: ICE has a budget of $9.8 billion this year, $1.5 billion more than the program actually requested from Congress. It had a $3.3 billion budget when it was created in 2003.
Encounters at the border have also increased. ICE arrested nearly 171,000 people in 2023, more than double the arrests from 2021.
The budget doesn’t include the $20 billion the Administration for Children and Families spent in 2022 and 2023 on “refugee and entrant assistance.” Previous reporting from OpenTheBooks.com showed that the federal government spent funds to provide cultural orientation, mental health referrals and more to refugees.
Summary: If our federal government can’t stop illegal immigration, it should at least be able to project how much money it will take to secure our border.
Throwback Thursday: Opera House Gets A Pricey Facelift
June 13, 2024
Throwback Thursday!
Topline: Fixing a bad haircut or a poor paint job is easy. Undoing the renovation of an entire building is less simple — unless the federal government steps in with half a million dollars.
Taxpayers spent $500,000 in 2008 to restore the Tibbits Opera House in Coldwater, Mich. to its original design after the building had already been remodeled twice.
That’s according to the “Wastebook” reporting published by the late U.S. Senator Dr. Tom Coburn. For years, these reports shined a white-hot spotlight on federal frauds and taxpayer abuses.
Coburn, the legendary U.S. Senator from Oklahoma, earned the nickname "Dr. No" by stopping thousands of pork-barrel projects using the Senate rules. Projects that he couldn't stop, Coburn included in his oversight reports.
Coburn's Wastebook 2008 included 65 examples of outrageous spending worth more than $1.3 billion, including the $500,000 spent on the Tibbits Opera House. The money would be worth over $730,000 today.
Key facts: Tibbits Opera House opened in 1882 at a cost of $25,000 and is now the second-oldest theater in Michigan.
The building went through a flurry of ownership changes and renovations. One owner transformed the building into a movie theater in 1934. Another group of investors turned it into a community theater after the building fell into disrepair.
By 1998, the Tibbits Opera Foundation had decided to restore the building to its original design, despite lacking the money to do so.
The Federal Highway Administration’s National Scenic Byways Program came through with the grant money in November 2008, and the process was complete: after over 100 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, the building’s facade looked exactly as it did before any money was spent.
A total of $3.4 million has been spent on the theater’s restoration, which continues today. Only $700,000 came from the theater’s owners; the rest came from grants and fundraisers. The state of Michigan has helped fund stage lights, a new electrical system and new boilers.
Summary: Today the opera house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, just as it likely would have been had its owners left the building untouched.
Harvard, Brown, More Take Foreign Gifts From “State of Palestine”
June 14, 2024
Topline: Billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars flow into Harvard University, Brown University and Indiana University of Pennsylvania, but that didn’t stop the three schools from supplementing their funds with nearly $10 million in combined foreign gifts from the “State of Palestine.”
Key facts: A new report from OpenTheBooks.com revealed that between 2017 and 2023, IUP accepted $7.3 million from Palestine, Harvard got $1.6 million, Brown took in $643,000.
OpenTheBooks’ auditors previously reported the significant amount taxpayers spend to subsidize Ivy League schools. Harvard received $3.3 billion in federal grants and contracts from 2018 to 2022, and Brown received $1.2 billion. IUP is a public school operating with Pennsylvania state money.
Neither the U.S. nor the United Nations acknowledges the existence of the “State of Palestine.” Brown, Harvard and IUP have decided to play by their own rules, even though they accept U.S. taxpayer money.
Brown used some of its Palestinian funds to hire Beshara Doumani as its first professor of “Palestinian Studies.” The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis reports that the department’s lectures center around “antisemitic conspiracy theories and gross misinformation about Jewish history and identity.”
During the period, Doumani was granted leave to run the West Bank’s Birzeit University, whose employee union praised Hamas terrorists for standing “boldly in the face of colonial fascism” when slaughtering innocent Israelis on Oct. 7 and Hamas is the largest student group on campus.
This April, Brown was one of the first and only universities to give in to pro-Palestine student protestors’ demands of considering divestment from Israel.
Most of IUP’s gifts went to pay tuition and fees for Palestinian students in the school’s business PhD and MBA programs at Arab American University in the West Bank.
Harvard’s Palestinian funds were unrestricted, so there are no federal records of how the money was spent.
Harvard’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights has run programs with Birzeit University, including courses like “The Settler Colonial Determinants of Health.”
Background: The Palestinian “gifts” are just one piece of the larger influence the Middle East wields over U.S. higher education.
In the last 40 years, $1 on every $4 of foreign gifts and grants to American universities has come from four Middle Eastern nations: Qatar ($5.2 billion), Saudi Arabia ($3 billion), United Arab Emirates ($1.3 billion) and Kuwait ($860 million).
Summary: U.S. taxpayer money should be supporting institutions that advance our national values, not those that accept money from groups terrorizing our country’s allies, and sowing antisemitism on college campuses.
The #WasteOfTheDay is presented by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.