March 6, 2025

Permission to republish original opeds and cartoons granted.

In Defense of the DEI Rollbacks: Is it The Handmaid’s Tale or Is It Simply Merit-Based Hiring and Real Inclusion?

By Manzanita Miller

For at least a decade mainstream culture has been obsessively preoccupied with forwarding a distinctly left-wing “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) agenda, and that agenda has heavily permeated the business world. 

While encouraging a diverse workforce sounds good in theory, the reality is DEI programs were used to discriminate against individuals based on their race and sex, mitigate merit-based mobility, and push radical views on gender that a majority of Americans simply do not wish to be bombarded with at the workplace.

In the wake of a cultural shift invoked by President Donald Trump’s election that has resulted in a series of executive orders reasserting constitutional rights and rolling back DEI, businesses are beginning to “de-woke” themselves, much to the chagrin of radical activists.  

From Target to McDonald’s, Walmart, and Amazon, American companies are rolling back DEI initiatives, arguably in a self-preserving fashion given the political climate, but nonetheless a significant marker of the cultural shift we are in the midst of.    

Businesses went radically woke, and frankly weird, in the first place because the entirety of western culture elevated woke ideals and it served their profit-margins to pay fealty to left-wing principles. In addition, many companies became infiltrated by proponents of radical left-wing ideals and further advanced the DEI agenda from within.   

Let’s not forget when odd videos of Microsoft meeting introductions circulated online a few years ago. Tech presenters at the company were apparently introducing themselves to audiences by describing their ethnicity, sex, and their physical features such as hair color. Allegedly, the oddly descriptive introductions were intended to include blind individuals, but that does not explain why presenters needed to include their race, gender or sexuality.

That was in 2022. But woke corporate culture seems to have reached a peak somewhere around the tail-end of President Biden’s term. We are now in the midst of a cultural shift that is actively deemphasizing woke-business culture for the first time in a decade or more.

What is interesting is while the rollback of affirmative-action DEI programs is incensing the radical left, if you actually read the approach U.S. companies are taking, it isn’t some draconian return to the 1950’s where groups of Americans find themselves second-class citizens.

Instead, American companies are scaling-down practices that specifically elevated minority groups – whether racial minorities or others – over everyone else and they are recommitting to the last part in the “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” ideology, which is simply “inclusion”. 

Last Friday, retailers faced an economic “blackout” over DEI rollbacks, with an activist group called The People's Union USA encouraging a boycott of Target and other retailers. Apparently, more boycotts are planned against companies such as Amazon, Nestle, Target, Walmart, McDonald's and General Mills in coming days.

McDonald’s is under fire from activists after scaling back its focus on the affirmative-action side of DEI, and instead committing to the concept of inclusion as a whole, which you would think liberals would be OK with.

McDonald’s announced in January that it is rolling back affirmative-action initiatives, including  no longer setting “aspirational representation goals” for minority representation, and removing a Supply Chain “Commitment to DEI pledge”, essentially returning to decisions based on merit.

Instead, McDonald’s is committing to something virtually anyone in a civil modern society should be OK with, their own “Golden Rule” focused on, “treating everyone with dignity, fairness and respect, always”. Still, McDonald’s is being targeted by activists for its rollbacks.

Leftists are also up-in-arms because Walmart said late last year that it will no longer be considering race and gender when determining who to hire. The company is also daring to “review” corporate grants to LGBTQ Pride events. 

So essentially, Walmart is saying they will be following the law and allowing individuals to rise up the ranks based on merit, while simultaneously considering withdrawing funds to promote an LGBTQ agenda. But the left is chanting “not in our America” and ominously referencing the Handmaid’s Tale.

Similar to Walmart, Lowe’s caught flak from leftists when it announced it would no longer sponsor LGBTQ Pride events. Oh, the horror.

In an equally upsetting move, the retailor-giant Amazon, whose website previously focused on its commitment to LGBTQ issues, has returned to simply promoting a diverse and inclusive work environment. 

As The Washington Post recently reported, the Policy Positions section on Amazon’s website, which previously mentioned providing “gender transition benefits” for transgender employees, has been changed. The company also removed reference to “LGBTQ+ people” on the same page.

In place of a fixation on niche gender issues, that section of Amazon’s website now states the company is “committed to creating a diverse and inclusive company that helps us build the best range of products and services for our broad customer base”, which sounds pretty reasonable.

What is incredibly telling about the activist left’s interpretation of these DEI rollbacks, is that for the most part the left is angry that LGBTQ initiatives are not being purposefully forced into the spotlight in corporate culture anymore, and that racist and sexist practices are being removed from hiring practices. 

In other words, companies are taking baby steps toward not discriminating against employees based on their race and gender and scaling back direct and blatant promotion of niche sexual identities. 

What this exposes, blatantly, is that the woke ideology was never actually about “inclusion”. It was focused on promoting a radical agenda that punishes certain individuals for not falling into the proper minority group, while elevating fringe lifestyles at the expense of everyone else. Companies are not ending an effort toward “inclusion”, if anything they might actually be living up to it for the first time since DEI became a thing.

Manzanita Miller is the senior political analyst at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.

To view online: https://dailytorch.com/2025/03/in-defense-of-the-dei-rollbacks-is-it-the-handmaids-tale-or-is-it-simply-merit-based-hiring-and-real-inclusion/

Sean Salai: Maryland, Virginia, D.C. officials predict economic woes for the region as Trump shrinks government

By Sean Salai 

Maryland, Virginia and D.C. officials warn that President Trump’s plan to downsize the federal government would hurt the metropolitan area’s economy.

In a revised forecast, the D.C. Office of the Chief Financial Officer predicted that a 21% drop in federal employment would cut 40,000 local jobs and lead to reduced income, decreased housing demand, declining property values, less consumer spending and $1.01 billion in lost revenue by 2029.

The report, released Friday, estimated that an even sharper 25% drop in federal employment would cut D.C. jobs by 50,000 — including 14,000 held by city residents — and cause a 5.3% wage loss by 2029. That would spark a 1.1% decline in the city’s gross domestic product and drive down its annual income and sales tax revenue from $1 billion to $550 million.

Roughly 190,000 federal employees work in the District, accounting for 25% of all jobs in the nation’s capital, according to the CFO’s office. That includes 72,000 D.C. residents employed by the federal government, roughly 19% of resident employment. Most of the remaining workforce commutes or works remotely from Maryland and Virginia.

“There is a high degree of uncertainty around the forecast as some of the new administration’s executive actions have or likely will be challenged in the courts, as new ones emerge, making meaningful economic impact analysis extremely difficult,” CFO Glen Lee wrote in a letter to Mayor Muriel Bowser and D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, at-large Democrat.

Ms. Bowser, a Democrat, said the revised estimates “show the significant financial impact” of the administration’s planned cuts and a “need to significantly reshape our upcoming budget proposal.”

“Now, more than ever, we need to be strategically focused on investing in the growth of our local economy to bring more good-paying jobs, companies and economic activity to D.C.,” Ms. Bowser said. “We will work with our colleagues on the council to ensure we make it through this together.”

The Trump administration has initiated a government hiring freeze, moved to sell federal office buildings and bought out contracts for 75,000 federal workers.

The White House declined to comment for this report.

Rick Manning, a former official in the George W. Bush Labor Department who was on Mr. Trump’s transition team for that agency, said the Biden administration’s extension of COVID-19 restrictions and remote work policies had already driven retailers and restaurants out of the city.

“As a result, layoffs will have a significantly smaller effect on the District itself than might be anticipated, but surrounding communities will likely see negative impacts due to lower housing and retail demand,” said Mr. Manning, president of the Virginia-based Americans for Limited Government. “This does not mean that the cuts should not be made, but it would be unrealistic to ignore that the DMV will be negatively economically impacted by this shift in the footprint of its major employer.”

Unemployment claims in the District shot up to 2,047 for the week ended Feb. 22, up 25% from the week before and fourfold from the same week in 2024.

As of Feb. 27, 7,433 workers in the District had filed for unemployment benefits since Mr. Trump returned to office in January and established the Department of Government Efficiency to cut $1 trillion from the federal budget.

“Those claimants are probably people laid off from contract work,” said Mary Hansen, an economics professor at American University.

Ms. Hansen estimated that 687,000 federal workers live in the Washington region, making up nearly 10% of the area’s labor force. Including more than 1.3 million civilian contractors, about one-third of the region’s civilian workforce works directly or indirectly for the federal government.

“Some optimists think that the D.C. region would benefit from being less reliant on the federal government,” Ms. Hansen said. “But changing the economic base of a region takes a long time. Just ask anyone who lived in Detroit, Pittsburgh or any other Rust Belt city.”

Virginia and Maryland

Officials in Virginia and Maryland are expected to release similar reports within the next several weeks.

A 2023 Office of the Comptroller report found that Maryland received $31 billion in federal income.

Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, on Friday ordered the state’s transportation, budget and higher education agencies to find ways to hire laid-off federal workers.

Sen. Chris Van Hollen, Maryland Democrat, said in a statement to The Times: “The administration’s illegal purge of federal employees and potential selloff of federal offices not only hurts many of those workers and their families, but also will have a devastating toll on Americans losing access to important services as Trump’s policies lead to further inflation and higher prices.”

In a potential blow to Prince George’s County, FBI Director Kash Patel announced last week that he plans to transfer 1,500 field agents and staff out of the Washington area to combat crime in other cities.

The transfers call into doubt a plan announced under the Biden administration to build a new headquarters for the FBI in Greenbelt to replace the crumbling J. Edgar Hoover Building near the White House.

“We haven’t heard anything officially, but we’re very concerned,” Greenbelt Mayor Emmett Jordan, a Democrat, told The Times.

Mr. Jordan said his city manager will release a new budget this month with more information about the impact of federal layoffs on his city, home of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

“It’s hard to quantify right now, but there’s going to be a lot of people out of work,” he said. “A lot of our residents work for the federal government or as federal contractors and subcontractors.”

In Northern Virginia, George Mason University economist Jack Salmon estimates that 81,000 residents work for the federal government, or 6% of all workers in the Virginia suburbs.

He said eliminating 10% to 15% of those jobs would affect less than 1% of Northern Virginia jobs but could kill a larger share of defense, intelligence, technology, real estate and commercial development contracts.

“What is more difficult to project is how these changes might impact federal contractors or jobs tied to federal funding,” said Mr. Salmon, a research fellow at GMU’s free market Mercatus Center. “Unlike private-sector economies, where businesses must compete and adapt, a large portion of Washington’s economy is sustained by taxpayer-funded employment and government spending.”

On a positive note, Mr. Salmon pointed to data showing that the Clinton administration’s elimination of 330,000 federal jobs from 1993 through 1997, the largest government layoff in recent decades, sparked economic growth in Arlington County, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland.

“It’s what we have known for a while: Big government is bad for business,” he said. “A region less reliant on federal spending would shift toward industries driven by consumer and market demand rather than government contracts and regulatory-driven employment.”

Adjusting economically

Local economists said the region’s economy would need years to adjust to any major cuts to health and defense programs.

They noted that Fairfax County’s economy leans partly on the presence of major defense contractors, including Boeing, General Dynamics, RTX (formerly Raytheon) and Northrop Grumman, while the Pentagon anchors Arlington County.

Fairfax County also houses 10 Fortune 500 companies, including Capital One, Hilton and Beacon Roofing Supply.

Montgomery County’s biotechnology industry depends on the presence of the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Health and Human Services along the Interstate 270 corridor.

Baruch Feigenbaum, an analyst at the libertarian Reason Foundation, said government downsizing could reduce housing prices and diversify job opportunities in the District and Maryland. He acknowledged it would also reduce consumer spending, hurt small businesses and drive away families.

“People will cut back on spending because of a fear of layoffs,” Mr. Feigenbaum said. “And if people have to move for work or because they cannot afford their mortgage, that will cause disruptions.”

Economists say it’s too early to estimate the effects of downsizing on the housing and retail markets.

The CFO report revised the District’s revenue forecast through fiscal 2029 downward by an average of $342.1 million annually, citing “forecasted sharp declines in employment levels as the federal government proceeds with reducing its workforce significantly.”

“With fewer federal employees in the region, spending on restaurants, retail, transportation, and other taxable goods and services is expected to decline, particularly for businesses that rely on federal workers,” the report said. “Job losses are also anticipated for federal contracting, hospitality and transportation sectors, as reduced federal employment leads to lower demand in these sectors.”

To view online: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2025/mar/5/maryland-virginia-dc-officials-predict-economic-woes-region-trump/

John Carney: The Case for Tariffs in a World of Foreign Intervention

By John Carney

The Trade Deficit Is Not Made in America

For decades, American policymakers have been fed a simple story about trade: The United States runs persistent deficits because it doesn’t save enough. If only Americans were more frugal and the federal government controlled its spending, the trade deficit would shrink, and manufacturing jobs would return.

This is the argument Maurice Obstfeld made in an essay for the Financial Times yesterday, dismissing President Donald Trump’s latest tariffs as a misguided attempt to fix a problem that, in his view, can only be solved by cutting budget deficits and boosting national savings. But this standard economic narrative ignores one crucial fact: the U.S. trade deficit is not just a domestic issue—it is driven by foreign economic policies designed to suppress consumption abroad and flood the U.S. with excess savings.

Michael Pettis, a veteran China analyst, took to X Wednesday and dismantled Obstfeld’s argument by exposing its biggest blind spot: the assumption that only the U.S. has agency in global trade imbalances. In reality, China, Germany, Japan, and other surplus nations actively shape these imbalances through policies that suppress wages, limit domestic consumption, and push their excess savings into the global economy—where the United States, with its open capital markets, absorbs them.

The Real Cause of Trade Imbalances

Obstfeld argues that the U.S. runs a trade deficit simply because Americans spend more than they produce. But what he ignores is that foreign nations—especially China—deliberately engineer their economies to produce more than they consume. Beijing enforces high savings rates by suppressing wages, limiting household wealth, and directing cheap credit to state-owned enterprises rather than consumers. These excess savings don’t stay in China. Instead, they flow outward, seeking a destination.

Where do they go? The United States, because America has the most open capital markets in the world. As Pettis explains, when China accumulates massive surpluses, they have to be absorbed somewhere—and that means an automatic increase in the U.S. trade deficit. The problem isn’t that Americans are reckless spenders; it’s that foreign governments are flooding the system with cheap capital, making deficits an inevitability.

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The scale of the imbalance is staggering. The U.S. has run persistent trade deficits since the 1970s, and ended 2024 with a goods trade deficit of approximately $1.2 trillion. The December 2024 trade deficit alone was $98.43 billion. If this were simply about inadequate U.S. savings, we would have seen these deficits fluctuate significantly over the years. Instead, their persistence suggests something else at work—foreign mercantilist policies that rig the global system in their favor.

Why Tariffs Are a Necessary Response

If the U.S. trade deficit is being imposed by foreign intervention rather than American choices, then tariffs are not just an economic tool—they are a defensive measure. The Trump administration’s tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada are part of a broader strategy to force surplus nations to stop distorting global trade and capital flows.

Obstfeld dismisses tariffs as ineffective, arguing that they won’t shrink the trade deficit or bring back manufacturing. But this assumes that tariffs operate in a vacuum. In reality, tariffs are one piece of a broader effort to counter foreign economic distortions. Without them, the U.S. is simply allowing itself to be the dumping ground for other countries’ surplus production.

Take China’s economy. Its massive trade surplus isn’t the result of natural free-market forces—it’s the direct result of Beijing’s industrial policies, state-controlled banking system, and currency interventions. The only way to change this is to make China feel the cost of its own policies. Tariffs increase that cost. They force China to reconsider whether its strategy of suppressing consumption and flooding the U.S. with cheap goods is sustainable.

Rebuilding American Economic Sovereignty

The core issue here isn’t just trade deficits—it’s America’s economic sovereignty. For decades, the U.S. has let foreign nations dictate its economic reality. We allowed China to become the world’s factory, gutting our industrial base. We accepted trade deficits as an unavoidable consequence of globalization. And we let foreign capital distort our financial system, fueling bubbles and debt-driven growth.

Trump’s tariffs challenge this status quo. They are a recognition that America cannot fix its economy without confronting the policies of surplus nations that have spent decades rigging the system in their favor. Obstfeld’s solution—some sort of intervention aimed at cutting U.S. spending and increasing savings—ignores the fact that America cannot out-save an economy like China’s, where savings rates are artificially inflated by government intervention. It would also involve far more economic intervention than simply addressing the trade imbalance head-on.

The real solution is to reshape global trade and capital flows so that the U.S. economy is no longer at the mercy of foreign mercantilism. As a first step, that means tariffs and the kind of conservative industrial policy of tax cuts and deregulation Trump advocated in his address to Congress on Tuesday. It means rejecting the idea that America’s economic fate is solely determined by domestic policy decisions. And it means recognizing that in a world where other nations play by different rules, America has every right to protect itself.

To view online: https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2025/03/05/breitbart-business-digest-the-case-for-tariffs-in-a-world-of-foreign-intervention/