The Latest Biden-Harris Madness: Funding DEI Instead of Protecting Undersea Cables

T he latest Biden-Harris proposed budget wants an additional $17 million for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and “environmental justice” spending — at the expense of ships to repair and replace the priceless undersea cables that are the backbone of the internet.

Democrats always have money to spare for DEI. In this case, the Biden-Harris proposed spending plan found it by slashing $10 million in funding for the Cable Security Fleet (CSF), an item in the Marine Administration’s budget in the Department of Transportation. This vital program would repair and replace the key undersea cables that connect the American internet to the rest of the world, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

Congress approved $10 million in annual funding for the CSF program in 2020. Yet the Biden–Harris administration’s fiscal year 2025 budget proposal “requests no funding for the program.”  The administration would devote the money meant for it to implementing executive orders on environmental justice and “diversity and equity priorities.”

“The Biden administration’s decision to defund undersea cable security while increasing spending on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) undermines the strategic defense posture of the United States against our adversaries, like Russia and China, in favor of radically liberal and unpopular social policies,” Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) wrote in a letter to the Department of Transportation.

Undersea cables transmit nearly 99 percent of international data, especially key information about financial transactions worth an estimated $10 trillion every day. While $10 million a year is a small number on today’s gargantuan fiscal scale, spending to protect these cables makes complete sense. Doing so helps secure data worth a million times more.

Even Biden and Harris ostensibly agree. This February, their administration designated undersea cables as a key technology “of particular importance to the national security of the United States.” The Biden–Harris administration has now abandoned even the pretense of concern about this supposed national-security priority. Instead, it’s diverting money from vital strategic necessities to delusional progressive spending sprees.

And it’s not as though the cables’ safety is guaranteed. In May, American officials alerted key telecommunications and internet companies that the Chinese Communist Party could be tampering with these vital cables using state-controlled repair ships for espionage operations. Russia has also targeted these cables to advance its own agenda. The possibility of these cables being disrupted worried NATO so much the organization began holding meetings on how to protect them in May.

The CSF program is designed to be insulated from the threat of foreign interference. As Cruz notes, it requires that “MARAD, an operating administration of the Department of Transportation (DOT), contract with privately owned U.S-flagged cable vessels to be available to the United States in times of national emergency.” But instead of focusing on national security, MARAD increased its budget by more than $1 million to hire eleven full-time “diversity and equity priorities,” staffers for the Department of Transportation, another $6 million to “address environmental issues and ‘mitigat[e] the impact of climate change,” with an additional $10 million support “environmental justice” in the U.S. Marine Highway Program.

The Biden–Harris administration is clearly prioritizing handouts for extreme left-wing pet projects over America’s vital interests. We should expect similar behavior from a President Harris, as she is a far more radical social-justice activist and environmentalist than Joe Biden is.

During her unsuccessful run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020, Harris proposed $10 trillion in new global-warming spending and endorsed reparations for slavery, which could cost more than $17 trillion. The U.S. collected $4.5 trillion in taxes in 2023, so Harris would spend more than double that on global warming alone and almost four times that on reparations, requiring potentially crisis-inducing levels of borrowing (or tax hikes that wouldn’t net the desired revenue).

Minnesota’s Democratic governor Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, is on the same page. He has blown vast sums of money on pointless subsidies for solar power in a state famous for being covered in enough snow to prevent solar power from working 110 days every year.

The money to pay for Harris’s proposed spending would need to come from somewhere. It seems that “somewhere” is America’s vital interests.