Exclusive: “Gift to China”: Biden-Harris DOD prioritizes DEI over next-generation fighter jet

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s Department of Defense (DOD) is sacrificing billions of dollars of military readiness to prioritize woke policies, defense hawks and former officials told the Washington Reporter.

The program for a sixth-generation fighter jet, known as the Next Generation Air Dominance fighter (NGAD), has been in motion for almost 10 years. DOD pulled the plug on future funding for the program, with critics contending that domestic politics are trumping national security. 

Former Secretaries of the Air Force under Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama have said that the program is crucial for keeping a technological edge over China. Experts in both parties say that the next-generation fighter jet technology is crucial for national security, especially as China continues its developments of advanced drones and other jets. Congress has fully funded and supported this program, and even Europe is proceeding with plans for NGADs of its own. 

One senior Trump administration national security official told the Reporter that it is “outrageous that Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall and Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks are sacrificing America’s lead in sixth generation fighters in a gift to China,” adding that “they might as well hand Taiwan over to the CCP now and save us all a lot of time. They’re squandering $10 billion already spent on this program while fully funding woke bureaucrats.”

Last year alone, the Pentagon requested more than $100 million for “dedicated diversity and inclusion activities.” Hill sources said that DOD’s ongoing influx of funds for DEI — which Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) said is partially responsible for the Biden-Harris administration’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal — is just one example showing that politics, not national security, is driving this massive cut. “If you go back to the very beginning of the Biden-Harris administration, they were more focused on woke causes at the same time that they were gearing toward the disastrous pullout in Afghanistan,” he said. “What happened to Afghanistan could have been entirely different if the Biden-Harris team was more focused on national security instead of all of the woke crap.”

Hicks is rumored to have eyes on a top job in a possible Harris administration, potentially as a Secretary of Defense. Her latest move to jettison the fighter jet program, follows the Navy already announcing that it is “delaying about $1 billion of funding into developing its next-generation strike fighter in its new budget, a move senior leaders said was a deliberate choice to sacrifice future modernization to keep current readiness high,” Breaking Defense reported.