One of the Biden administration's first major public health declarations came in April 2021 when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared racism to be a "serious public health threat." Since then, President Joe Biden's health department has spent tens of millions of dollars attempting to mitigate the purported effect of racism on the HIV epidemic.
The Department of Health and Human Services allocated at least $73.9 million in grant funding to programs aimed at either mitigating the alleged harm racism causes minorities living with HIV or investigating different ways these harms manifest, according to a Washington Examiner analysis of federal spending records. The grants' descriptions range from claiming that structural racism makes it more difficult for minorities to access healthcare, thereby exacerbating the harm caused by HIV, to arguing that the stress allegedly caused by existing as a minority in the United States is enough to adversely affect the health of blacks and Latinos.
"CDC has long recognized that racism is the root cause of many health disparities," the agency, which operates under HHS, declared in 2021. "Across the country, racial and ethnic minority populations experience higher rates of poor health and disease in a range of health conditions, including diabetes, hypertension, obesity, asthma, and heart disease, when compared to their White counterparts."
HHS takes these ideas seriously. In 2022, the agency allocated $2.4 million to Columbia University to investigate whether systemic racism experienced by people with HIV led to declining vascular health, compounding the harm caused by the autoimmune disease. Another grant, worth $2.5 million and disbursed to Rutgers University, theorized that racism can cause "stress, depression, violence, and substance use" which, in turn, contribute to a higher probability of contracting HIV. The department funded multiple other programs assuming that racism was physically harming minorities, including a $1.8 million initiative investigating how "minority stress" impacts HIV prevention efforts.
America's health bureaucracy has taken a racial turn under the Biden administration. HHS, despite denying the existence of "antiracism" policies at the agency, has worked on creating and implementing "an antiracism plan" and has recommended people for high-ranking posts in part due to their work in the antiracism space. In May, the department proposed incentivizing U.S. hospitals to prioritize low-income patients when performing kidney transplants in an effort to root out "racial inequities" in the healthcare system.
Preferential treatment for racial minorities on the grounds of addressing structural racism was also present in HHS's grantmaking. A $1.5 million grant given to the Harlem United Community Aids Center in New York City, for example, states that the nonprofit organization will prioritize serving "black, Indigenous, and people of color" given that it believes "racism, trans and homophobia, sexism, and social classism" worsen health conditions for those groups. A second grant set aside for New York City, worth $2.1 million and awarded to the Montefiore Medical Center, identifies "black and Hispanic/Latinx" men who have sex with men as the target population to be served by the federal dollars through the provision of HIV prevention services.
A significant subset of the grants identified by the Washington Examiner concerned mitigating the impact of racism on transgender women of color.
"In the United States, transgender women of color experience cyclical, interlocking systems of structural and institutional oppression rooted in racism and transphobia, which fuel economic vulnerability," the description of a $670,000 grant to the University of Michigan reads. "Together, cycles of intersecting racism, transphobia, and economic vulnerability create conditions that give rise to extreme HIV inequities among trans women of color."
The federal funds allocated to the grant paid to help transgender women of color obtain "legal support to obtain legal gender affirmation" such as changes to their name or legal gender, funded employment trainings, and were used to pay out $1,200 unconditional cash grants to members of the target population.
"Racism, sexism, HIV stigma, cisgenderism, and other interlocking forms of oppression generate mutually reinforcing structural vulnerabilities for trans women of color," the description of another $350,000 grant awarded to the University of Michigan in 2023 reads. "These structural vulnerabilities synergistically interact to elevate risk of HIV."
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HHS's spending on race-related initiatives is not confined to its grantmaking operations. The agency spends tens of millions of dollars every year on diversity-related expenses. This includes $38.7 million annually to employ 297 staffers working in roles related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and an additional $29.4 million per year to staff the agency's Office of Minority Health, which functions to "improve the health of racial and ethnic minority populations through the development of health policies and programs that will help eliminate health disparities."