(DCNF)—America stands at a crossroads, facing two distinct paths. One path leads to a future where merit, hard work and individual qualifications open doors of success, fostering unity and opportunity for all. The other path, driven by the misguided agenda of “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI), leads to division, resentment and a low-trust society where race, gender and sexuality are prioritized over qualifications and merit.
To most Americans the choice is clear, and it is time that Congress follows suit and take a stand for it.
DEI is not the noble cause it claims to be. At its core, DEI practices enforce a system where identity traits are valued above individual abilities and achievements. This approach undermines the fundamental American principle that everyone should have an equal opportunity to succeed based on their hard work and qualifications. Instead, DEI policies create an environment of division and resentment, where people are judged by characteristics over which they have no control rather than their skills and contributions.
The extent of DEI’s reach within our government is staggering. From NASA and the National Science Foundation to the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Army, federal agencies are mandated to undergo diversity training. These workshops drill tax collectors on “cultural inclusion,” military commanders on so-called “male pregnancy” and nuclear engineers on the “roots of white male culture.” That same training even instructed engineers to write messages to “white women” and “people of color” about their newfound insights, a clear example of DEI’s condescending and divisive nature that places some Americans above others because of their immutable characteristics.
While these divisive trainings—reminiscent of the Maoist struggle sessions in 20th-century China, which were designed to enforce ideological conformity through public humiliation and coercion—represent one of the problematic aspects of DEI that must be rooted out of our government institutions, there are other equally concerning issues. For instance, in 2022, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued guidance that led some states to ration alternative COVID-19 treatments based on race. This policy, driven by DEI mandates, put lives at risk by prioritizing racial considerations over medical need.
Back in 2022, it was reported that the Department of Defense allocated $2 million for DEI programming in schools for military children. These funds could have been used to improve educational resources but were instead diverted to promote a divisive agenda for the children of members of the military.
This misuse of taxpayer money is not just an affront to fiscal responsibility, it institutionalizes discriminatory practices within our government. In 2023 alone, the Biden administration spent over $16 million on diversity training for government employees and requested an additional $83 million for DEI programs at the State Department. The Office of Personnel Management’s DEI and Accessibility office also received $9.2 million of taxpayer money. These numbers highlight the significant financial burden DEI places on taxpayers, all while fostering division in society.
To combat this, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and I have introduced the Dismantle DEI Act which would end these practices by broadly prohibiting all DEI-related activities within the federal government. It seeks to cut off funding for DEI trainings, offices and programs and meticulously combs through the U.S. Code to eliminate legal authorizations for these divisive initiatives. By doing so, we are ensuring that these practices are not just reduced, but entirely eradicated from our federal government and the institutions that it mandates.
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DEI initiatives, while often presented as efforts to promote fairness, have instead cultivated an environment where people are judged by demographic identifiers rather than their merit. This fundamentally conflicts with the principles of equality and fairness that should be the foundation of our government institutions. By dismantling DEI programs, we are reaffirming our commitment to a system where individuals are evaluated based on their qualifications and abilities, not their race, gender or sexuality.
It is time for Congress to act decisively to eliminate DEI programs and restore a system based on merit and equality. Together, we are committed to taking our message to the American people—a message that promises opportunity for all rather than a select few. The Dismantle DEI Act is a necessary step in restoring to our federal government common sense, fairness and the understanding that all are created equal.
Rep. Michael Cloud represents the 27th Congressional District of Texas and is a member of the House Appropriations Committee, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and the House Select Committee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.