HHS’s ‘Blackity Black Black’ Chief Equity Officer Hides From Trump With New Title

Last August, the Department of Health and Human Services said its Chief Equity Officer, a man named Dia Harris, “embodies” the “DEIA commitment.”

A few months prior, this is how Harris introduced himself: “Greetings and salutations. I am Dia D. Harris, ACF Chief Equity Officer… My pronouns are he/him/el/il. I am unapologetically a black man.” On LinkedIn, Harris wrote: “I authentically live as an Unapologetically Blackity Black Black Man!”

But after the November election, he no longer seemed so committed to authenticity.

According to a Daily Wire investigation, the Biden administration’s HHS and Harris conspired to conceal his true role, changing his title from Chief Equity Officer to Chief Organizational Development Officer. Harris falsified his career history on LinkedIn to erase the fact that he was a decades-long DEI activist. And according to his public LinkedIn, he remains employed by the agency.

His profile suggests that he aims to steer key personnel policy under the Trump administration, “provid[ing] consulting and guidance to senior stakeholders on strategic planning, leadership development, and talent management.”

Under the Biden administration, permanent civil service jobs were created to do blatant left-wing activism. But they also openly discussed their plot to embed such activism across all positions, making it difficult to extricate.

As Harris said in the same video that shows his introduction, which was archived by the American Accountability Foundation and has him appearing alongside Biden political appointees in a National Call to Action on Equity: “We must also embed equity into every aspect of our lives, from our personal interactions to our professional endeavors… By integrating equity in our daily practices and decision-making processes, we can create lasting and building a more equitable society for future generations.”

Its architects are not above Machiavellian maneuvering to get away with it, as the post-election title changes of numerous activists, uncovered by The Daily Wire, show.

On December 13, the Department of Labor’s Christopher J. Godfrey, Director of the Office of Workers Compensation Programs, wrote to staff that he was changing the title of a diversity czar, an email obtained by The Daily Wire shows.

“Effective December 15, 2024, Paige Brown, OWCP’s Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Officer, will transition to the Division of Administrative Operations (DAO), where she will take on an expanded role in support of OWCP’s mission. This evolution reflects the natural growth of her responsibilities and expertise, as well as OWCP’s commitment to fostering a thriving and inclusive workforce,” he wrote.

Sybill Wyatt, a DEIA Program Analyst, would also move to the vaguely-named “Administrative Operations” office, he wrote. Wyatt was previously Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer for a Veterans Affairs hospital, and Director of Affirmative Action for a college.

“The important work of Paige and Sybil to foster fairness, belonging, and opportunity will continue to be an integral part of OWCP. This transition enables us to build on the progress we’ve already made and integrate these critical principles into the broader organizational and workforce development strategy,” he said.

On January 24, Donald Trump’s Office of Personnel Management directed agencies to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and “environmental justice” offices and positions within sixty days… agencies can and should begin issuing [reduction-in-force] notices to employees of DEIA offices now.”

Agencies were also required to send to OPM “a complete list of DEIA offices and any employees who in those offices as of November 5, 2024” and “a list of all contract descriptions or personnel position descriptions that were changed since November 5, 2024 to obscure their connection to DEIA programs.”

HHS did not respond to questions about Harris’s job status and whether anyone at HHS had sought to conceal his activities from the Trump administration. But the changes to Harris’s resume appear to illustrate just the sort of subterfuge that Trump anticipated. Shortly after the election, an HHS employee told The Daily Wire that the Biden administration had plotted to change his title so that he could escape the Trump administration’s notice. When we checked his LinkedIn again a few weeks later, that’s exactly what had occurred.

Harris’s career as a DEI “advocate” dates back to his first job in 1997 as Assistant Director of Admissions; Diversity at Lafayette College. Throughout a series of subsequent DEI jobs, he ran a side business as a freelance “Inclusion Equality & Diversity Consultant” giving presentations about “unconscious bias.” All of that was recently erased from his resume on LinkedIn.

He retroactively changed his title at Amazon, where he worked from 2020 to 2021, from Diversity Program Manager (“Manage relationships with diversity conferences”) to Talent Program Manager (“Identify and mitigate risks to ensure the timely and successful execution of talent programs”).

His title at BNY Mellon, where he worked from 2021 to 2023, morphed from Director of Recruiting: Global Campus Diversity & Pipeline Programs to Director of Recruiting: Global Head of Talent Pipeline Programs.

From 2015 to 2017 Harris worked at Boeing as Senior Diversity Recruitment Consultant, where he led “the sourcing and diversity activities.” Now he claims to have been a Senior Recruitment Consultant, who “Lead the recruitment marketing efforts to promote Boeing as an employer of choice.”

He says at Johnson & Jonson (2011-2015), he oversaw a program called Developing Leaders of Tomorrow. But the program was actually Developing Diverse Leaders of Tomorrow.

Harris also altered his past job title at MPMG (2006-2011) from Diversity Recruiting Manager to Talent Acquisition Manager, and at Bates College from Director of Multicultural Recruitment to Associate Dean of Admissions.

Similar things were happening at other agencies. In March 2024, DEI bureaucrats spoke at a conference panel called “Federal Agency DEIA Leadership.” The panel showed how entrenched DEI was in the government: one was the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer of the Air Force Global Strike Command.

Another was “Jeanita Pritchett Clay, Chief Scientific Diversity Officer, NIH/NCATS.” In January, according to her LinkedIn, her title changed to “senior advisor.” From that highly-paid but nondescript post, she would “provide strategic guidance and leadership” for “bold and audacious goals” and “represent NCATS at national and international conferences.”

Then there was LTonya Davis, Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer for the Department of Agriculture. On LinkedIn, she has retroactively changed that title to “People Leader,” while also saying she accepted a new job at the agency in January, called Executive Director, Center for Civil Rights Operations.

OPM did not respond to an inquiry about whether agency officials included the names on their list of DEI staffers whose titles had changed post-election, and whether they are currently employed.

A bane in any administration is the attempt by political appointees to “burrow” into jobs that allow them to serve in the next administration, potentially undermining it. The Biden administration used a loophole to hide a Biden White House official at the Department of Labor. That official was terminated following a Daily Wire expose. Another burrowed into the Department of Commerce.

The proliferation of DEI jobs — Biden was trying to fill 1,200 just before the election — could pose a trickier problem, given that they are career employees and may pretend to have been doing jobs in human resources and other less obvious categories. Employees who previously sought DEI roles are as likely as political appointees to be career left-wing ideologues. And unlike political appointees, who usually exit when their boss leaves office, DEI activists are often clear that they view their advocacy as a calling, and that attempts to silence them only make them fight harder.

[#item_full_content]

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Last August, the Department of Health and Human Services said its Chief Equity Officer, a man named Dia Harris, “embodies” the “DEIA commitment.”

But after the November election, he no longer seemed so committed to authenticity.

Its architects are not above Machiavellian maneuvering to get away with it, as the post-election title changes of numerous activists, uncovered by The Daily Wire, show.

He says at Johnson & Jonson (2011-2015), he oversaw a program called Developing Leaders of Tomorrow. But the program was actually Developing Diverse Leaders of Tomorrow.

OPM did not respond to an inquiry about whether agency officials included the names on their list of DEI staffers whose titles had changed post-election, and whether they are currently employed.

“}]]

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