Republicans in the House of Representatives swear they do not want to touch Social Security and Medicare in their budget cut demands -- so instead they're going after what they called "wokeness" in the federal government.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) previewed his caucus's demands in the upcoming standoff over raising the debt ceiling by outlining how they aim to dismantle anything they deem to be "woke" in the federal budget.
“We need to cut wokeness out,” Norman explained. “Our office is going to be looking at the dollars that go into wokeness — whether it’s in the military, whether it’s in discretionary money.”
While it might seem like cutting "wokeness" out of the government would be a relatively small task, Republicans are claiming that a full 50 percent of the budget for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is dedicated to such initiatives.
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And that's just one of many agencies set to get the ax from Republicans, writes Rolling Stone.
"Among the proposed cuts: gutting the National Institute of Health’s 'offices that are infused with critical race theory and gender theory,' purging programs the Department of Housing and Urban Development that promote 'health equity' or 'social justice,' and defunding a quarter of the Department of Education’s budget to scrub the 'equity' embedded 'throughout the entirety of its operations,'" the report states.