Your Tax Dollars: Government Accountability Office Mandates What Employees Can and Can't Say

Bob Hoge reporting for RedState 

Ever wonder where your tax dollars are going? They don’t seem to be doing much to lower crime or solve the homelessness crisis. All too often these days we find that our money is going to fund indoctrination efforts by the Biden administration as they force their woke brand of justice on society—whether you like it or not.

The latest victims are the 3,100 employees of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) who have been told to avoid “gendered language” in the workplace. According to its website, the Office wasn’t created to engage in social activism, but instead to keep an eye on the government itself. Their website describes their function:

GAO provides Congress, the heads of executive agencies, and the public with timely, fact-based, non-partisan information that can be used to improve government and save taxpayers billions of dollars.

Our work is done at the request of congressional committees or subcommittees or is statutorily required by public laws or committee reports, per our Congressional Protocols.

An internal memo dated October 2022 and obtained by The Daily Mail, however, shows that they have other ideas in mind. The 3,000+ word missive penned by the  “chief diversity management officer” demands that workers not use “wording that diminishes anyone’s dignity.” It sounds like a noble enough goal—until you hear some of the words like “manpower” that are considered triggering. Have you ever heard someone use a phrase like, “We don’t have enough manpower for that job” and immediately thought that someone would find it deeply insulting? If you have, you’re probably one of those people who sit around searching for things to be aggrieved about.

More from the memo:

Inclusive language allows us to support GAO’s mission by appropriately addressing all members of society. [I throw the red flag right there, folks. the use of the word “members” is extremely inappropriate and offensive.] Writing inclusively means your words, phrases and tone are free from assumptions, implications, and connotations that may exclude people or perpetuate misconcenptions. The overarching goals are to respect the identitites and prerefences of all people and to avoid wording that diminishes anyone’s dignity or humanity.

If I’m working for the GAO, I’m thinking to myself, what does all that gobbledygook actually mean in practice? They supply more confusing guidance filled with buzzwords to help explain:

“When it is necessary to refer to sex or gender identity, be aware of the distinction and avoid equating the two,” the leaked memo reads.

“Sex is a classification of people into categories such as male, female or intersex on the basis of biological characteristics.

“Gender identity is a person”s innermost concept of self as male, female, a blend of both, or neither.

“Gender identity may align with the sex a person was assigned at birth (cisgender), another sex (transgender), or neither.

“A person whose gender identity does not align with their sex assigned at birth or with another sex may identify as nonbinary, agender, or gender fluid, among other identities.”

Maybe it’s just me, but I think the employees should be focused on holding the government to account and detecting financial irregularities, not obsessing about their gender identities. Aren’t there some important issues out there?

There’s more stupidity, but you get the idea: don’t call illegal aliens illegal aliens, use footnotes “when your choice of inclusive language could be unfamiliar or confusing,” don’t use “differently abled” (which until recently was deemed considerate), etcetera, etcetera.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) had an appropriate response:

If Biden and the radical leftists in his administration focused on the real problems facing America — forty-year high inflation, out of control crime, open borders and a flood of deadly drugs — instead of forcing a woke ideology down our throats, our country would be in a far better position to tackle the problems he has exacerbated.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was equally scathing:

The GAO is tasked with investigating federal spending and performance, but under President Biden they’re wasting valuable government time and resources on regulating language.

While it’s nice to be polite, this whole exercise reeks of silliness, especially when as RedState‘s streiff reported, the GAO doesn’t “doesn’t know why and may not even care” about the disastrous military recruiting numbers our forces are experiencing. Maybe they should spend some time on that?

The government should not be dictating social policy on its workers or on its citizens. Increasingly however under Biden’s administration, the federal bureaucracy often seems to be preoccupied with anything except their actual jobs.