Week in Review: Too Big to Fail?

$250 million in taxpayer money blown on “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (DEI) initiatives. 163 staffers dedicated to DEI. Countless lectures on “white supremacy culture” and the like. Investigations into the slightest deviation from the script of political correctness.

The University of Michigan’s DEI experiment was too big to fail. Until it did. All that race-based division resulted in a climate of distrust, fear, and discrimination as this public university became less inclusive, Goldwater’s Timothy K. Minella writes for National Review.

“On its own terms, the DEI project was a massive failure,” Minella adds. Of course, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that racial discrimination doesn’t help people get along. Do we need anymore proof that DEI is a disaster?

Read more here.  

Stop Illegal Taxpayer-Funded Electioneering

Local governments in Arizona are wasting tax dollars on targeted political campaigns to convince voters to fork over even more of their hard-earned money. That’s illegal under state law—so the Goldwater Institute is warning them to stop this taxpayer-funded electioneering.

Officials in Gilbert, Queen Creek, and Buckeye have used a range of strategies, from trendy social media videos to political mailers, in an effort to persuade constituents to support raising government funding. But we’re taking a stand for taxpayers against illegal public electioneering and other abuses. Government entities statewide should take note and stop the politicking.

Read more here.

Time’s Up on Release Time

Imagine your local city council paid city workers—think emergency dispatchers or heavy equipment mechanics—not to perform the jobs they were hired to perform, but to work for Walmart instead as checkout clerks or greeters.

Writing for Discourse Magazine, Goldwater VP for Litigation Jon Riches says this sort of scenario is happening all around the country to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year under a corrupt practice called “public-sector union release time.” But time could be up on release time: After Goldwater sued the city of Phoenix, the Arizona Supreme Court earlier this year struck down release time as unconstitutional, the first time a state supreme court has done so. “That was a watershed decision,” Riches writes, and “one that may have a broader national impact.”

Read more here.