The Three Costs of DEI

DEI has consumed resources, displaced productive work, and created years of costly clean-up.

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About the Author

James L. Nuzzo, PhD, is an exercise scientist and men’s health researcher. Dr. Nuzzo has published over 80 research articles in peer-reviewed journals. He writes regularly about exercise, men’s health, and academia at The Nuzzo Letter on Substack. Dr. Nuzzo is also active on X @JamesLNuzzo.

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Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) is not merely a set of workplace trainings or campus slogans. DEI is a political movement rooted in critical theory, intersectionality, and “social justice”—ideas that often begin from premises at odds with reality. The result is a worldview that does not merely fail to promote human flourishing, but actively obstructs it.

That obstruction comes at a cost.

A framework for understanding those costs can help explain the damage DEI has done, expedite its removal from institutions, and warn future generations against repeating the mistake. DEI imposes three broad kinds of costs: the cost of commission, the cost of omission,[1] and the cost of correction.

The Cost of Commission

The cost of commission is probably what most people think of first when they think about the price of DEI. It is the cost of doing DEI.

Some of that cost is financial. Between 2016 and 2024, the University of Michigan spent $250 million on DEI staffing and programs, with many DEI staffers earning between $152,000 and $416,000 per year. Federal agencies have spent billions more on DEI-related projects, including the Departments of Education, Defense, and Health and Human Services. And because DEI causes bureaucracy to bloat, it reduces institutional efficiency that creates indirect costs that are harder to measure but no less real.

DEI also creates unnecessary noise in systems. In academia, this has been achieved by lowering the bar for what counts as rigorous scholarship. Thousands of DEI-based papers are submitted to journals each year, further clogging an already overburdened and flawed peer-review system. Professors’ inboxes fill with requests to review weak papers dressed up in fashionable jargon. When those papers are eventually published, they pollute databases with junk research that other scholars must waste time navigating around.

But the costs of commission do not end there.