Senator Joni Ernst is taking a sledgehammer to the Biden administration’s woke transformation of America’s premier defense technology programs, introducing legislation that would end taxpayer funding for transgender apps and campus therapy sessions masquerading as national security priorities.
The Iowa Republican’s INNOVATE Act directly targets the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs—once known as “America’s seed fund” for cutting-edge military technology—which have been hijacked to advance progressive social experiments instead of American lethality on the battlefield.
Under Biden’s watch, these critical defense innovation programs have hemorrhaged over $3 million on projects that would make our Founding Fathers roll over in their graves. A staggering $1.6 million went to developing transgender apps, while another $406,092 funded campus therapy programs—all while China races ahead in hypersonic weapons and artificial intelligence capabilities that could determine the outcome of future conflicts.
“We should be advancing America’s lethality, not funding woke nonsense,” Ernst declared, cutting through the bureaucratic doublespeak that has infected our defense establishment. Her legislation strips away the Biden administration’s mandatory 10% diversity, equity, and inclusion weighting in grant reviews—a quota system that prioritizes political correctness over the technological superiority that keeps American warriors alive and victorious.
This isn’t just about fiscal responsibility, though the numbers are damning enough. It’s about restoring the constitutional purpose of defense spending: providing for the common defense through innovations that maintain America’s military edge. When our tax dollars fund therapy apps instead of next-generation weapons systems, we’re essentially subsidizing our own strategic decline while Beijing laughs all the way to military supremacy.
Ernst’s timing is masterful. With SBIR-STTR funding set to expire on September 30, she’s forcing Congress into a binary choice: continue the woke spending spree that weakens America, or return these programs to their original mission of developing technologies that project American strength around the globe. There’s no middle ground when national security hangs in the balance.
The senator’s legislation also includes crucial intellectual property safeguards designed to prevent China from stealing American defense innovations—a problem that has plagued these programs for years. While the Biden administration obsesses over gender pronouns and diversity metrics, our strategic competitors have been systematically pilfering the technological breakthroughs that American taxpayers funded, then turning them against us.
This represents a broader pattern of progressive capture within the defense establishment, where merit-based programs have been transformed into vehicles for social engineering. The administrative state has quietly redirected resources meant to strengthen America’s military capabilities toward ideological projects that actively undermine our competitive advantage.
Consider the constitutional framework our Founders established: a federal government with limited powers, chief among them the responsibility to provide for the common defense. They never envisioned taxpayer dollars flowing to transgender apps while adversaries develop weapons systems that could threaten American cities. Ernst’s legislation represents a return to this foundational principle.
The economic implications extend far beyond the immediate dollar amounts. When defense innovation programs prioritize woke credentials over technological merit, we’re systematically degrading the research and development pipeline that has maintained American military superiority since World War II. Every dollar wasted on social experiments is a dollar not invested in the breakthrough technologies that could prevent the next Pearl Harbor.
Patriots should watch closely as this legislation moves through Congress. It will reveal which Republicans have the backbone to stand with Ernst against the progressive capture of our defense infrastructure, and which will cave to establishment pressure to maintain the status quo.
Ernst’s bold move signals that the America First movement is ready to reclaim our innovation programs from woke capture and restore our focus on the technological dominance that guarantees American freedom. With leaders like Ernst willing to fight, America’s best days of innovation and strength lie ahead.
