AG Andrew Bailey should keep his promises to Missourians like me | Opinion
Andrew Bailey has established himself as one of America’s leading attorneys general. Last year, Bailey’s promise to continue fighting for conservative values helped win him a full four-year term.
During the campaign, Bailey highlighted his efforts to eradicate diversity, equity, and inclusion policies from Missouri through high-profile investigations and lawsuits. “As long as I’m attorney general,” Bailey promised, racial discrimination from DEI “will have no place in the state of Missouri” and will “be dead on arrival in this state.” Bailey repeated his stance this past April, when he reminded us that he was “fighting to protect working Americans and investors from these woke political trends and blatant racial discrimination.”
But, at the same time, Bailey is defending racial discrimination by our state government and fighting hundreds of thousands of Missourians who are victims of the discrimination. During the Biden administration, the Missouri Housing Development Commission received more than $130 million from the federal government to prevent foreclosures of Missourians struggling financially after the COVID-19 pandemic. Eligible homeowners could receive up to $50,000 of relief, which would be life-changing for any working Missouri family.
Unfortunately, people like me — white Missouri homeowners — were not told about the program. For reasons we still do not know, the MHDC followed the Biden administration’s recommendation and specifically targeted outreach and marketing about the program to people “who have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice or cultural bias.” Unbelievably, Missouri’s program was more radical than California, which had a race-neutral policy.
I joined with other Missourians in filing a lawsuit against the MHDC last year over this program, which I believe illegally discriminated on the basis of race. The Donald Trump-appointed federal judge hearing our case recently called our allegations “troubling” and said they would be “problematic” for the state government if true.
The attorney general has the authority to end this case by admitting that Missouri had illegal DEI policies in this COVID-19 program. Given his public statements, I hoped that Attorney General Bailey would thank us for exposing this DEI scheme and work with us to make things right. But so far, Bailey is fighting against us.
On his first day back in office as president, Trump signed an executive order to eliminate the Biden administration’s DEI policies from the federal government. I hope that Andrew Bailey will keep his campaign promises and do his part to correct the Biden DEI program that operated in Missouri.
Paul Bumpas is a resident of Blue Springs and a longtime employee at the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence.