Multnomah County, Oregon — which includes the majority of Portland — just dropped a proposed FY2027 budget that reads less like a government spending plan and more like a DEI fever dream scribbled on a napkin at a faculty lounge happy hour. According to a Washington Free Beacon review of the county's budget documents, Portland plans to blow nearly $300 million of taxpayer money on explicitly race-conscious programs over the next year.
Three hundred million dollars. On programs sorted by skin color. In a county that just eliminated 166 full-time positions and is staring down a General Fund shortfall. Priorities!
Let's walk through the highlight reel, because honestly, these line items are so absurd they'd get rejected from a Babylon Bee pitch meeting for being too on-the-nose.
First up: $1.75 million for a program that connects black and Hispanic parolees with "Culturally Specific Corrections Counselors." That's a real budget line item, folks. Not a joke. Not a parody. Your tax dollars are funding corrections counselors who are apparently only effective if they match the parolee's racial background. Because nothing says "criminal justice reform" like sorting your counselors by ethnicity.
Then there's $2 million for a "Construction Diversity and Equity Fund" that, per the budget documents, "dismantles systemic barriers by redistributing resources to women and people of color." They're not even hiding the ball anymore — they put "redistributing resources" right there in the description. At least they're honest about it.
But wait, there's more. The county is dropping $1.5 million on a housing program that is "culturally specific to the Black/African American community," plus $18.4 million for "supportive housing for Native American, Black/African American, Latinx, Somali, and immigrant and Refugee populations." Notice who's not on that list.
And here's the kicker that really ties the whole thing together: nearly $50 million of that $300 million total is earmarked for programs that appear to exclude white people entirely. The remaining $248 million goes to programs that use racial preferences or are geared toward "race-conscious outcomes." So if you're a struggling white family in Multnomah County — tough luck, you picked the wrong demographic.
More than $200 million of this race-sorted spending flows through the county's Homeless Services Department, which maintains detailed "equity" targets for all its programs. At least 28 programs aim to ensure that each of the five "BIPOC participant groups" — black, Asian, Hispanic, American Indian, and Pacific Islander — access services "at a rate equal to or greater than their share of the total homeless population." Equal to or greater than. Not "equal." Greater than is fine too, apparently.
The county even has a program for minority veterans that's set to receive nearly $1 million. The budget justification is a masterpiece of bureaucratic doublespeak: "Data shows that white veterans may be housed (and retain housing) at rates higher than their Black, Indigenous, and other Peer [sic] of Color, due to the majority of veterans being white." Read that again. White veterans get housed more because there are more white veterans. That's not a disparity — that's math. But Portland turned it into a reason to discriminate.
This budget lands on the desk of Multnomah County Chair Jessica Vega Pederson, who told residents she "made tough choices to prioritize vulnerable neighbors." This is the same Vega Pederson who in December 2025 declared the county would use "every tool at our disposal" to resist Immigration and Customs Enforcement. So she'll fight the feds on immigration enforcement but won't lift a finger to stop blatant racial discrimination baked into her own budget. Got it.
Meanwhile, the real-world consequences of this racial sorting are already piling up. A disabled white woman named Michele Mei, who suffers from cerebrovascular disease, filed a lawsuit after being denied rent relief because she scored too low on the county's race-based screening tool — the Multnomah Services and Screening Tool, rolled out in October 2024. The system awards more points for requesting "culturally specific services" than for having a disability. A year-long investigation by Oregon's Bureau of Labor and Industries found evidence that the county may not be providing equitable access to housing for people with disabilities. But sure, let's keep funding those Culturally Specific Corrections Counselors.
The total budget sits at $3.9 billion, with a General Fund of $918 million. The Board of County Commissioners is scheduled to vote on June 4. If this thing passes as written — and in Portland, of course it will — nearly $300 million of it will flow through a racial sorting machine that would make a segregationist blush.
Portland has become a city where your skin color determines what government services you can access, and they've stopped pretending otherwise. They just put it right there in the budget, line by line, dollar by dollar. The rest of America should be paying attention — because this is what happens when DEI stops being a slogan and becomes a spending category.
