Nominations

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, later today, the Senate will vote on the nomination of Kiran Ahuja, President Biden's choice to serve as head of the Office of Personnel Management. This is the position responsible for making hiring, payroll, and training decisions that affect literally millions of Federal employees.

The President's nominee has made statements expressing sympathy for the discredited, ahistorical claims about our Nation's origins that form the backbone of so-called critical race theory. One major organization of Federal employees expressed its concern about the nominee's capacity for ``neutrality, fairness, and impartiality.'' I share those concerns, and I will be voting against this nomination.

Still elsewhere in the Biden administration, efforts to subvert the basic understanding of our founding principles are already well underway. The Department of Education's latest ``proposed priorities'' run roughshod over existing history and civic programs--established with bipartisan support--in order to push critical race theory on public school students and keep pace with ``woke'' sensibilities.

American students deserve a rock-solid civics education grounded in actual facts, not divisive propaganda that tells them they are little more than a product of their racial background. That is the basis of new legislation I was proud to help introduce this week. Schools that choose to trade in fact-based curricula for activist propaganda like the 1619 Project forfeit their right to receive Federal education grant funding for those teachings.

The current administration came to power on the promise to unify a divided nation. It will be judged closely and carefully on how that power is used.

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