Let’s see. My Wife and I have Black Primary Care Doctors. My Gastroenterologist and my Oncologist are Muslim. My Wife’s Oncologist is German. Our Cardiologist and one Opthomologist and my Podiatrist are Indian. My Urologist is Jewish and my other Ophthalmologist is Irish. We’ve visited the FHHER a few times in the last 7 years and all the Doctors we’ve had and most of the Nurses and Techs are non-Whites. Many of our Doctors were educated in their Native Countries, not in the U.S. Most are under 40. All good Doctors, too good and unfortunately many are leaving Frederick, lured away by more lucrative positions in MoCo and D.C. Getting an appointment with our Doctors within a month is tough and if you have an injury or sickness come up they send you to Urgent Care or the ER for treatment. So you probably have Health care from POC without DEI or Affirmative Action anyway. Frederick is rapidly becoming a Health Care desert. They hire anybody with a MD behind their name. I hear you all complaining about FHH and ER being substandard. More and more of your Healthcare will be by Minority Doctors and workers. Are they competent? Yes, we’re all still alive. And some of you need your heads examined.

Diversity in itself is important for lots of reasons, including productivity, but, yah, it's tricky to balance the goal of diversity against the goal of picking the most technically qualified individuals. Unfortunately, there is still the reality of institutional racism.

At the end of the day, you have to be qualified to do the job no matter what diversity boxes are checked. The Fitzwater's of the world think that they can mandate DEI in the workplace. For example, when she goes to the Doctor, she is looking for qualified medical expert, not diversity. She like the rest of the government so called do DEI experts are hypocrites.

Shifty- Employees who "do a great job" as you put it, are usually highly valued, especially by profit-driven employers, (and by many public bureaucracy managers) regardless of their personal quirks and preferences. That is, unless they're just so unreasonably demanding of their employer and/or they exhibit enough obnoxious behavior towards their co-workers that it seriously negates their good work by creating a toxic work environment.

Private employers can usually replace problem employees, although that's becoming more and more risky and litigious all the time. Public employers are usually stuck with them or forced to give them a lateral transfer, or non-essential (no work) assignment, further bloating the budget.

DEI programs encourage hiring and retaining workers primarily because of their diversity status ahead of the quality, quantity and reliability of their work. This makes no economic nor managerial sense.

Worse, virtue-signaling DEI programs often have a distinctly negative effect in the workplace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2KX8wXzc78