Texas vs. Ohio State: Auditors Pick a...Loser

In this matchup, there's no touchdown for taxpayers, just more DEI spending and foreign influence.

Ohio State and UT are set to face off in the Cotton Bowl on their way to the NCAA Championship game.

Both have storied football programs, and neither has escaped Open the Books’ recent examination of public university funding.

From damaging far-Left research to concerning foreign funding, our auditors have some stats on these contenders that you likely won’t see on TV.

OSU RECAP: THE KEY STATS

In December, Open the Books reported that spending on DEI had broken out well beyond just Ivy League institutions, and deep into Buckeye Nation.

DEI-RELATED EMPLOYEES: 201
SALARY COST: $13.3 million

FOREIGN FUNDING: $203.5 million since 2013
KEY COUNTRIES: China ($15.8 million); Saudi Arabia ($7.7 million)

FEDERAL GRANTS & CONTRACTS: $3.5 billion since 2020; ~$700 million annually
TOP FUNDING AGENCY: Health and Human Services
KEY GRANTS:
Bug Food -$717K from the USDA to solve “cultural resistance in the USA and Europe [that] impedes the acceptance of insect proteins as food sources.”
“Misinfo” Fighting: $749,999 from the National Science Foundation to find “actionable sensemaking tools for curating and authenticating information in the presence of misinformation during crises.”

Key Coursework: Queer Ecologies: Gender, Sexuality, & the Environment

Read our entire investigation here: DEI Blitz Reaches Buckeye Nation

UT: AUSTIN – SIDELINING DEI?

A 2023 law passed by the Texas state legislature requires state universities to close their DEI offices, end mandatory diversity training and ban companies from asking job candidates to pledge their commitment to diversity as a condition of employment, effective last year—January 1, 2024. Consider it a flag on the DEI play.

In April 2024, UT Austin announced it was “discontinuing programs and activities within the Division of Campus and Community Engagement (DCCE) that now overlap with our efforts elsewhere” as well as closing DCCE and redistributing the remaining programs, such as disability services, University Interscholastic League, the UT charter schools, and volunteer and community programs.

Funding that had been used to support the DEI apparatus would be "redeployed to support teaching and research,” the university president announced.

After the announcement, UT Austin laid off at least 60 staff members who previously worked in related roles, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

The Division of Campus and Community Engagement was previously known as the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement (DDCE), with employees still listed under DDCE in the 2023 payroll.

OpenTheBooks.com requested the 2023 payroll in September 2024, and received it in January 2025. The records show 93 people working in the DDCE, with salaries totaling $8 million.

Another 23 people in other DEI roles made $1.8 million, totaling almost $9.8 million in pay.

That’s the equivalent of tuition for over 1,800 in-state liberal arts majors.

The highest paid DEI-related official in 2023 was Charles Breithaupt, associate vice president, Office of the Vice President for Campus, Community Engagement, making $439,320.

Octavio Martinez, senior associate vice president in the same office, took home $394,148.

Another 27 people made between $100,000 and $255,000, working for the Division of Campus and Community Engagement, Office of the Vice President for Diversity and Community Engagement, Center for Women's and Gender Studies, Academic Diversity Initiatives, Equity, Community Engagement and Outreach and Campus Life and Belonging.

It’s unclear how many of the 116 people working in DEI roles in 2023 remained at UT Austin and in what roles.

The university also spent over $381,000 last year on organizations with a DEI purpose, according to its vendor spending records. The records don’t specify what the spending is for — whether a grant, payment for a service or goods.

National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity received the largest figure from UT Austin of any DEI-related organization — $125,000.

The university gave $69,000 to the Equal Justice Center, which provides free legal services to undocumented immigrants, and $74,250 to the Austin Justice Coalition, which “serves people who are historically and systematically impacted by gentrification, segregation, over policing, a lack of educational and employment opportunities, and other institutional forms of racism in Austin.”

The San Antonio-based Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, Inc. got $37,500, the Austin chapter of NAACP got $10,000.

DAWA — Diversity Awareness and Wellness in Action — collected $25,000 from the university.

Brooklyn-based Transgender Equity Consulting Inc was paid $15,000, while Ann Arbor-based consulting firm Inclusion Nation received almost $21,000.

The Institute for Democratic Education and Culture, “a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of education, racial and social justice, cultural literacy, leadership development and activism” received $2,500.

Given the funding, and prevalence of radical left-wing ideology on campuses, it’s no surprise that following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, there were antisemitic acts, including vulgar antisemitic graffiti on a building that houses UT Austin’s Jewish student organization Hillel.

Pro-Palestinian UT Austin students and others held protests, including one in April that saw 79 people arrested.

Protestors also called for the university to divest from Israel.

Columbia University, the University of Michigan and the University of California, Los Angeles also had similar divestment demands.

GRANTS AND CONTRACTS: DIVERSIFYING ENGINGEERING, STUDYING “CIS” PRIVILEGE?

Since 2020 University of Texas at Austin has received over $3.5 billion in federal tax dollars from grants and contracts. Funds average around $700 million a year.    

Most funding—$2.5 billion—came in the form of grants.  

Three agencies have awarded UT Austin roughly $600 million each since 2020: The National Science Foundation gave the most at $615 million, followed by the Department of Education ($598 million), and the Department of Health and Human Services ($590 million).   

Some example grants include:   

• $1.19 million from National Science Foundation to support “the initial steps to create a center for equity in engineering with a centering vision that diversity, equity, and inclusion are the responsibility of everyone within the university’s engineering community.”  

• $792,443 from Health and Human Services to test the hypothesis that “it is cisheteronormativity, the societal belief that everyone is cisgender and heterosexual, that increases risk for exposure to general ACEs [adverse childhood experiences], that cisheteronormativity leads to cisheterosexism, or SGM [social and gender minority]-identity based discrimination, mistreat and violence exposure, and that exposure to cisheterosexism in early life should be considered a unique ACE experienced by SGM populations.” (“Cisgender” means someone who identifies with their own sex.)   

• $473,913 from National Science Foundation for a project titled “Empowering Engineering Scholar-activists Through Community-Driven Research Experiences.” The abstract states that “students will read and discuss relevant engineering education and sociology literature, reflect on their own experiences and actions, engage with activists across campus, conduct their own research on engineers from marginalized groups, and lead future community outreach and organization efforts.”  

Notably, the Department of Defense gave UT Austin $368 million in grants and nearly $600 million in contracts, mostly for various defense-related research projects. UT Austin hosts the Defense Research Advancement team, a Department of Defense University-Affiliated Research Center.  

These billions in taxpayer funds do not include government-backed student loans or tax breaks on the university’s $18.8 billion endowment. Such endowments are not subject to taxation.   

Despite UT Austin's multibillion dollar endowment, the university took over $166 million in federal Higher Education Emergency Relief Funds to offset expenses incurred by COVID-19 lockdowns and related economic uncertainties.   

FOREIGN FUNDING AT UT AUSTIN

The University of Texas at Austin has accepted $380.5 million from foreign sources since 2013.  

The university has accepted money from sources in 51 different countries, but China ($25.3 million) and Saudi Arabia ($19.7 million) are both among the 10 largest benefactors.   

UT Austin runs the Empowering Saudi Women Through Entrepreneurship program, which aims to “introduce selected Saudi women entrepreneurs” to the Austin market to compete with American workers. It’s operated in partnership with the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, named after the former monarch who authorized torture and public beheadings during his reign.  

Roughly 25% of all Saudi funding to Texas universities in the last 10 years went to UT Austin.  

The university also has its own chapter of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association. The U.S. State Department says the organization exists to “monitor Chinese students and mobilize them against views that dissent from the Chinese Community Party’s stance.”  

UT Austin once had a China Public Policy Center, though it appears to no longer be active.  

The college has also been masquerading as an oil baron around the world: all three of China’s major state-owned oil companies have signed contracts of $100,000 or more for what the university described only as “research activities.” The college signed another four $50,000 contracts with the Kuwait Oil Company and accepted $800,000 in contracts from the Abu Dhabi Oil Company in the United Arab Emirates.  

HEAD-TO-HEAD MATCHUP

Foreign Funds: U Texas
University of Texas edges ahead of OSU on raw dollars and cents when it comes to funding from China and Saudi Arabia. But OSU had to eject someone from their side of the stands when he misappropriated federal dollars from the NIH, and he’s now serving a jail sentence.

Grants and Contracts: TIE
Both universities have collected about $3.5 billion in federal money, and each can boast some truly far-Left concepts. While OSU researches how to fight disinformation and get people to warm up to bug eating, UT is researching childhood assumptions that people are “cisgender.”

DEI Payroll: Ohio State
OSU spent $13.3 million on DEI-related salaries for 201 staff across various departments. UT Austin was spending $9.8 million for 116 related staffers. That should mean OSU dominates the category, although we will continue to report on changes made following the new Texas law.

So, unlike the Cotton Bowl where Texas is seeded slightly higher, each school took one category in our analysis, and the third was a draw. So, this budget matchup is a bit more of a coin toss.

But either way, federal taxpayers should be asking for the coin back!