California’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” class raked in as much as $1 billion in taxpayer money in the past year, according to a new study.

The Center for Organizational Research and Education’s (CORE) study shows over $500 million in funding for staff positions, outside consultants, training sessions, educational materials, and other expansions of “anti-racist” and “anti-bias” indoctrination initiatives.

Based on responses — and non-responses — CORE estimates the statewide total is close to $1 billion.

According to the study, state agencies disclosed about $162 million in DEI funding in departments such as Water Resources, Conservation, and Fish and Wildlife.

Local governments spent nearly $200 million on the indoctrination schemes, while colleges and universities spent over $103 million, including on six-figure salaried DEI leadership positions.

In addition, of the among the 16 school districts that responded to the study, a total of $30 million was spent.

Spending in the school districts included bulk purchases of books aimed at indoctrinating children into the race-essentialist thinking of critical race theorists, including How to Be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi, White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, and This Book is Anti-Racist: 20 Lessons on How to Wake Up, Take Action, and Do the Work by Tiffany Jewell.

The study also notes that DEI spending at American universities has gone up 27 percent since 2014 and that nearly 80 percent of companies plan to increase their DEI spending next year. In addition, institutions like the Harvard Business School now push DEI initiatives as “integral to corporate responsibility,” according to the study.

This growing trend of DEI initiatives should not be discussed, the study indicates, without an understanding of the pervasiveness behind the movement.

“DEI experts seem united in depicting America as a racist and terrible place,” the organization explains.

For example, Nevada County used more than $11,000 to fund DEI training from consultant Tracy Pepper, who among other things believes that Americans are “murdered in the streets, in their beds, on playgrounds for merely being black” and agreed “many white people are horrible.”

DEI experts also promote extreme anti-police ideologies and seek to recast schools as “laboratories for progressive viewpoints.”

Tellingly, DEI experts both insist on their own importance and make their expertise a top-dollar item in any organization’s budget — oftentimes at the taxpayer’s expense. Simply put: they get to promote an anti-American ideology and get rich doing it.

“DEI spending is out of control,” CORE researcher Will Coggin said in a statement. “The people of California are footing the bill for diversity consultants, equity authors, and inclusion officials to rake in millions. With hundreds of millions already spent and potentially billions more to come, it’s a feeding frenzy funded by taxpayers.”

CORE compiled data through public records requests of state and local governments, K-12 school districts, and institutions of higher education.

Breccan F. Thies is a reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow him on Twitter @BreccanFThies.