The taxpayer-funded plan, which Paige Cognetti commissioned as mayor of Scranton, said the city should work to ‘equalize outcomes between more and less advantaged groups’
Pennsylvania Democrat Paige Cognetti is running for Congress on her record of “cutting waste” as mayor of Scranton, Pa. Omitted from her pitch to voters is a $75,000 “equity” plan she commissioned that called to place DEI “at the core of every decision” in city government.
One year after Cognetti became mayor, in 2021, her administration issued a “request for proposals” for a “City of Scranton Equity Plan,” records show. The request noted that the city would “hire a qualified consultant to work with community partners and providers to advance equity initiatives for $75,000.” It also noted that the “successful bidder must utilize, to the greatest extent feasible, minority and/or women owned business concerns.”
The contract went to the Institute for Public Policy and Economic Development, a self-described “partnership of 13 colleges and universities and the business community” that lists Cognetti as a member of its “Regional Competitiveness and Coordination” task force. The institute released the plan, along with an accompanying “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Primer,” in 2022. They urge the city to “organize … racial equity teams” within each governmental department, implement mandatory “Implicit Bias and Microaggression training,” and place a “focus on equity in stewarding public funds, equity programming, procurement, and City financial processes.”
“Diversity, equity, and inclusion should permeate every aspect of the City’s actions and be at the core of every decision to reduce barriers, disparities, and inequities,” the taxpayer-funded report said. “Equity in public policy exists when social systems are designed to equalize outcomes between more and less advantaged groups,” the “DEI Primer” added. Both were obtained by the Washington Free Beacon via public records request.
Cognetti’s expensive embrace of DEI contradicts the independent persona she presents on the campaign trail.
Cognetti, a lifelong Democrat, notes on her campaign site that she “first ran for mayor as an Independent, in a campaign called ‘Paige Against the Machine,’ for her fight to take on corruption against the local Democratic machine.” It also says that Cognetti has “been cutting waste, fraud, and abuse in government for nearly a decade” and has thus called to “Audit the Federal Government.”
Just two years after launching that “Independent” campaign, however, Cognetti appeared keen to follow national Democrats’ embrace of DEI—and unbothered by the cost to do so.
In addition to the DEI plan, Cognetti’s proposed 2023 budget called for creating a new DEI coordinator position with the Department of Economic and Community Development. Scranton’s city council nixed the idea, zeroing out funding for the position in its budget revisions.
Two years later, in June 2025, Scranton released a five-year housing plan that emphasized “the need for race-conscious housing policy and targeted interventions to reduce disparities and ensure equitable access to safe, affordable housing.”
Those actions suggest that Cognetti took the equity report seriously. The report, for example, states that housing resources “need to be directed strategically and innovatively to diverse communities” in order to achieve “housing equity.”
Cognetti’s office declined to comment on how it has implemented the DEI plan, though it appears to be happy with the Institute for Public Policy and Economic Development’s equity-related work.
When Scranton received federal funds from former president Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act, Cognetti’s administration hired the institute as its “ARPA Evaluator for the City’s ARPA Funds.” A subsequent “ARPA Evaluation” from the institute, released in December 2023, called on the city to “consider implementing an equity framework and equity impact assessment” to “stabilize and grow businesses owned by people of color and immigrants.” A press release from Cognetti, meanwhile, states that the “mission of Scranton’s ARPA program is to … foster equitable wealth generation that targets the needs of Scranton residents.”
The institute released another “ARPA … Evaluation Report” in March 2026. It praises Scranton’s “equitable” deployment of $549,000 in taxpayer funds for a program that awarded forgivable loans to 101 first-time home buyers. The report notes that 81 percent of the program’s recipients “were minorities” and that the program was “made more accessible through free translation support and bilingual written materials.”
Scranton is two-thirds white.
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