Myriad of Cut DEI NSF Grants Includes Millions for AI Racial Equity, to Engage Poor Latinx in STEM

The Trump administration is saving American taxpayers a substantial amount of money by terminating hundreds of “science” grants that fund all sorts of preposterous Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives at dozens of universities and a few nonprofits throughout the United States. The cash is disbursed by the National Science Foundation (NSF), established by Congress in 1950 to promote the progress of science, advance national health, prosperity, and welfare and to secure national defense. Instead, under the Biden administration the agency went on a remarkable DEI spending frenzy that has supported a multitude of exclusionary leftist projects at private and public academic institutions nationwide as well as organizations that claim to advance minority causes.

One of the country’s largest public universities alone has lost tens of millions of dollars in NSF grants identified by the Trump administration as supporting blatant DEI projects that are unlikely to further the agency’s mission. With an undergraduate enrollment of 142,000, Arizona State University (ASU) has received around $28.5 million from the NSF for over two dozen DEI initiatives recently placed on the chopping block. Among them is a $2.4 million project called Black Girls as Creators described as an intersectional learning ecosystem toward gendered racial equity in artificial intelligence education to help black girls focus on intersectionality and racial equity. An “institutional transformational” project that aims to reshape faculty policies for gender equity and intersectionality received nearly $3 million. A program that positioned engineering faculty to support black students through awareness, knowledge, capacity building and community got $733,633 and over half a million dollars went to a community transformation experiment that claims to increase justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion in academic standards.

Public universities on opposite sides of the country are losing a total of $2 million for identical projects titled “Challenging Anti-Black-Racism in Civil and Environmental Engineering Curriculum” that claim to serve the national public interest by establishing education practices that acknowledge low-income communities of color are disproportionately exposed to air and water pollution. The University of South Florida in Tampa received $1.5 million for the environmental justice initiative and the University of California Berkeley $500,000. UC Berkeley also lost a $1.6 million allocation from the NSF to help center scientific and environmental literacy around the voices of communities of color since, according to the grant document, the entire field is “aligned with dominant views that can marginalize, exclude, and erase the knowledge and expertise of communities of color.” The renowned northern California university asserts that its study will “contribute new understandings of how race and culture influence learning, as well as how racism and biases have shaped research to date.”

The list of canceled DEI science grants is extensive with many of the hefty awards—most around a million dollars—using similar language in the name of combatting widespread discrimination in the field. The University of Denver in Colorado got north of a million dollars to mobilize equity and raise inclusivity in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) by creating a special coalition that will hire more faculty with “intersectional identities” and increase women as well as other underrepresented groups. The University of Missouri in St. Louis also got over a million dollars to advance equity in STEM academic careers by cultivating a climate where women, African Americans, Hispanics, and other historically underrepresented groups will thrive. The City University of New York (CUNY) received $999,839 to implement institutional transformation emphasizing the advancement of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) faculty. A south Florida public university received $999,853 to focus on inclusive support for gender diversity and intersectional minorities, especially Latina, and African American women in hiring and retention.

Among the nonprofits that saw their government money cut is the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, which received nearly $600,000 to address accessibility and inclusion issues at visitor-serving organizations such as museums, botanical gardens, and zoos that “tend to serve disproportionately white, able-bodied, and high-income audiences.” A Public Broadcasting Station (PBS) in New York, got over $3 million from the government to better engage underserved families in STEM by targeting low-income Latinx (a gender-neutral term fabricated by the left) families with media and text-based mechanisms. The stated goal is to build knowledge about how innovative, culturally responsive tools can help Latinx and low-income families engage in fun STEM learning at home. These are just some examples from a drawn-out list documenting the waste of over a billion dollars spent by the previous administration to appease the left. The complete list of cancelled NSF grants can be viewed here.