NSF Cancels DEI Grants Awarded under Multi-Billion-Dollar Biden Plan to Politicize Scientific Research

While liberals and their mainstream media allies express outrage that the federal agency that funds most of the nation’s scientific research is cancelling grants focused on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), it is worth taking a look at a recent U.S. Senate report illustrating how the Biden-Harris administration diverted billions of dollars from scientific research to DEI activities. The extensive document, published by the Senate Commerce Committee, uses a multitude of examples to show that, under Biden, the National Science Foundation (NSF) increasingly politicized the use of taxpayer dollars meant for scientific research. In fiscal year 2024 the NSF’s budget was $9 billion and the federal probe found that more than one quarter of all NSF spending went to support leftist projects masked as academic research.

The agency allocated over $2 billion to thousands of projects of questionable scientific merit that promoted DEI tenets or neo-Marxist perspectives after a Biden Task Force on Scientific Integrity determined that activities counter to DEI values are disruptive to the conduct of science. The DEI research funded under Biden focused on social justice, gender, race, and environmental justice. NSF grants involving gender presented far-left ideological theories about men, women, and other identities, asserting that white men are barriers to opportunity and the need to create identity-affirming environments. Many of the gender-related grants funded studies that investigated the supposed harms of misgendering individuals by using the wrong pronoun. Race grants were mostly allocated to programs that addressed “racial inequity and White Supremacy” in scientific disciplines that promote racialized oppression. Projects involving environmental justice asserted that environmental sciences must be investigated through the lens of left-wing social activism.

Examples include an Ivy League university in New York that received $4.4 million to “decolonize geoscience” by creating a special program called Implementing Novel Solutions for Promoting Cultural Change in Geoscience Research & Education (INSPIRE). A public university in Arizona and two other schools got $5 million to build an intersectional learning ecosystem toward gendered racial equity in artificial intelligence education as part of NSF’s Racial Equity in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education program. A private university professor in Illinois known for publicly praising Marxist traditions received over a million dollars from the NSF for a project focusing on racial equity in STEM and a public university in Georgia got nearly $100,000 to disrupt racialized privilege in the STEM classroom by acknowledging whiteness and white supremacy are deeply ingrained in higher education.

The list goes on and on, which is why the Trump administration made the cuts, shifting the priorities of the NSF, which was created in 1950 to promote the progress of science, advance national health, prosperity, and welfare. “The principles of merit, competition, equal opportunity, and excellence are the bedrock of the NSF mission,” according to the updated statement of NSF priorities. The agency will review all projects using intellectual merit and broader impacts criteria and will broaden participating activities that aim to create opportunities for all Americans everywhere. “These efforts should not preference some groups at the expense of others, or directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups,” the Trump administration’s NSF priorities statement reads. “Research projects with more narrow impact limited to subgroups of people based on protected class or characteristics do not effectuate NSF priorities.” Instead, the agency will support research with the core goal of creating opportunities for all Americans.

Not everyone is in favor of such widespread inclusion. In a piece published this week a mainstream newspaper trashes the NSF for terminating hundreds of research awards targeting DEI as well as misinformation. Among those in the article who lost their NSF grant is a Chicago researcher studying the experiences of black STEM students and a psychologist at an Ivy League university examining how gender, race and other group memberships impact bias in facial perceptions since the left claims group-based biases have profound consequences and can drive social inequities such as gender and racial disparities in society. In the story the psychologist who just lost his grant says it is shocking to see the government slash funding for DEI studies and claims it “cedes American leadership in science and technology to China and to other countries.”