Note to Congress on DEI in the Sciences: The Call is Coming from Inside the House

In his address to a joint session of Congress earlier this year, President Trump promised to "conquer the frontiers of science." Many journalists and critics then feigned confusion when his budget took direct aim at the National Science Foundation, slashing funding by 55%, to $3.9 billion.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has bemoaned Trump’s “War on Science,” while a sample Nature headline blared “an attack on science anywhere is an attack on science everywhere.”

How to reconcile the cuts with promises to conquer new frontiers, explore deeper into space and win the Artificial Intelligence race? Well, they’re not as irreconcilable as some would like us to think.

Injecting Science with Ideology

The NSF’s descent into ideological madness has been well documented. Far too many of its grants reward divisive identity politics, going to projects that seem ridiculous to taxpayers and smack of social engineering rather than hard science. Open the Books has identified at least $800 million worth of them. Just one example we uncovered was $445,600 to Ohio State University for Girls* on Rock: a program to diversify the geosciences by providing “16-18-year-old girls and nonbinary individuals with immersive, hands-on experiences in the geosciences, combined with elements of artistic expression and technical rock climbing in the Rocky Mountains, Colorado.” So much for the frontiers of science.

Aside from proposing budget cuts, the president has signed executive orders aimed at broadly dismantling grants and programs that advance DEI and gender theory, of the sort that universities have regularly won funding to execute.

Congress’ Role

But while many of Trump’s allies in Congress cheer his battles with academia over extremist ideas, when it comes to NSF grantmaking, the lede remains at least partly buried.

Sure, universities are plenty radical of their own accord, but criteria mandated by Congress have structurally incentivized adding DEI, minority outreach and gender politics to grant proposals in order to win funding. Nonprofits have followed suit. In future administrations that may not align with Trump’s executive orders, existing statute risks sending federal money right back toward the same set of distractions and away from hard scientific innovation. Every dollar the federal government spends on a faddish DEI grant is a dollar not available to cure breast cancer or childhood leukemia.

In horror movie parlance, this is the part of the film where our protagonists realize the DEI call is coming from inside the house.

History of the NSF

The National Science Foundation was created by an act of Congress and signed into law in 1950. The initial law called for funding basic science research and supporting graduate students in science through scholarships and fellowships. But In 1968 the agency underwent a dramatic shift thanks to the Daddario-Kennedy amendment, which added social science to its mandate and instructed the agency to fund “applied science.”

The amendment empowered the agency to work towards solving social problems, and this shift was reinforced in subsequent years as lawmakers sought to require NSF to have “broader impacts” on society beyond scientific discovery.

The subsequent ideological metamorphosis at NSF is well documented. Last year Open the Books found $800 million in highly problematic STEM education-focused grants from the agency, like:

• $772,953 to Emory University for “Black Feminist Epistemologies: Building a Sisterhood in Computing”

• $905,642 across three universities (Florida International University, Colorado State University, and University of Minnesota) for a “qualitative inquiry into sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming students” to create a “more inclusive environment.”

• $2,998,446 to Washington University in St. Louis will study applications of photon spectrography while also “detect[ing] phenomena that evade identification in the human-scaled realm of lived experience,” such as how “students perceive themselves as science learners via their science identity, [and] racial and gender identity.”

Another investigation into woke DEI grants, led by Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), identified 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion.

Less well-publicized is that all NSF grant proposals are evaluated on DEI-related requirements, distractions from basic research and development efforts.

America Competes?

The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010, for instance, mandated that NSF add a “broader impacts” requirement in grant criteria and defined seven possible “broader impacts” goals. Some of these goals, like “increasing the economic competitiveness of the United States” and “supporting the national defense,” seem largely uncontroversial; they go hand in hand with scientific advancement. Another, “advancing the health and welfare of the American public,” sounds good until we remember the public health establishment’s 2020 pandemic response. Indeed, plenty of NSF money has been misspent conceiving of methods to identify and combat “misinformation” related to Covid.

Several other criteria explicitly attempt to reinvent NSF grantee universities by orienting them around public relations, “scientific literacy,” K-12 education, and engaging with prospective researchers based on their identity rather than merit:

• Developing an American STEM workforce that is globally competitive through improved pre-kindergarten through grade 12 STEM education and teacher development, and improved undergraduate STEM education and instruction

• Improving public scientific literacy and engagement with science and technology in the United States

• Expanding participation of women and individuals from underrepresented groups in STEM

The late-1960’s shift at NSF from basic hard sciences to applied science, including social science, quite plainly pushed the agency leftward over the ensuing decades.

The America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 then licensed NSF to coerce grantee institutes into practices that reward identity, not merit. And because of the emphasis on public outreach, universities were encouraged to spread these DEI ideas further into their local communities.

As discussed in a 2014 NSF report, universities reoriented their internal infrastructures to align with the “broader impacts” mandate:

“America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 reaffirmed the importance of the broader impacts criterion and encouraged institutions of higher education and nonprofit organizations to take an institutional approach towards achieving the societal benefits championed via broader impacts. This institutional approach has to be embraced by a number of institutions of higher education and nonprofits, who are collectively pooling their expertise and experiences to put in place on their campuses the broader impacts infrastructure that is necessary.”

The changes were facilitated by a $500,000 four-year grant to the University of Missouri for the Broader Impacts and Outreach Network for Institutional Collaboration (BIONIC)” program, which brought together many universities to brainstorm ideas on how to comply with the new mandate. Per a Mizzou press release, “The BIONIC initiative will create a national network of professionals who will share ideas and resources to help researchers design, implement and evaluate their Broader Impact activities.”

Today, University of Missouri is a hub for a cottage industry of “broader impacts” consultants, nonprofits, and university initiatives that are now keys to securing grants.

Incentives in Action

A look through recent NSF grants illustrates how this works in practice, using awardee the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor as an example:

• $600,000 for a chemistry project called “Unravelling the Nature of Elusive Transition Metal-oxyl Complexes.” While investigating the structural and magnetic properties of various compounds, the grant promises that scientists will “engage in STEM outreach programs focused on recruiting Underrepresented Minority (URM) high school students to stem fields.” The principal investigator for this grant “directs the D-RISE program, which provides 6-weeks, full-time summer research opportunities to high school students from the greater Detroit area.”

• $598,575 for an astronomy project called “Multi-wavelength Imaging of Planet-forming Disks: The Inner Au of Herbig and T Tauri Stars.” In between analyzing telescope data to understand stars, researchers will facilitate an “inspiring educational experience” for “middle-schoolers in ‘Wolverine Pathways,’ a University of Michigan program offered to communities in the Detroit-metro area who are historically under-represented in state colleges.”

While it is nice to think about kids learning about science outside of school, what this means is researchers, who are supposed to be solving difficult scientific problems, are now being asked to work in communication, public relations, and K-12 education.

When critics of Trump’s plan to eliminate NSF discuss funding cuts to science, they don’t mention that funds for actual scientific discovery are already being diverted to Congressionally mandated, ideologically motivated side projects.

So, if you’re left wondering how taxpayers ended up funding a “visual tool to promote inclusivity” in STEM and combat “racial microaggressions,” these concepts have been incentivized by Congress, whether or not this consequence was intended.

SIDENOTE: Open the Books has also reported on federally funded podcasts, which are sometimes included as add-ons to grant proposals in the name of scientific “public outreach”—and the topics of which frequently strain credulity.

The fact is, under current law, any amount of funding the National Science Foundation produces could end up supporting DEI at American universities, in K-12 education, and across the nonprofit ecosystem.

Codify, Codify, Codify

President Trump's budget request zeros out funding for NSF’s “woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences” and grants from the agency’s “Broadening Participation” program, which explicitly funded identity-based projects. Several executive orders against DEI and gender ideology have also eliminated funding from related grants. And President Trump has reduced all university overhead fees from 50-60% of total grants to a more reasonable 15%, allowing them far less breathing room to spend outside of research.

All these moves are laudable, but the danger of returning to the same patterns is ever present in future presidential administrations. While the Trump White House has done everything possible to mitigate the damage from the office of the president, Congress needs to step up to end illegal DEI in scientific research grantmaking at the NSF. Critics and the media should also stop obscuring the nature of this funding, although that might be too much to hope for.

Today Congress has a policy majority and popular mandate to excise DEI from public spending. Lawmakers must use it to save scientific research at NSF by repealing “broader impact” measures in the 2010 American COMPETES Act Reauthorization and explicitly banning identitarian projects from being funded in the future. While the original House vote was dominated by an Obama-powered Democrat majority, 17 Republicans also voted Yea – and the Senate’s amended version passed by unanimous consent. How many would like a do-over 15 years later?

As with other aspects of the DOGE agenda, the message is simple and bears endless repeating: codify the cuts.

In FY2024 alone, the NSF doled out $7.4 billion in research and development grants, spanning a wide variety of scientific fields, from computer science to geology; as outlined, the impacts across society are substantial.

There is no doubt that American universities are left-wing; it’s time that our elected officials take responsibility for having pushed them even further.