The GOP Congress could take a simple step to end the network of grants created under the Biden-Harris administration.
The GOP Congress could take a simple step to end the network of grants created under the Biden-Harris administration.
E arlier this month, the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced “the termination of additional awards not aligned with agency priorities” and officially updated its guidelines to reduce the priority of funding woke science.
While the move may help, a more effective option is available. The Republican-controlled Congress could ban federal funding to institutions that violate anti-discrimination laws and simply end the network of grants created under the Biden-Harris administration.
“Awards that are not aligned with NSF’s priorities have been terminated, including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and misinformation/disinformation,” states the update. It also removes from the agency’s list of goals “expanding participation in STEM [science, technology, engineering, and math] for women and underrepresented groups.”
Worryingly, these changes merely remove the existing NSF’s funding priority status placed on that kind of “research” and will only end up encouraging ideological research to be slightly less obvious. Existing research gets a grace period of 120 days for amendment, allowing the researchers to remove the obvious keywords, according to the agency’s grant proposal guidelines. Worse yet, the move could be easily undone in the future without congressional action.
This follows a series of White House directives reducing the NSF’s staff, restructuring grant-making, and proposing cuts to the agency’s budget.
At present, most NSF grants are allocated by scientists on temporary leave from their universities, a system that clearly generates corrupt incentives. Trump’s proposed changes would implement gradual reform by reducing the term of NSF’s roster of employees on loan from universities from four years to one.
Government funding agencies such as the NSF play an incredibly important role in scientists’ careers. Universities hire researchers largely to attract grant funding, which inherently polarizes science politically. Previously, concerns about obtaining NSF diversity grants were used as justification for absurd acts of racial discrimination, such as a plan by Harvard to increase the proportion of women and minorities in certain occupations to more than 90 percent by, illegally in the eyes of the Trump administration, the explicit adoption of racial hiring goals.
A return to these horrible incentives looks likely should Republicans lose control of Congress or the presidency in the future. Currently, these reforms would not stop America’s science funding agencies from promoting unscientific wokeness by adopting progressive, politicized research methods . . . they would just force the agencies to be slightly less obvious about it.
And Democrats are already howling at that.
“Today, President Trump has made this chaos and destruction commonplace,” wrote Democratic members of the House Science Committee in a recent letter to the NSF’s acting director. “However, we refuse to accept this as our new reality.”
The NSF alone funds roughly 25 percent of federal basic research at American universities, while a 2024 investigative report by the Senate’s Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation found that depending on the precise definition, between 10 and 25 percent of NSF grants were directly tied to left-wing shibboleths related to social justice, gender, race, or environmental justice between 2021 and 2024. The cost of these initiatives totaled $2.05 billion across 3,483 grants.
The NSF is estimated to have spent $487.7 million explicitly on DEI grants to various nonprofits and universities, with another $1.97 billion in DEI aligned grants, according to a search of tax records.
Infamously, these grants included one of just over $1 million in 2023 to teach children the meaning of genocide and apartheid from a Marxist perspective after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. This is closer to left-wing dogma than to science.
It must be said that the executive order has purged some of the worst of the NSF’s wokeness, but only Congress can make this permanent. This means Congress and President Trump have a unique opportunity to lock in reform at the agency now. After all, Democrats can’t get much angrier.
Trump is not the first Republican president to warn Americans of the great threat of politicized science, as the problem has been getting worse for some time.
“The free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity,” wrote President Eisenhower in his farewell address, directly after warning Americans about the dangers of the military-industrial complex. “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”
As I previously wrote, the NSF spent $270 million on the NSF Advance program to introduce the intersectional framework of critical race theory into STEM by willfully biasing the canon of scientific knowledge via “the implementation of evidence-based systemic change strategies that promote equity for STEM faculty in academic workplaces and the academic profession.” The science agency openly states “the NSF ADVANCE program provides grants to enhance the systemic factors that support equity and inclusion and to mitigate the systemic factors that create inequities in the academic profession and workplaces.”
Two of the program’s three principal contacts, Keri Wagstaff and Jessie DeAro, have left the agency since Trump’s order, not merely been reassigned, with the former accepting a position at Framingham State University and the latter having her position eliminated.
Sharon Bird, the former program director, is now a professor of sociology at West Virginia University studying “gender theory, social inequality (race/class/gender), work and organizations, race and ethnic relations, enhancing diversity in higher education, sociological and gender theory.” She obtained this position after acquiring $295,693 in funding from the NSF to study “Exploring Conditions for Systemic Equity Transformation that Advance Women and Minority STEM Faculty,” according to her curriculum vitae.
The agency also sunsetted the Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM but appears to have simply transferred the staff as opposed to actually terminating them.
Merely throwing more money into science has not led to the increase in innovation that such agencies promise. According to the New York Times, inflation-adjusted annual federal research funding exploded from $2 billion in 1953 to $60 billion today — the equivalent of funding two Manhattan Projects annually. Federal research funding has increased by a factor of 30. Yet the 1950s were far more scientifically innovative, bringing us computers, space travel, and nuclear energy. The lion’s share of the increased funds since then have been diverted to fat university endowments, tens of thousands of highly paid administrators, and the propagation of left-wing ideology.
The science agencies of the U.S. government are no longer neutral observers and communicators of science. They have adopted the woke worldview and are using their institutional resources to advance woke politics. Major scientific journals such as Nature and Scientific American now openly declare that research must align with progressive ideologies to be published. Scientific accuracy alone is no longer a sufficient defense.
Until recently, these journals aspired to be politically and ideologically neutral to prevent editors’ views from impeding the scientific quest for truth. Now that quality controls have been replaced with political checkpoints, writing true but insufficiently progressive statements in a scientific paper could trigger potentially career-ending consequences.
If America is to reclaim scientific integrity, Congress must act now to insulate research from far-left political ideology.