27% Of National Science Foundation Grants Went To DEI Projects, Study Finds

The National Science Foundation spent more than $2 billion funding “science” projects that were often more about activism and critical race theory than science, the Senate Commerce Committee found.

The committee found that one in 10 grants awarded between January 2021 and April 2024 had to do with oppression, social or environmental justice, gender, or race. The figure was dramatically higher in grants issued more recently, as what counted as “science” transformed dramatically under the Biden administration.

“While only 0.29% of all grants with start-dates in 2021 centered on DEI initiatives, by 2024, more than a quarter (27%) of new grants pushed far-left perspectives,” the Commerce Committee said in a report released Monday.

“Over the past few weeks, the Trump administration has been taking a sledgehammer to the radical left’s woke nonsense. DEI initiatives have poisoned research efforts, eroded confidence in the scientific community, and fueled division among Americans,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the committee’s chairman, told The Daily Wire in a statement. “Congress must end the politicization of NSF funding and restore integrity to scientific research.”

Scientists have warned that anticipated cuts under the Trump administration could harm life-saving research. However, few of them complained when, in recent years, soft-science and activist academics began siphoning off money that could have otherwise gone to things like cancer research.

Cruz said that wasn’t the only way DEI activism masquerading as research was harming real scientists, saying it also reduced the public’s confidence in the field as a whole. More than a quarter of the American public has no or not much confidence in scientists, double what it was a few years ago, he said. Low-quality “research,” where academics start with an ideological conclusion and work backwards to justify it, is also dangerous because it could lead to a faulty understanding of the world, he said.

Some papers from left-wing academics have said that the scientific method, the written word, and hard work are all racist, making it all the more surprising that mainstream scientists have failed to condemn it.

The NSF spent half a million dollars  on a project called “Reviewer Zero,” which says that peer-reviewing papers — a crucial step in assuring quality — is racist because peer reviewers disproportionately find that minorities’ research is not accurate.

“The accepted values and practices in science can serve as roadblocks and barriers to the inclusion and advancement of minoritized scholars,” its study said. “The overrepresentation of people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) societies shapes the way research is done.”

In 2022, NSF gave a $4.4 million grant to Columbia University to “decolonize geoscience.” Another million dollars went to a project that says that physics is racist. In exchange for the hefty government funding, two scholars — a “chronically ill and disabled, physics-Ph.D.-holding, thin wealthy white woman” and a black man — watched videos of four science lessons, and spoke to two students and the teacher over Zoom. Their conclusion rested on a single several-minute video of an undergrad group project, in which a Middle Eastern student did most of the work while a white and Hispanic student cracked jokes. It concluded that the Middle Eastern student exemplified “whiteness” by being “centered” (receiving attention since he was the one actually doing the work) while the others were “marginalized.”

Cruz said radical left-wing ideology that deems anything mainstream or successful to be oppressive or colonizing has contributed to unrest on college campuses, including outbreaks of blatant anti-Semitism.

NSF began prioritizing ideological grants in response to a Biden administration executive order that said it DEI should be in every area of government. A Biden task force said “[a]ctivities counter to DEIA values are disruptive to the conduct of science.” Left-wing colleges then took that mandate even further, interpreting it in ways that may have flagrantly violated civil rights laws.

Shirin Vossoughi, an associate professor at Northwestern University, is co-principal investigator for a $1 million NSF grant, awarded in 2023, for “Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM.” Vossoughi cited Karl Marx to justify teaching children anti-Israel concepts after Hamas attacked Israel.

Millions in federal funds were spent politicizing artificial intelligence in ways that could have profound effects on society. NSF awarded more than a million dollars to the University of Pittsburgh’s Angela Stewart, who wrote that artificial intelligence should not be neutral, because that “only serves the capitalist, racist, heteronormative, patriarchal, etc society.”

Cruz’s committee gathered more than 3,000 grants matching DEI keywords, which The Daily Wire has made searchable and browsable below: