Trump Is Reverse Engineering DEI Revolution in Science Institutions

The Trump administration’s ban on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in the federal government has sent shock waves through science institutions around the country.

Way back in 2021, I wrote about how institutions of medicine were promoting transgender ideology with little scientific justification. They used their institutional credibility to promote left-wing political views.

It went beyond just transgenderism. One institution of science, medicine, and technology after another became converted to a temple of wokeness, forgoing objectivity and scientific rigor for the zeal of cultural revolution.

That perverse dynamic appears to be unraveling.

The New York Times reported on Sunday that President Donald Trump’s DEI ban via executive order is completely changing at least the outward direction of scientific institutions—along with many others—almost overnight.

The Times noted that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine—a nongovernmental organization that relies on government contracts—had in recent years made DEI “central” to its agenda. But after President Donald Trump’s Jan. 31 executive order on DEI, “the institute closed its Office of Diversity and Inclusion, removed prominent links to its work on DEI from its website’s homepage, and paused projects on related themes.”

It’s easy to see why they would change. The institution is almost wholly reliant on federal dollars.

“The Academies are privately operated, but they receive a majority of their support from government contracts,” The New York Times reported. “Fifty-eight percent of their program expenditures came from federal government contracts last year.”

One of the many positive developments in the early days of the Trump administration is that Americans are finding out just how much the nongovernmental organization industrial complex is actually a quasi-governmental web of institutions linked tightly to the whims of federal bureaucrats doling out taxpayer money.

The change at NASEM is only the tip of the iceberg, according to the Times. Countless other institutions of science, whether they are directly a part of the government or not, are suddenly going through an about-face on DEI:

NASA cut requirements for inclusivity from several of its programs. The National Institutes of Health removed the application for its new Environmental Justice Scholars Program [from its website]. National laboratories under the Department of Energy took down webpages that had expressed a commitment to diversity, while the department suspended its promotion of inclusive and equitable research.

Of course, plenty of employees are refusing to comply with the new direction. The Times reported that Johan Bonilla Castro, “a nonbinary Latinx physicist at Northeastern University”—yes, really—is just going to continue writing about his, her, xir (or whatever) “racial and gender identity in grant proposals,” regardless of whether funding gets cut off or not.

There will undoubtedly be a lot of resistance within organizations that are going through what must seem like mind-boggling whiplash. But it’s hard to see institutions making the decision to forgo half their budgets. And the threat of lawsuits for trying to continue stealth DEI programs is likely another huge disincentive from continuing the previous course.

Is it good that so many institutions make decisions based on the flow of government money? Of course not. But that’s the reality of what our system has become. It turns out there were a lot of strings attached to that money.

A recent report by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation highlighted just how much the National Science Foundation had been pushing DEI through grants.

“Committee analysis found 3,483 grants, more than [10%] of all NSF grants and totaling over $2.05 billion in federal dollars, went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion,” the report read.

The report found that under the Biden administration, more than a quarter of total grants funded “far-left causes,” including DEI, gender ideology, and environmentalism.

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, then the ranking member of the committee, was quoted in the report: “In recent years, we have seen a sharp increase in actual scientists—that is people with degrees in the hard sciences from major universities who regularly receive money to conduct actual scientific research—using their credentials to parrot the talking points of the woke neo-Marxist Left.”

It couldn’t be clearer that the Biden administration was primarily committed to cultural transformation over almost anything else. Ideology was always put first.

While those on the Left had tremendous success in pushing every single elite institution to embrace their ideas, the ultimate result was that public trust in institutions collapsed.

Revolutionary fervor can’t last forever. Shredding credibility built up over generations on the altar of ideology has proved catastrophic.

What’s clear is that the complete wokification of science wasn’t entirely organic. Instead, it was fueled by a massive influx of government money and more than a little coaxing from federal agencies.

This isn’t to say that institutions didn’t independently support and embrace DEI; they certainly did. But the huge amount of government dollars was intended to make it sustainable and permanent. It was to goad them from simply having DEI as part of their mission to it being the central guiding ideology that would inform their every decision.

The government was supercharging cultural revolution. What Trump is doing in response is no less than a historic counterrevolution. Let’s hope it’s one that eradicates the DEI pox for good.

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