The National Science Foundation on Friday canceled millions of dollars in grants that “are not aligned with agency priorities,” broadening the scope of research targeted by the Trump administration on ideological grounds.
Among the projects on the chopping block are those related to diversity, equity, and inclusion and misinformation and disinformation, according to an agency FAQ page. The NSF also froze all new grants last week in conjunction with the arrival of Department of Government Efficiency employees at its offices, Nature reported.
Exactly how many grants were cut is unknown. A post on X from DOGE praised NSF for axing “402 wasteful DEI grants ($233M in savings), including $1M for ‘Antiracist Teacher Leadership for Statewide Transformation.’” (An analysis by The New York Times found that the group has inflated its previous estimates of cost savings.) Within the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, one of eight directorates at the agency, 53 grants worth $24.7 million were canceled, according to a list compiled by an NSF program officer and obtained by The Chronicle. And a crowdsourced tracker of canceled grants listed 120 grants worth a total of $71.6 million at press time.
Termination notices were sent on Friday evening; a copy of one such letter shared with The Chronicle said that the decision was made “to protect the interests of the government” and that “this is the final agency decision and not subject to appeal.” The NSF declined to answer questions about how cancellation decisions were made, and by whom.
The National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Endowment for the Humanities have all cut funding for grants on topics the Trump administration opposes, including racial disparities, transgender health, climate change, and Covid-19; several of those terminations have been challenged in court. The NSF cancellations come two months after Sen. Ted Cruz’s office released a list of “questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda” and were funded by the agency during the Biden administration. That list included 3,483 grants worth more than $2 billion; Cruz, a Republican from Texas, is chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation.
‘Horrible Irony’
Critics of Friday’s cuts argue that they contravene a congressional directive that the NSF broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in science and engineering. That mandate was first outlined in the 1980 Science and Engineering Equal Opportunities Act and has since been reinforced in the agency’s grant-review criteria. In addition to a proposal’s intellectual merit, the NSF has historically assessed its “broader impacts,” including “expanding participation of women and individuals from underrepresented groups in STEM.”
The agency will continue using the broader-impacts criterion to assess proposals, but that work “must aim to create opportunities for all Americans everywhere,” Sethuraman Panchanathan, the NSF director, said in a statement. “These efforts should not preference some groups at the expense of others, or directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups. Research projects with more narrow impact limited to subgroups of people based on protected class or characteristics do not effectuate NSF priorities.”
But with the nation becoming more diverse, the types of research enabled by the broader-impacts criterion are crucial, said Terrell R. Morton, an assistant professor in the educational-psychology department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “It actually boils down to a numbers game. You need people who have different racial, ethnic, gender-based backgrounds to be present in these spaces,” Morton said. In that respect, he said, the congressional mandate “has a very real-world impact on how we as a country will be able to thrive, or, if not, thrive, survive.”
Morton learned Friday that two of his grants had been canceled. One, “Examining Blackness in Postsecondary STEM Education Through a Multidimensional-Multiplicative Lens,” involved about 50 research collaborators at six institutions and was in the third year of a five-year contract. The grant was funded through the NSF’s Racial Equity in STEM Education program for $8.8 million and sought to help STEM educators better understand how ethnicity, nationality, and geography affect Black students’ perception of their own identity.
Morton’s second canceled grant involved using Afrofuturism as a framework to develop new undergraduate biology courses and to aid in student retention and matriculation. That project had been awarded $500,000 over three years. Shutting down both projects, he said, means he’s had to tell Black students “that their voice, their ideas, their stories, their experiences, do not align with the country’s values.” The cancellations, he added, also pose a broader question: “What are we actually telling people about who this country values, who this country believes is capable in innovating in STEM, or even beyond STEM?”
Both of Morton’s grants were on Cruz’s list of targeted projects. Democrats on the Senate Committee on Science, Space, and Technology last week circulated a rebuttal to Cruz’s report; an analysis by ProPublica also found that some of the projects flagged by Cruz “simply acknowledged social inequalities or were completely unrelated to the social or economic themes cited by his committee,” but used terms like “diversity” and “trauma” in clinical contexts.
A grant aimed at recruiting K-12 computer-science teachers also appeared on Cruz’s list and was canceled Friday. That project was part of the NSF’s longstanding “Computer Science for All” program, said its principal investigator, Amy J. Ko, a professor and associate dean for academics at the University of Washington’s Information School. With the million-dollar grant’s termination, Ko said, funding for two postdocs, a dozen Ph.D. students, and about 15 undergraduate researchers across five universities is up in the air.
Having served on NSF grant-review panels for 16 years, Ko said, she is well-versed in what qualifies for funding under the broader-impacts criterion. She’s confident that her work did so, but she’s less certain that, going forward, similar projects will continue being funded. “Based on this new guidance, a lot of the solicitations that I would be supporting probably will be canceled,” she said.
Ko’s grant was among the 53 canceled within the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, as was a $500,000, four-year grant led by Lisa Fazio, an associate professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University. Fazio said she learned her funding had been cut after Vanderbilt’s sponsored-programs office forwarded her a Friday-afternoon notice from the NSF.
Fazio’s grant focused on how false beliefs form and how they can be corrected. Studies of misinformation and disinformation “could be used to infringe on the constitutionally protected speech rights of American citizens across the United States in a manner that advances a preferred narrative about significant matters of public debate,” according to the NSF’s website.
“They’re forbidding research on exactly some of the biggest problems that we have in the U.S. right now,” Fazio said. “There’s also this horrible irony that the administration complains about misinformation research being a part of the censorship industrial complex, while they themselves are censoring academics and telling them what they can and can’t research.”
As a result, Fazio said, the NSF’s reputation as an “independent institution that followed good science” has been compromised. “We’re seeing the manipulation of the system, where now politicians are deciding where the money should go or what science is and is not, rather than the scientists themselves.”
