According to the recent findings of a report commissioned by a Senate subcommittee, the federal government has spent more than$ 2 billion dollars over the past three years tarnishing efforts to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion concepts into scientific research.
According to the 43-page report, the National Science Foundation has given taxpayer money to “projects that divide Americans and help studies or papers with doubtful medical price.”
Anna Krylov, a prominent critique of the NSF’s appropriation of public funds, criticized the results.
” ]I ] nstead of funding science, they dump money into pseudoscience, miseducation, and ideological indoctrination”, she said in an email to The Fix.
Published in October by the U. S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, the Senate review traces the trouble to the “beginning of the Biden-Harris management”.
The National Science Foundation under this leadership, the report states, “increasingly funded research and programs that color medical investigation and engagement projects through the lens of social ideology, undermining goal hard science disciplines…in which facts and theories may be perfectly measured, tested, and freely reproduced”.
From January 2021 through April 2024, the NSF awarded 3, 483 grants amounting to more than$ 2.05 billion to “questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion ( DEI ) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle”, the report states.
This is a part of a longer line of laws that put demands on analysts seeking federal funding for their work, according to Shefford Baker, interact professor of materials science and engineering at Cornell University.
Some of these, Baker said, were acceptable, such as pushing experts to engage in public awareness or market research among K-12 students. Nevertheless, he noted, after requirements may necessitate trying to get “people from certain identity categories to go into technology”.
According to Baker, the NSF decided to conduct research to determine how to ensure that all these underrepresented groups are represented in every area of science at every level of education and at the same levels [present ] in the general populace.
A$ 349, 985 University of Colorado project aimed at “identifying learning experiences that enable architecture for cultural justice” and a$ 2 million joint efforts by researchers at UC Berkeley and University of South Florida to fight anti-black racism in executive courses are among the projects outlined in the statement.
It also flagged a$ 1, 505, 031 project at Florida State University to build a” Sisterhood in Computing” by leveraging black feminist epistemologies and” ]black women’s ] ways of knowing”.
The San Jose State University’s ongoing effort to create” a hub for justice-centered science education” that will produce “school-based materials and professional development activities that examine the interwoven nature of climate justice and racial justice” will cost$ 786, 285 by 2027.
Baker described many of the projects cited in the report as “unserious” and “observational reporting]that ] is n’t really science”.
DEI projects received more than 27 percent of NSF grant funding by 2024, compared to the initial 0.29 percent that the NSF distributed in 2021. The majority of these efforts and the significant increase in funding they received can be attributed to two initiatives initiated under the Biden-Harris administration, it states, despite other recent Democratic administrations ‘ attempts to imbue science with left-wing ideology.
For one, a” Task Force on Scientific Integrity” was established in a memorandum from January 2021 to evaluate the effectiveness of numerous policies promoting scientific integrity and examine the effects of” the Federal scientific and engineering workforce’s and scientific Federal advisory committees'”
The task force then released a report from January 2022, which stated that DEI initiatives are inherently disruptive to scientific research and suggested DEI considerations be incorporated “into all aspects of science planning, execution, and communication.”
Consequently, the October 2024 Senate report notes, the National Science Foundation followed the Task Force on Scientific Integrity’s recommendations by integrating DEI considerations into funding decisions.
” And this is only the tip of the iceberg”! Krylov sent The Fix an email. The ideological, non-scientific criteria are also used to finance technical projects, either through the required DEI statements or the” Broader Impact” criteria, or both, according to the statement.
In a paper that was released earlier this year, Krylov and several other authors documented these trends.
Additionally, many NSF grant recipients, the Senate report notes, have engaged in left-wing activism not only in their personal lives and on their campuses but also in their classrooms and their labs.
Pro-Palestinian campus protests were a topic of conversation among several researchers highlighted in the report. One in particular, Tammie Visintainer, a San Jose State University professor working on the” justice-centered science education” hub, even used her “science methods course for aspiring middle and high school science teachers”, which she describes as “center]ing ] racial justice in science education”, as a platform for discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and “process]ing ] the impact” of the harsh language used by Israeli political leaders when speaking of Palestinian terrorists.
Many others, the report notes, hold beliefs that science and STEM are inherently oppressive or discriminatory against women, racial minorities, and other allegedly marginalized groups.
The report also suggests these beliefs serve as the foundation of many NSF-funded projects carried out by these researchers, demonstrating that” the Biden-Harris administration, through]the ] NSF, is deliberately and systematically inserting a divisive political ideology into’ scientific research.'”
” Instead of identifying the best or most talented scientists”, it states, the NSF “funded researchers who prioritized filling out research teams and programs based on ethnicity, cultural background, or political perspectives”.
The College Fix reached out to the office of Senator Ted Cruz, the ranking member of the U. S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, for comment, asking whether he sees the practices described in the report changing given the results of the 2024 elections. His office has yet to reply.
Responding to the same question, Krylov wrote,” We can expect that the new government will roll back the most egregious DEI policies, such as DEI-mandating executive orders, which is a welcome development”.
” However”, she noted,” this alone is not sufficient — more significant changes are needed to root out DEI from the funding agencies and other institutions, to reduce bureaucratization of science, and to restore focus on merit. The scientific community must mobilize and take action to accomplish this.
Baker told The Fix that because there will be changes that are perceived by many as chaotic, she believed things will be different.
Yet, he added,” It took us generations to get into this mess. It wo n’t be simple to go back out, in my opinion.
” What I’m hoping will happen”, he said, “is we will re-learn how to have conversations among people who do n’t necessarily agree”.
MORE: Idaho education board debates cutting DEI offices at universities
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