ANALYSIS: Some projects that were cut appeared to indicate conventional science, whereas the majority of cuts focused on DEI-related grants.
More than 1,600 grants from the National Science Foundation have recently been awarded to Elon Musk’s largely legendary saw by the Department of Government Effectiveness, or DOGE.
Grant Watch, a task that tracks” the cancellation of offers of academic research organizations under the Trump presidency in 2025,” records the reduces.
Many of the 701 reductions, which were announced on April 25, are related to DEI, or projects promoting diversity, equity, and participation. A significant number of these defunded projects aimed to entice members of allegedly underrepresented groups to certain STEM areas, or to better join, keep, or comprehend the views and contributions of members of those communities.
In addition to these projects, there are those that seek to increase diversity in natural anthropology, advance astrophysics in American Indian and Northern African communities, and learn how remote Arctic students interact with arctic research. They also examine the experiences of undergraduate LGBTQ students in STEM, examine the effects of gender composition on destructive science, and examine the effects of gender composition on destructive science.
Importantly, some jobs addressed these kinds of goals in quite distinct ways. One$ 1.5 million project that was intended to be about physics outreach was intended to build on pilot work that is said to have demonstrated that “authentic inquiries into science through embodied learning strategies can provide rich possibilities for sense-making through kinesthetic experience, embodied imagining, and the representation of science concepts for Black and Latinx teenagers when learning approaches focused on dancing and dance-making.”
Another$ 1.5 million project attempted to use” Black feminist epistemologies and Black women’s ways of knowing as critical frameworks” and” the concept of sister circles to create counterspaces to build community and resist structural oppression” in computer science programs, which was previously covered by The Fix and highlighted in a 2024 Senate report regarding dubious NSF-funded DEI projects.
The NSF website claims that the funding was targeted at grants that were in conflict with the organization’s recently updated priorities. These include, but are not limited to, awards for projects that focus on “diversity, equity, and inclusion ( DEI), environmental justice, and misinformation/disinformation”
Numerous grants were awarded as part of an initial round of funding that would have funded studies looking at the spread and risks of alleged misinformation, particularly in relation to COVID-19 and vaccines, as well as methods to identify and stop such information.
For instance, a$ 50,000 grant was voided for a project at Northern Kentucky University that involved the creation of a prototype web extension that could be “directly embedded into web browsers to seamlessly report trustworthiness of any OHI]online healthcare information ] content,” serve as a” trust badge model for easy certification of web content,” and aid in the classification of online content.
A$ 5 million grant for a University of Wisconsin-Madison project that was previously covered by The Fix and named in a report from the House Judiciary Committee and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government regarding the “funding of AI-powered censorship and propaganda tools” was also included in those funds.
However, grants for a number of projects that appear to steer clear of contentious social issues and political ideology have also been affected, which raises the question whether all of these terminations were intentional or whether some of them were caused by the use of terms that frequently have different meanings in scientific terms in political discourse or the use of vague assertions about promoting diversity and inclusion when referring to broader project impacts.
Projects recently funded by the NSF include those that examine the extinction of pollinators on the Hawaiian Islands, male-female diversity in Panamanian hummingbirds, the diversity of aquatic insects, and underemployment in neurodiverse individuals.
Researchers connected to a number of these projects were emailed by The College Fix. One researcher responded that they were avoiding media contact at the moment but that they were still trying to figure out what the termination would mean for them and their work.
Additionally, on May 15, 189 grants awarded to Harvard University researchers were cut, many of which had nothing to do with DEI or other contentious subjects. These are generally accepted to be downstream of Harvard’s ongoing conflict with the Trump administration over the school’s DEI policies and allegations of on-campus antisemitism, in contrast to cuts made in previous rounds. Alan Garber, president of Harvard, made the announcement that he would take a 25 % pay cut to help pay for these and other financial losses from the conflict.
Many of the terminated grants appear to have already been awarded in full, which raises the question of whether some of these terminations will actually save the federal government and taxpayers any money, according to information provided on the NSF website regarding specific grants across the organization’s past several rounds of cuts. These include the$ 1.5 million grant for “dance-making” in physics and the$ 5 million grant that the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government cited.
The NSF provided these details to The College Fix for clarification. The Fix was directed to the NSF’s FAQs page by a media officer with the organization who responded via email that the organization had declined to comment.
MORE: After Harvard’s demands are met, the Trump administration freezes$ 2.2 billion in its favor.
CREDIT & IMAGE CAPTION & CREDIT: The National Science Foundation / NSF logo.
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