Are you interested in creating “sister circles” for “black women in undergraduate computing programs at predominantly white institutions, framing the research through black feminist epistemologies and structural oppression rather than technical computing advancement?” Then the National Science Foundation has a $1.5 million grant for you! Or it did, until April, when President Donald Trump sacked all 22 members of its board.
The National Science Foundation, guided by the presidentially appointed National Science Board, exists to “promote the progress of science, advance the national health, prosperity and welfare, and secure the national defense.” The independent federal agency does this “chiefly by making grants” of taxpayer money to universities and research institutions.
You might think that a 22-member board supposedly composed of a diverse array of scientists and researchers would be immune to the influence of politics, fads, and groupthink. If only.
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When most people think of scientific research, they picture particle accelerators, DNA ladders, and chemical reactions. But, like many federal agencies, the NSB and the NSF have, in recent years, allowed activism to creep into their mission. In 2020, the NSF began a program called NSF ADVANCE to contribute to its “goal of a more diverse and capable science and engineering workforce.”
“Diverse and capable?” The two are not mutually exclusive, but nor are they necessarily complementary. They’re, at best, unrelated. It’s too bad logic isn’t considered a scientific discipline. It might have saved the taxpayers the $270 million granted under the auspices of NSF ADVANCE between 2021 and 2024.
Some of the programs that received grants include the University of South Florida, which got $1.5 million to include content on “anti-black-racism” in undergraduate civil and environmental engineering curricula, replacing traditional technical coursework with ideologically driven content framed around environmental justice and activism.
The University of Colorado at Boulder received $349,985 for a longitudinal study tracking how “decolonization” and social justice movements influence graduate engineering students’ career aspirations, with the explicit aim of building theory on social justice-driven “value system development” within the engineering profession.
Arizona State University was awarded $3,206,383 for something called “Black Girls as Creators: an intersectional learning ecosystem toward gendered racial equity in Artificial Intelligence education.” It held racially exclusive summer camps.
Virginia Tech got $663,883 pandemic relief money from the NSF to train engineering diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators.
And then, of course, there were the “sister circles.”
It’s hard to see what these grants did to advance or support scientific research. It’s also hard to see if they even helped advance scientific education. But those weren’t all.
The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation reported that, from 2021 through April 2024, “3,483 grants, more than ten percent of all NSF grants and totaling over $2.05 billion in federal dollars, went to questionable projects that promoted DEI tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle. The Committee grouped these grants into five categories: Status, Social Justice, Gender, Race, and Environmental Justice.”
The Trump administration realized that the NSF had lost its way and fired the whole NSB. According to research analyst Andrew Follett, “roughly half its members are not practicing scientists at all; they are university administrators, grant officers, or career bureaucrats whose expertise lies in navigating federal compliance regimes rather than conducting original research.”
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The move was in keeping with two of the president’s early executive orders: ensuring government decisions are based on “gold standard science,” and purging unconstitutional and discriminatory initiatives from the government and institutions it funds. Unfortunately, grants like those above were long on activism and short on science.
The NSB needed reform. The president’s actions are a good start.
Michael Chamberlain is the director of Protect the Public’s Trust.