Science is Dead, Long Live Science

From the College Fix, Biden-Harris admin’s NSF spent over $2 billion imposing DEI on scientific research: Senate report

The federal government has spent over $2 billion dollars over the last three years infusing and embedding diversity, equity and inclusion concepts into scientific research – tainting the efforts with ideology and diminishing discoveries — according to the recently published findings of a report commissioned by a Senate subcommittee.

The National Science Foundation has awarded taxpayer dollars “to projects that divide Americans and support investigations or publications that are of questionable scientific value,” the 43-page report states.

A leading critic of the encroachment of DEI into STEM, Anna Krylov, said the findings illustrate a misuse of public funds by the NSF.

“[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 report traces the problem to the “beginning of the Biden-Harris administration.”

The National Science Foundation under this leadership, the report states, “increasingly funded research and programs that color scientific investigation and engagement projects through the lens of political ideology, undermining objective hard science disciplines…in which facts and theories can be precisely measured, tested, and independently 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.

It was already getting obvious long before I retired 10 years ago, with DEI requirement being written into requests for proposals (RFP) for hard science grants, and with a few woke-ish projects being funded, but recently it has gotten fairly pervasive: 

Among projects detailed in the report are a $349,985 University of Colorado endeavor to “identify learning experiences that enable engineering for social justice” and a $2 million joint effort by researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of South Florida to combat anti-black racism in engineering curricula.

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.”

Also on the list: an ongoing attempt by San Jose State University scientists to develop “a hub for justice-centered science education” that aims to produce “school-based materials and professional development activities that examine the interwoven nature of climate justice and racial justice” that will cost $786,285 by 2027.

Baker described many of the projects cited in the report as “unserious” and “observational reporting [that] isn’t really science.”

DEI projects initially accounted for 0.29 percent of funds dispersed by the NSF in 2021 — but by 2024 they were receiving more than 27 percent of NSF grant funding, according to the report.

This looks like an excellent opportunity for DOGE to make some cuts.