Coming from an official announcement
Every tax dollar the Government spends should improve American lives or advance American interests. This often does not happen. Federal grants have funded drag shows in Ecuador, trained doctoral candidates in critical race theory, and developed transgender-sexual-education programs. In 2024, one study claimed that more than one-quarter of new National Science Foundation (NSF) grants went to diversity, equity, and inclusion and other far-left initiatives. These NSF grants included those to educators that promoted Marxism, class warfare propaganda, and other anti-American ideologies in the classroom, masked as rigorous and thoughtful investigation.
While I once believed that funding should primarily support the advancement of core scientific methods and studies rather than numerous DEI initiatives, this view is a grotesque distortion of reality, especially when we consider the so-called “study” the White House is citing. Many DEI projects are, in fact, valuable educational efforts or have an environmental focus, often addressing critical research needs that receive little to no funding from other sources.
Here is a brief overview how these numbers were produced, and key problems that I have with the methods. The statement comes from the October 9, 2024 Senate Republican staff report Division. Extremism. Ideology: How the Biden-Harris NSF Politicized Science from the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation, then led by Sen. Ted Cruz (PDF, the original is no more available on Aug 12, 2025). The underlying dataset was released on February 11, 2025 (press release and database).
Staff analyzed 32,198 NSF prime awards with start dates between January 2021 and April 4, 2024. Using a keyword-based tagging process, they identified 3,483 awards they labeled as “DEI/neo-Marxist,” totaling more than $2.05 billion. The report says that for 2024 (measured only up to April 4), 27% of new grants fell into this category. Appendix A of the report explains the method. Staff pulled all NSF awards from USAspending.gov with start dates in the 2021–2024 window. They ran an n-gram/keyword search using glossaries from sources like NACo and the University of Washington, expanding the list to more than 800,000 variants. Awards with zero or only one keyword match were removed, and additional filtering plus manual checks produced the final set of 3,483. Grants were grouped into five thematic categories (Status, Social Justice, Gender, Race, Environment). The “27% in 2024” figure came from the share of awards in that subset with start dates in the first quarter of 2024.
Faults and shortcomings in the method
- The keyword approach equates the presence of certain words with being a DEI-focused grant, and the keyword list is very broad (including terms like “equity,” “privilege,” “climate change,” “systemic,” “historic*,” and “intersectional”), which can capture unrelated research.
- The 27% figure comes from only part of the year (January–April 2024), not a full year.
- There is ambiguity between counts and dollar amounts; the 27% refers to counts, not necessarily to total funding share.
- Removing all single-keyword matches and applying manual pruning introduces subjectivity and potential bias.
- Categories like “Social Justice” or “Race” are based purely on word presence, not actual research aims, conflating standard NSF education/broader impacts work with political advocacy.
- Reliance on abstracts and spending descriptions means the screen often catches standard boilerplate language that NSF requires by law.
- A House Science Committee Democratic staff review in April 2025 found numerous false positives in the Cruz dataset, such as biodiversity studies flagged for the word “diversity” or wildlife grants flagged for the word “female.” That review also notes that NSF is required by statute to consider “broader impacts” in all awards.
- The Senate report is a partisan staff product, not peer-reviewed, and uses normative framing (“neo-Marxist,” “extremist”) rather than neutral description.
Restoring „gold standard“ of science by non-scientists?
An US health secretary who wants to retract an Annals paper for personal opinion?