Ban on DEI language sweeps through the sciences

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine is an independent, 162-year-old nongovernmental agency tasked with investigating and reporting on a wide range of subjects. In recent years, diversity, equity and inclusion — collectively known as DEI — have been central to its agenda.

But the Academies’ priorities changed abruptly on Jan. 31. Shortly after receiving a “stop work” order from the Trump administration, the institute closed its Office of Diversity and Inclusion, removed prominent links to its work on DEI from its website’s homepage and paused projects on related themes.

Now the website highlights the Academies’ interest in artificial intelligence and “our work to build a robust economy.”

The quick about-face reflects the widespread impact that President Donald Trump’s executive order on DEI is having on scientific institutions across the nation, both governmental and private. The crackdown is altering scientific exploration and research agendas across a broad swath of fields.

NASA cut requirements for inclusivity from several of its programs. The National Institutes of Health removed the application for its new Environmental Justice Scholars Program. National laboratories under the Department of Energy took down webpages that had expressed a commitment to diversity, while the department suspended its promotion of inclusive and equitable research.

None of these federal agencies responded to requests for comment.

Many organizations initiated DEI programs as a way to correct historical underrepresentation in the sciences. According to one report, in 2021, just 35% of STEM employees were women, 9% were Black and less than 1% were Indigenous.

“If we want to be the best country for the world in terms of science, we need to leverage our entire population to do so,” said Julie Posselt, an associate dean at the University of Southern California. DEI programs, she added, “have ensured that the diverse population we have can make its way into the scientific workforce.”

Federal frenzy

One NASA program affected is FarmFlux, a research initiative on agricultural emissions that redacted plans to recruit from “diverse student groups” for its team. Mentions of another, called Here to Observe, which partners with smaller academic institutions to expose historically underrepresented students to planetary science, have been removed from the space agency’s website.

Peter Eley, a dean at Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University who, in 2023, worked as a liaison for minority-serving institutions in NASA’s Office of STEM, noted that such programs often support students from lower-income rural communities, regardless of their racial background.

Many of these students “don’t know what’s out there,” Eley said. “They don’t have the opportunity to see what is possible.”

At the National Science Foundation, or NSF, an agencywide review of current awards supporting DEI initiatives is underway. Part of the agency’s grant criteria includes “broader impacts,” defined as the potential to benefit society. That encompasses, but is not limited to, efforts to broaden participation of underrepresented groups in science.

According to a program director at the foundation, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, a software algorithm flagged grants that included words and phrases often associated with DEI, including “activism” and “equal opportunity.” Other words it searched for were more nebulous — “institutional,” “underappreciated” and “women” — or can mean something else in scientific research, like “bias” and “polarization.”

NSF officials were instructed to manually review grants flagged by the algorithm. Some staff members, including the NSF program director, made a point of removing the flag from most awards. “I’ll probably get in trouble for doing that,” she said. “But I’m not in the business of McCarthyism.”

The NSF did not answer questions sent by The New York Times regarding its ongoing review of awards. Scientists funded by the agency whose research has DEI components said that they had not received enough information about how to comply with the executive order.

‘Obeying in advance’

Several scientists expressed concern that organizations within the federal sphere seem to be overcomplying, prompting confusion and resentment.

“They’re obeying in advance, they’re going beyond what the executive order says,” said Christine Nattrass, a physicist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who conducts research at Brookhaven National Laboratory and emphasized that she was not speaking on behalf of her institutions.