WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The National Science Foundation (NSF) spent more than $2 billion of taxpayers’ money imposing “woke” ideology on scientific research over the course of the Biden administration, according to a new report from the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation.
“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 diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle,” the report found. Those grants fell into five categories: “Status, Social Justice, Gender, Race, and Environmental Justice.” Perhaps most significantly, the Biden administration raised DEI’s share of total NSF disbursements from 0.29 percent in 2021 to more than 27 percent as of April 2024.
Highlights include $2 million to address “anti-black racism” in engineering curricula at University of California Berkeley and the University of South Florida, and a projected $786,285 price tag for a “hub for justice-centered science education” fixating on the “interwoven nature of climate justice and racial justice” at San Jose State University.
Calling the findings “only the tip of the iceberg,” University of Southern California chemist Anna Krylov told The College Fix that in “addition to these grants that are clearly dedicated to advancing the Critical Social Justice agenda (which commonly operates under the name of DEI), the ideological, non-scientific criteria are also applied to funding of technical projects…This is done either through the mandatory DEI statements or through the ‘Broader Impact’ criteria, or both.”
“We can expect that the new government will roll back the most egregious DEI policies, such as DEI-mandating executive orders, which is a welcome development,” she added. “However, this alone is not sufficient — more significant changes are needed to root out DEI from the funding agencies and other institutions, to reduce bureaucratization of science, and to restore focus on merit. For this, the scientific community must mobilize and act.”
The 2024 elections, in which former President Donald Trump won a return to the White House and Republicans won both chambers of Congress, has been seen in part as a rebuke to Democrats’ focus on so-called woke ideology. So such grants are all but certain to be targeted by the new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which despite the name is a private advisory organization spearheaded by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy that will examine federal spending and present the incoming Trump administration with recommendations for what to cut.