New data show the share of National Science Foundation grants carrying DEI language has collapsed from 34 percent in 2022 to just 9 percent in 2025, the lowest level since 2001.
The numbers, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon from the research nonprofit DeepAudit, tell a simple story. In 2021 the NSF handed out $3.4 billion in grants containing terms like "equity," "diversity," "inclusion," "gender," "marginalize," "underrepresented" or "disparity." By 2025 that figure had fallen to roughly $400 million. An 88 percent drop, in four years, at one of the federal government's largest basic-science funders.
That is not a rounding error. It is a foundation-wide reversal of what researchers who track the data call "the great awokening," the surge of identity-focused language that crept into NSF proposals and award abstracts over the past decade. The Trump administration has spent its first eighteen months methodically stripping it back out, and the DeepAudit numbers are the clearest evidence yet of how far that effort has gone.
The DeepAudit findings corroborate an earlier, independent inquiry. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz released a database in February identifying more than 3,400 NSF grants, worth over $2.05 billion, awarded between January 2021 and April 2024 that his committee flagged for promoting DEI initiatives or what Cruz's report called "neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda." The committee built the list using keyword searches across grant abstracts rather than a manual review of every award, and it drew immediate pushback. Some flagged projects, including a $470,000 study of mint plant evolution cited for the words "diversify" and "female," turned out to reference plant biodiversity and a young female scientist's career, not DEI programming. NPR and other outlets have noted the list also swept in research on self-driving car safety and solar eclipses.
Cruz's office has stood by the database as a roadmap for what he calls wasteful, ideologically driven spending, and the NSF's own actions since have tracked closely with it. Science magazine reported that sources close to the agency say NSF's grant terminations followed the blueprint Cruz's committee laid out in an October 2024 report, months before Trump took office.
NSF's defense and the mounting cuts
The NSF has said publicly that it is reviewing its research portfolio to ensure compliance with President Trump's executive orders ending federal DEI initiatives, not simply cutting arbitrarily. But the scale of the reduction extends well beyond a language purge. Higher education outlets have reported broad NSF budget cuts and layoffs this year, with roughly three-quarters of the agency's funding cuts landing on education-related grants specifically. Trump has also removed the NSF's external oversight board, a move that eliminates one of the last independent checks on how the agency sets its funding priorities.
Not every canceled grant is going quietly. Researchers at multiple universities, including Princeton, where the Cruz investigation targeted roughly $2.4 million in grants, have pushed back publicly on individual terminations, arguing the keyword-based flagging swept up legitimate science alongside genuine DEI programming. Some of those disputes are working their way toward litigation, though no major court ruling has yet reversed an NSF termination tied to the DEI reviews.
For conservatives who have argued for years that federal science funding drifted from merit-based research toward ideological box-checking, the DeepAudit numbers are hard evidence that the argument won. For nearly $3 billion in annual grant spending to migrate away from equity and inclusion framing in under four years is not a subtle shift, it is a wholesale change in what gets funded and why.
The open question now is durability. Cruz's committee database and the NSF's own terminations were both built during a single administration's window, and a future Congress or a future NSF director could reverse course just as quickly. Watch for how many of the disputed terminations end up in federal court, and whether Congress moves to codify the funding criteria in statute rather than leaving them to executive discretion.
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