Trump’s Plans To End Woke Science Funding Are Stalling

Donald Trump has a great idea, and orders everyone to do it. But what happens next?

That question is being tested at the National Science Foundation (NSF), an independent federal agency created in the early years of the Cold War that distributes billions of dollars in research grants every year. Everything Americans are fighting about in our culture war shows up in the debate about federal science funding, as does the political problem of bureaucratic intransigence in the face of a new administration’s course corrections. The puzzle at the NSF is the puzzle in all of the executive branch: Is policy executed? Do the agencies do what the President of the United States tells them to do?

For years, scientists have warned that the outsized financial influence of the NSF warps and distorts science, pushing ladder faculty at research universities toward work that will bring in government funding: “The steady growth of perverse incentives, and their instrumental role in faculty research, hiring and promotion practices, amounts to a systemic dysfunction endangering scientific integrity.” If you’re a young professor and you want tenure, get federal funding. To get federal funding, fit your research into the government’s list of priorities.

In recent years, the government’s list of science funding priorities has been trending steadily leftward. Last February, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, opened a database identifying $2 billion in Biden-era NSF funding that “promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.” An earlier report from Cruz called out a series of specific grants to (for example) fund research on white privilege in STEM and train young people to be climate activists.

NSF funds a bunch of real science — “Probing Nucleation and Growth Dynamics of Lithium Dendrites in Solid Electrolytes,” for example — but they’ve also funded a long list of projects like this: “All NSF ADVANCE proposals are expected to use intersectional approaches in the design of systemic change strategies in recognition that gender, race and ethnicity do not exist in isolation from each other and from other categories of social identity.”

Criticism hasn’t only come from politicians or the political right, and some of the most powerful alarms have been sounded inside the universities. In a 2024 paper, “Politicizing science funding undermines public trust in science, academic freedom, and the unbiased generation of knowledge,” eight academic scientists warned against the loss of serious research through the imposition of political agendas. “When funding agencies politicize science by using their power to further a particular ideological agenda, they contribute to public mistrust in science,” they wrote. “Hijacking science funding to promote DEI is thus a threat to our society.”

Academics — some, anyway — have seen the point of a fight for freedom of inquiry in a culture of openness, with merit-based research systems pursuing evidence-focused science. The heterodox National Association of Scholars has addressed this problem with great and sustained clarity.

Then came Donald Trump’s second term. Along with other battles over NSF funding, at least two of Trump’s executive orders have sought to broadly limit the woke focus and DEI agenda in federal agencies that fund grants, including the NSF. Executive Order 14303, “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” requires that funding for science be for science, directing “that agencies practice data transparency, acknowledge relevant scientific uncertainties, are transparent about the assumptions and likelihood of scenarios used, approach scientific findings objectively, and communicate scientific data accurately.” And Executive Order 14332 imposes significant new political oversight in the area of federal grants, with the intent of preventing the government from “propagating absurd ideologies.” A variety of other presidential actions have covered topics that involve the NSF.

And then? The critics of the NSF’s woke focus all have some version of the same answer: not much.

Igor Efimov is a professor of biomedical engineering and medicine at Northwestern University, and the first author of that 2024 paper on the politicization of science funding. “While I welcome efforts to separate political agendas from research funding decisions, I do not see any concrete steps toward the proclaimed return to merit-based, evidence-focused science,” he told The Federalist. “NSF has been without a leader since April 2025, which sends the wrong message at a time when we are about to lose the competition for scientific leadership to China.”

Jeffrey Flier, a professor at the Harvard School of Medicine and the former dean of faculty there, was also an author of the 2024 paper. He’s similarly unenthused. “I consider the Trump administration’s actions in the realm of research funding for NIH and NSF to be extremely poorly considered and implemented, and incredibly harmful to the US research ecosystem,” he said. “I say this as someone who has advocated for some meaningful reforms to NSF and NIH but sees the administration’s efforts as substituting incoherent and in some instances illegal flailing for well considered reform.”

Echoing a set of responses that cross boundaries between topics and agencies, a third author of the 2024 paper told the Federalist that the Trump administration’s science initiatives are “a mixed bag.” Anna Krylov, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California, started with the good news: “Positive changes include purging DEI mandates — such as those documented in our paper — from the federal funding and cancellation of loony DEI grants with titles such as ‘Identifying, Enabling, and Supporting Racial Justice in Science Teaching,’ ‘Reimagining Educator Learning Pathways Through Storywork for Racial Equity in STEM,’ or  ‘Examining Blackness in Postsecondary STEM Education through a Multidimensional-Multiplicative Lens.’”

But Krylov remains concerned. “On the negative side is the disruption due to sanctions imposed on many universities — even when such sanctions are well justified, they damage STEM research.” Her bottom line is a question: “Were these changes politically motivated or do they represent normal priority setting and rebalancing of research portfolios?”

Finally, David Randall — the director of research at NAS, whose webinar you see above — answered my questions about Trump’s policy measures in detail, describing a problem that shows up all over the federal government:

The Trump administration has issued an amazing number of good Executive Orders and similar administrative actions. Some of these need to be done as legislation, or to go through regular administrative procedure as judges undo their initial actions–see the attempt to limit indirect costs, which a judge just overturned. (To be challenged at a higher level?) Others need to be executed in detail — one executive order needs to be translated into changes in every individual program, rule, practice, requirement, etc. So those need time, simply to formulate, and then to make sure they actually are enforced.

The metric, therefore, is a steady stream of changed regulations enforcing the Executive Orders on a granular level — and, I suppose, complaints from the Establishment as the status quo gets changed. 

Good start, smart framing, not nearly enough detailed execution inside the agency, no help from Congress. An “amazing number of good executive orders,” first, but then the need to “make sure they are actually enforced.” For Trump, the problem at the NSF is the problem in the entire government. Do the agencies carry out the president’s directives?

If you look at the website for the NSF’s Executive Office of the Director, you can see the first part of the problem:

“Personnel is policy,” and the effort to reform the enormous federal government requires hundreds of key appointments. Currently, the NSF is being run by its chief of staff, Brian Stone, who didn’t respond to my request for comment.

From the top down, the NSF is announcing its intention to follow President Trump’s policy directives. A page of “Updates on NSF Priorities” describes the agency’s new funding plans. Among other noteworthy declarations, the NSF is announcing an end to its long effort to fund studies on “disinformation,” which trended heavily toward the science of Orange Man Bad, progressives warm and kind. Following the president’s lead, the agency says, “NSF will not prioritize research proposals that engage in or facilitate any conduct that would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.”

But scientists who closely follow NSF funding measures point to ongoing research opportunities that seem to skirt the administration’s priorities in quiet ways, pouring old wine into new bottles. An NSF-funded project on “Creating Learning Environments for Advancing Researchers,” for example, happens to be overseen by academic officials like the “Assistant Vice President, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Assessment, Chief Diversity Officer, Chief Institutional Research Officer, Cal Tech.” It’s framed as not-DEI, but it’s managed by people who do DEI. There’s a trend, here, as colleges all over the country have rebranded DEI efforts to evade bans on DEI.

In a statement, the administration seems to declare something close to victory while quietly acknowledging that there’s more work to be done at NSF: “Although the Trump administration has made historic progress to restore Gold Standard Science and national security imperatives at the National Science Foundation and other public research bodies, we will continue to focus on ensuring that taxpayer dollars advance the American people’s best interest instead of ideological pet projects,” said White House Spokesman Kush Desai.

Time will tell, but the problem merits sustained attention. Agencies either answer to the President of the United States or they don’t, and the NSF is a test case that matters.

Chris Bray is a former infantry sergeant in the U.S. Army, and has a history PhD from the University of California Los Angeles, not that it did him any good. He also posts on Substack, at “Tell Me How This Ends,” here.