NSF Grants With DEI Language Drop to 9% in 2025, Lowest Share Since 2001

The National Science Foundation awarded grants containing DEI-related language at the lowest rate since 2001, according to data obtained by the Washington Free Beacon from DeepAudit, a nonprofit that uses AI to analyze federal grant text. The share fell to 9 percent in 2025, down from 34 percent in 2022.

The decline accelerated after President Trump took office in January 2025 and directed agencies to eliminate DEI-based funding preferences. The scale of the drop reflects a reversal of a trend that had been building for roughly two decades.

The Numbers

DeepAudit analyzed abstracts from NSF grant applications going back to 1990, tracking terms like "equity," "diversity," "inclusion," "gender," "marginalize," "underrepresented," and "disparity." In 2021, under President Biden, NSF awarded $3.4 billion in grants containing at least one of those terms. By 2025, that figure dropped to $400 million, an 88 percent decrease, according to the Free Beacon's reporting.

Jonah Davids, DeepAudit's director of research, told the Free Beacon the current numbers put grant funding roughly back to where it stood in 2001, before what he called the "great awokening." In the NSF's education and human resources division, where DEI language was once used in more than half of funded abstracts between 2018 and 2024, that figure is now below 15 percent, according to Davids, putting it in line with divisions like computer science and physics.

The NSF controls about 25 percent of all federal research dollars that flow to American universities, so shifts in its funding criteria ripple through higher education nationally.

How the Cuts Happened

The drop in DEI-flagged language reflects both a change in what NSF funds going forward and a retroactive purge of existing grants. Since April 2025, NSF has canceled more than 1,500 grants and contracts worth over $1 billion, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute using the Grant Watch database, a project run by Noam Ross of rOpenSci and Harvard researcher Scott Delaney.

Urban Institute's review found the cancellations hit some places far harder than others. Massachusetts's Fifth Congressional District, home to institutions tied to Harvard's ongoing funding disputes with the administration, lost more than $165 million, about 40 percent of its total NSF funding. Colorado's Second District, covering the University of Colorado Boulder and Colorado State, lost more than $29 million. Arizona's Fourth District, home to Arizona State University, lost more than $26 million.

NSF's stated justification, per the Urban Institute, was that grants prioritizing specific demographic groups no longer "effectuate NSF priorities." The Office of Management and Budget has since proposed a rule requiring NSF grants to align with the administration's stated goal of eliminating programs that don't "reflect the values of the vast majority of the American public," according to the Free Beacon.

The Legal Fight, and What's Unresolved

A coalition of scientific and academic groups, including the American Association of Physics Teachers and the United Auto Workers (representing graduate researchers), sued in June 2025 to block the terminations, arguing they were arbitrary, violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and raised separation-of-powers and due-process problems, according to the Guardian. A federal judge in the District of Columbia declined to issue a preliminary injunction, finding the plaintiffs hadn't shown a likelihood of success on their constitutional claims or irreparable harm from the prospective cuts. That case is still proceeding on the merits; no final ruling has been issued.

The strongest case critics have centers on an argument that isn't about whether DEI-focused research is inherently worthless. Rather, they contend that mass, abrupt cancellations of already-awarded, already-budgeted grants disrupted ongoing experiments, graduate students' funding, and years of institutional planning without the kind of individualized review the underlying statutes arguably require. The Guardian's framing emphasizes that congressional mandates originally pushed NSF to expand participation by women, people of color, and people with disabilities in STEM fields specifically to widen the talent pool for national competitiveness, not as an ideological add-on. Whether that congressional intent required the specific grant language NSF had been funding, or whether agencies had wide discretion to redefine "priorities," is precisely what's still being litigated.

DeepAudit's Leif Rasmussen acknowledged a real limitation in this kind of analysis: some grant applicants may simply be avoiding DEI-coded language now while pursuing similar work under different terminology. That means the raw percentage drop could overstate how much actual programmatic change has happened.

What isn't contested is the raw scale of the numbers. A fall from $3.4 billion in flagged grants in 2021 to $400 million in 2025 has occurred alongside a court that has so far let the administration's cancellations stand while the underlying legal challenge continues. The case's ultimate merits ruling, whenever it comes, will determine whether this becomes a permanent structural change to how NSF funds science or a temporary disruption subject to reversal.