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Early medical care during pregnancy can prevent complications, and lead to healthier babies and parents-to-be. In 2022, Evangeline Warren, a sociology PhD student at Ohio State University, received a “diversity supplement” grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study medical mistrust among pregnant people. Over two years, she interviewed dozens of patients across Ohio who’d expressed discomfort about going to the doctor—gathering information which, she hopes, will improve medical visits, and ultimately, save lives.
Yet if she applied for this project in 2025, it’s unclear if it ever would happen. The NIH grant she’d received, which had been around since 1989, is typically given to hundreds of researchers every year to supplement ongoing NIH-funded research and support underrepresented groups’ participation in the sciences. (In her application, for instance, Warren flagged that she is multiracial and has a disability.)
But within days of Donald Trump’s second stint as president, the NIH removed or altered webpages about the diversity supplement program and stopped accepting applications, marking the grant as “expired,” only to apparently reinstate them later—sparking concern about the future of the program. (NIH didn’t respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones.)
Luckily for Warren and her colleagues, her grant concluded at the end of 2024. “I made it out under the wire,” she says. But as someone who benefited from one of these programs, she’s “heartbroken” to see it come under threat. “I’m really worried about what it means for junior colleagues,” she says, noting that the grants typically involve mentorship and professional development for early-career researchers. If we lose those scientists, she says, “we’re going to miss out on areas of discovery that aren’t even on our radar.”
The NIH supplements are just one potential casualty among the ongoing, government-wide war on DEI, or diversity, equity, and inclusion. Trump kicked it off with a January 21 executive order aimed at ending “immoral” “race- and sex-based preferences” at federal agencies. While it’s unclear what research or programs, specifically, fall under Trump’s definition of DEI, the order has already set off chaos and confusion throughout the science world, as agencies like the NIH, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the National Science Foundation (NSF) scramble to comply with it.
The NSF, for instance, which spends most of its $9.06 billion budget on funding academic research, has begun combing through grants for terms like “disability,” “diversity,” “equity,” “gender,” “historically,” “marginalized,” and “women,” among others, in an apparent attempt to weed out projects deemed non-compliant. (NSF initially froze funding too, including for ongoing awards, until a federal judge blocked the agency from doing so.) Researchers wanting to access NSF’s payment system, ACM$, were told at one point that funding would be unavailable while the agency conducted a “comprehensive review” of its portfolio, according to NSF memos reviewed by Mother Jones.
Meanwhile, workers at the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the NIH, the CDC, and the Food and Drug Administration, received a memo urging them to report colleagues who’ve used “coded or imprecise language” to “disguise” DEI efforts—or face “adverse consequences.” On top of that, Trump officials have reportedly removed more than 8,000 federal web pages, including pages devoted to workplace diversity at the CDC, health equity at the FDA, and some mentioning “broadening participation” in science at NSF. Research review panels at NIH and NSF, where experts convene to assess grant proposals, were also put on hold, grinding all new funding to a halt for more than a week. (Many panels have since restarted.)
“This kind of halt to the review of scientific proposals has never before happened,” an NSF employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity told Mother Jones.
If left unchecked, Trump’s unprecedented crackdown on anything considered DEI, scientists worry, will reshape who can participate in science for years to come, drain creativity and fresh ideas, limit the scope of projects, and by extension, lead to worse research. And that’s not just bad for scientists; it’s bad for the health and safety of the rest of us. “It is just common sense that in order to have the best science, we need the broadest, most inclusive environment for scientists,” says Jacob Hoover Vigly, a postdoctoral fellow at MIT. As Warren warns, “We are very much at risk of losing an entire generation of researchers, and that will negatively affect us for generations.”
Fostering diversity in science isn’t a new idea. In 1945, Vannevar Bush, the director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, defended the need to expand opportunity in the field in a report titled, “Science: The Endless Frontier.” The prescient paper, which paved the way for the founding of NSF in 1950, argued that scientific advancement is “essential” to the United States’ national security, job creation, and health of its residents. And it stressed that one of the keys to advancement was widening the pool of scientists empowered to do research.
Science, Bush felt, should be a field based on competitive merit and talent—but barriers often prevented all but the wealthiest from competing. “Higher education in this country is largely for those who have the means,” he wrote, adding, “there are talented individuals in every segment of the population” who often can’t access it. “Here is a tremendous waste of the greatest resource of a nation—the intelligence of its citizens.” Part of the solution for the most meritorious system, he asserted, is to “encourage and enable” a larger number of people to “take up science as a career” through scholarships and fellowships. In other words, greater opportunity would enhance a merit-based system.
In 1980, Congress passed the “NSF Authorization and Science and Technology Equal Opportunities Act,” aiming to support activities and programs that encourage people “of all ethnic, racial, and economic backgrounds” to have “equal opportunity in education, training, and employment in scientific and technical fields.” More than forty years later, in 2022, the CHIPS and Science Act called on NSF to invest further in minority-serving institutions and appoint a chief diversity officer.
Those reforms have led to some incremental progress. But there’s plenty more work to be done: As of 2023, the most recent year available, women made up about 48 percent of grad students in science, engineering, and health in the US, but are still underrepresented in science and technology careers. Hispanic, Black, American Indian, or Alaska Native people collectively account for 37 percent of the US population between the ages 18 to 34, according to a 2023 NSF report (which is now scrubbed from the agency’s website), but only 24 percent of master’s degrees in science and engineering, and just 16 percent of doctoral degrees. An estimated 72 percent of all full-time faculty at colleges and universities are white, even as 58 percent of the country’s population identifies that way.
The slow pace of diversifying science has likely come at a cost. Research shows broadening the makeup of teams can enhance, creativity, innovation, and productivity, NSF’s Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering noted in 2023. Other research has shown that ethnic diversity among teams correlates with amplified scientific impact. These benefits are particularly clear, as a group of University of Massachusetts, Amherst-led researchers wrote in 2017, when women and people of color aren’t just on teams, but fully integrated in them. “If organizations and fields (and nations) cannot include all scientists, they will flounder,” the researchers concluded.
Now, programs that were supposed to help bridge the gap are under attack by officials who’ve labeled DEI as a form of radical wokeness. “DEI is just another word for racism,” Elon Musk, now at the helm of the unofficial “Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE, posted on X last year.
Broad swaths of research have been lumped into the MAGA camp’s definition of “DEI”: In an October 2024 report from Sen. Ted Cruz, titled, “D.E.I.: Division. Extremism. Ideology. How the Biden-Harris NSF Politicized Science,” the Texas Republican claimed that NSF funded thousands of “questionable projects” under the Biden administration that promoted DEI “tenets” or pushed “neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle.” This week, Cruz released the full database of studies. (Notably, the review only analyzed grants awarded under Biden, not before, and many of the broad search terms used to identify them—including “minorities,” “increase diversity,” and “barrier”—were probably in use dating back to the 80s and 90s, the NSF employee says, the era of NSF’s 1980 equal opportunity law.)
Kylea Garces is an NSF-funded postdoc whose grant was on the list. She studies plant fungi. She wonders if her work was flagged because in her grant application, she shared that she was a first-generation, multiracial woman. “Even if I had the opportunity to alter this work to be in compliance, whatever that may mean, I can’t remove my identity in my story,” she says. “And that being under attack hurts probably the most.” (So far, no action has been taken to remove her funding.)
But all sorts of research—on topics the administration may deem inappropriate, or conducted by scientists on “DEI” grants—appears to be on the chopping block. Isabel Low, for instance, a neuroscience postdoctoral research scientist at Columbia University, says her funding is set to dry up in about a year. In preparing for her next career step, she was looking to apply for three grants, two of which were open to researchers from underrepresented backgrounds, including women: NIH’s MOSAIC and BRAIN Initiative awards. Now, she’s not sure those awards will be available. After the inauguration, “the web pages for these grants were just disappearing in real time,” she says. (Applications for these grants appear to have been restored, for now.)
Low’s research, which focuses on how memories form in the brain, isn’t related to DEI as a subject area. “I’m just an underrepresented person in academia trying to do this work,” she says, adding, “This just hurts research broadly across the board.”
One professor at a Midwestern university, who also spoke anonymously, says he recently drew upon NIH’s supplement to enhance diversity to hire a postdoc at the end of January. But as of this week, the money hasn’t yet arrived. “If I had to bet,” the professor says, that money probably isn’t going to show up.” While he plans to continue supporting the postdoc, he says, at a public university, “There’s only so much moving around money one can do.”
Unfortunately, cuts to funding tend to hurt junior researchers first—grad students, postdocs, and early-career professors without the same safety net as established scientists. Which is a shame, the professor says, because “the junior people are always the most creative,” a trait he argues is critical to the advancement of science.
Research on topics like women’s health, health disparities, environmental justice, or historic inequities may be especially vulnerable, researchers worry. The Midwestern professor, for instance, has a grant proposal up for review at the NIH related to women’s health. Now he’s concerned the grant won’t get green-lit by the administration, at least in full. “I’m not sure studies of women’s health are going to fit broadly into what they want to fund,” he says.
Warren, at Ohio State, studies the effects of discrimination on health—an issue that she fears will become “a point of focus” for the administration. While most of her funding comes from her university, she worries about her field generally: “If we don’t study these things,” she says, “It becomes a lot harder to make coherent policy arguments for why we need to address societal problems.”
The tools and data researchers rely on are at risk too. Shortly after Trump took office, for instance, the administration cut access to the Council on Environmental Quality’s Climate & Economic Justice Screening Tool, which scientists used to track areas most vulnerable to pollution. This helps them address basic health questions about environmental hazards. “That’s not DEI,” says Sacoby Wilson, an environmental health scientist and professor at the University of Maryland. “That’s a science question.”
On a practical level, weeding out diversity and inclusion from science may be harder than it sounds. Because many grants have some sort of mandated diversity component, DEI is embedded in the DNA of scientific research. As an NSF-funded biologist who asked to remain anonymous explains, “Congress has required that the NSF work on broadening participation of people in science. That is required by law,” he notes, pointing to the 1980 NSF equal opportunity law.
On the downside, that means, “Everybody at the NSF has a certain level of insecurity from the DEIA standpoint,” he says. “Where does the terrible, awful, ideological purging line get drawn?”
Perhaps the most lasting threat of Trump’s DEI purge is an indirect one: good scientists quitting government-supported science—or steering clear of it in the first place.
Some of Warren’s peers, for instance, are considering private employment instead of a faculty or research job, she says. “That’s a great loss,” she says. “Those are folks who otherwise would be making discoveries that could benefit the public good.” Now, they’ll be “cordoned off in corporate land.”
Others are weighing leaving the country to pursue research on friendlier shores. “It feels less stable here now,” says Vigly. Some scientists worry that foreign researchers, who have long flocked to the US given its reputation for plentiful opportunities, will be dissuaded. “If we’re not putting our money where our mouth is in training world’s scientists, then all we’ve invested in the science in the US will not mean anything anymore,” the NSF-funded biologist notes. If scientists are limited in the scope of their work, he says, “the United States will no longer be the place where you go to do the best science.”
That’s not to say all young researchers are giving up hope. “There are thousands of postdocs and grad students across the country who are part of unions who are ready to fight on this,” Low, a steward for her postdoc union, UAW Local 4100, says. Even before the election, she’d started working with a coalition of researcher unions called Fair Research Careers Now to push for better working conditions for early-career scientists. After Trump paused federal funding for many researcher salaries, the group organized a virtual phone bank to call their representatives in Congress. Hundreds of people showed up—so many, that they had to increase their capacity on Zoom. “When we come together as unionized researchers,” Low says, “we can have a lot of power.” (Disclosure: UAW also represents Mother Jones and Reveal employees.)
Warren, for her part, is on track to graduate with her PhD in May. While she wasn’t planning to pursue a career in academia, she had considered applying for a postdoctoral fellowship, perhaps to study racism and health. Unfortunately, the grants she’d rely on are offered by NIH and NSF. “And with that amount of uncertainty,” she says, it wouldn’t make sense to apply for them. The first weeks of the Trump administration, she adds, “have really shown that what many consider to be a very stable career path is not, in fact, stable. At the whim of a single executive order, things can be thrown into chaos.”
Beyond the chaos in the near-term, a country with fewer scientists means less life-saving research, “a tremendous waste of the greatest resource of a nation—the intelligence of its citizens,” as Bush put it in 1945. And, at least for some researchers, it cuts against the very idea of what American science is—or was. As Warren says, “If we have suddenly decided that diversity is not a core value of our country, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the American project is.”
