At the start of the Cold War, Congress created the National Science Foundation as part of an effort to stay ahead of the Soviet Union in the scientific arms race. The NSF’s mission, in its own words, is “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense; and for other purposes.” In its early days, the Biden administration tacked on a new goal: to expand the frontier of diversity, equity, and inclusion in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education.
A recent report from the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation found that the NSF issued more than $2 billion in grants pushing DEI ideology. Our own analysis found that the Biden administration has doled out at least $827.3 million exclusively in NSF grants intended to shape STEM education.
To conduct our analysis, we first used keywords such as “intersectional,” “privilege,” “Latinx,” and “activism” to flag grants. We then read every flagged grant to confirm or deny whether it advanced left-wing ideology. With words like “intersectional,” virtually every grant flagged was clearly ideologically laden. Words like “equitable” sometimes were and sometimes weren’t. We counted grants promoting “equitable testing” as ideological, because that is a term of art for lowering merit-based standards to reduce minority achievement gaps. We did not, however, count grants as ideological that merely used “equitable” in passing as a synonym for “effective.” Last year, the Biden administration doled out about $120 million in grants for ideologically “equitable” projects—about ten times as much as in the last year of the Trump administration.
The NSF expended about $360 million to make STEM education “culturally relevant” or “culturally responsive.” Those buzzwords were pioneered by Gloria Ladson-Billings, the professor who introduced critical race theory to K–12 education, and they almost invariably signify efforts to infuse curricula with racialized Marxism. For example, the NSF spent $400,000 on a “culturally responsive” project that aims to “design and refine[] . . . modules for raising critical consciousness in undergraduate mathematics teacher preparation.” (Critical consciousness is another term for “Marxist worldview.”) The project will draw upon experts in “justice” to develop “critical pedagogies” that address “political . . . issues in mathematics education [and] identity.”
NSF grants also focused on rewriting biology to conform to gender ideology. The agency provided $905,642 for a “qualitative inquiry into sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming students” to create a “more inclusive environment.” The NSF provided $119,520 for a conference titled “Re-imagining Biology Education Through Social Justice,” featuring a talk on “Gender-Inclusive Adaptations to Biology Teaching.”
Under Biden, the NSF has figured out exactly what America needs to win the AI tech race: $772,953 in spending on “Black Feminist Epistemologies: Building a Sisterhood in Computing.”
The foundation provided $6.9 million for various projects de-emphasizing the scientific process in favor of what it calls “native” or “indigenous ways of knowing.” For example, $399,930 was spent on a project to honor “indigenous knowledge” by “infusing native ways of knowing into engineering education,” but without engaging in the “misappropriation of indigenous knowledge.” The NSF provided $1.29 million to promote “youth as participatory designers of indigenous mixed reality science exhibits” that address “the ongoing marginalization of indigenous communities in informal science learning spaces.”
The agency has managed to infuse wokeness in places where, just a few years ago, scientists might have doubted whether it was even possible. The NSF spent $600,000 in aerospace engineering to sharpen “student critical consciousness and sensitivity to injustices within social systems through integration of macro-ethics (ethics of large-scale issues as opposed to individual ethics) into aerospace engineering science curriculum.” In addition to using “photon spectrography” to explore “new quantum light imaging modalities applicable in biology and medical imaging,” a $3 million NSF grant in quantum mechanics will “detect phenomena that evade identification in the human-scaled realm of lived experience,” such as how “students perceive themselves as science learners via their science identity, [and] racial and gender identity.”
It’s crucial to note that, while federal law prohibits the Department of Education from creating or influencing public school or college curriculum, no such law prohibits the NSF from doing so. Biden’s first year in office saw a major controversy over a Department of Education regulation intended to promote a social studies curriculum that highlighted Ibram X. Kendi’s “anti-racism” and the 1619 Project. That proposed rule would have seen the Department of Education spend $5 million on grants to make social studies education woke. After intense pushback, that program was shelved. Yet the NSF has spent more than 150 times as much injecting left-wing ideology into STEM education—with essentially no public notice.
The Soviet Union may no longer exist. But we do still have to contend with a rising China, an international arms race in AI, and innumerable crises and diseases in need of scientific breakthroughs. Instead of leveraging the National Science Foundation to cultivate the next generation of American scientists, the Biden administration has spent more than $800 million undercutting them by infusing diversity ideology into STEM.
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