DEI Language in NSF Grants Just Fell to Its Lowest Share Since 2001 — Down From a Third of All Awards in 2022.

The share of successful National Science Foundation grants that contain diversity-equity-inclusion language has collapsed to its lowest point in a quarter century. According to data obtained exclusively by the Washington Free Beacon and published July 8, 2026, just 9 percent of successful NSF grant abstracts in 2025 contained DEI-coded terms — down from 34 percent in 2022. The last time the share was this low was 2001.

The analysis comes from DeepAudit, a nonprofit that used AI to scan the abstracts of every successful NSF grant application from 1990 through 2025. The dollar trend is even sharper than the language trend: grants containing at least one DEI-coded term drew $3,400,000,000 in NSF funding in 2021. By 2025 that figure had fallen to $400,000,000 — an 88 percent drop in four years.

The shift did not happen by accident. It tracks, almost exactly, the run-up and reversal of a specific federal equity mandate — and a Senate investigation, a leadership purge, and a DOGE-driven termination campaign that followed it. NSF funds roughly a quarter of all federally supported basic research at American universities, so how it defines “DEI” language shapes what science gets funded nationwide.

• 34% → 9% — share of successful NSF grants containing DEI-coded language, 2022 vs. 2025 — the lowest share since 2001 · Source: DeepAudit via Washington Free Beacon
• $3,400,000,000 → $400,000,000 — NSF funding attached to grants with DEI terms, 2021 vs. 2025 — an 88% drop · Source: Washington Free Beacon
• 50%+ → under 15% — share of Education & Human Resources grants with DEI language, 2018-2024 average vs. 2025 · Source: DeepAudit
• $2,050,000,000 / 3,483 grants — the DEI-coded NSF grants Sen. Ted Cruz's (R-TX) Senate Commerce Committee identified from Jan. 2021-Apr. 2024, over 10% of all NSF awards in that window · Source: Senate Commerce Committee
• 1,574 grants / $1,100,000,000 — NSF awards terminated since April 18, 2025; nearly 90% contained at least one flagged DEI term · Source: Urban Institute analysis of NSF termination data
• 22 of 22 — members of the National Science Board — NSF's entire governing body — removed by the Trump administration in April 2026 · Source: Science (AAAS)

DeepAudit’s researchers — Jonah Davids, the group’s director of research, and Leif Rasmussen, its director of technology — built a machine-learning model that scanned the text of every funded NSF grant abstract going back to 1990, checking for terms like “equity,” “diversity,” “inclusion,” “marginalize,” “underrepresented,” and “disparity.” The trend line rises gradually from the 1990s, accelerates sharply after 2020, peaks at 34 percent of awards in 2022, and then falls off a cliff — landing at 9 percent in 2025, a level the agency had not seen since 2001.

“The percent of grants with DEI terms being funded is now about the same as in 2001,” Davids told the Free Beacon. The decline was not confined to one field. It ran across computer science, math and physics, and every other STEM category DeepAudit tracked — including the one place DEI language had been most entrenched.

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The sharpest reversal is in NSF’s Education and Human Resources directorate, the division that funds STEM-workforce and classroom programs. From 2018 through 2024, more than 50 percent of that directorate’s awards carried DEI-coded language. By 2025, that share had fallen to below 15 percent — roughly in line with computer science, math, and physics, categories where DEI terms were never as common to begin with.

DeepAudit also tracked individual terms, and some of the declines are stark on their own. Mentions of “women” in successful abstracts fell from about 2 percent in 1990 to under 1 percent in 2025. “Gender” fell from roughly half a percent to under a quarter of a percent. “Latinx,” a term that did not appear in NSF abstracts before 2018, is now used in under 0.05 percent of awards. “Intersectional” and “marginalize” are both below a quarter of a percent.

The run-up is traceable to a specific policy, not a vague cultural drift. On his first day in office, President Joe Biden (D) signed Executive Order 13985, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” on January 20, 2021. It directed every federal agency — NSF included — to embed equity assessments into its funding decisions. NSF, which was then led by Sethuraman Panchanathan, a nonpartisan scientist nominated by President Trump in 2019 and confirmed to a six-year term in June 2020, expanded DEI-linked funding sharply over the following three years as it implemented that directive.

By early 2025, Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-TX) had built a public database documenting the scale of it: 3,483 NSF grants — more than 10 percent of all awards the agency made between January 2021 and April 2024 — totaling more than $2,050,000,000 that Cruz’s committee classified as promoting DEI. “DEI initiatives have poisoned research efforts, eroded confidence in the scientific community, and fueled division among Americans,” Cruz said releasing the database. Independent researchers and university groups pushed back hard on the methodology, noting the committee’s keyword list flagged studies on stroke recovery, mint-plant biodiversity, and Hebrew grammar simply for using words like “diversify” or “female” in an unrelated context.

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“DEI initiatives have poisoned research efforts, eroded confidence in the scientific community, and fueled division among Americans.”

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Senate Commerce Committee, February 2025

The Cruz database became the working blueprint for what came next. Starting in April 2025, NSF began terminating active grants flagged for DEI content, and DOGE publicized the results in near real time. On April 19, 2025, DOGE announced NSF had canceled 402 grants worth $233,000,000 in savings, including a $1 million award for “Antiracist Teacher Leadership for Statewide Transformation.” Days later it announced 701 more grants worth $203,000,000. The DOGE post embedded below puts the two-week total at over $325,000,000 saved — though DOGE’s own two cited figures actually sum to $436,000,000, a discrepancy in the agency’s own arithmetic that this story is not able to resolve.

By late May 2025, the tally reached 1,574 terminated projects worth roughly $1,100,000,000, about 4 percent of the 40,715 active NSF projects funded since 2020 — nearly 90 percent of them DEI-flagged, per an Urban Institute analysis of the termination data. Then-NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan wrote that “research projects with more narrow impact limited to subgroups of people based on protected class or characteristics do not effectuate NSF priorities” — and resigned days later, on April 24, 2025, in the fifth year of his six-year term. NSF has had no Senate-confirmed director since. Chief of Staff Brian Stone has run the agency on an acting basis; President Trump’s March 2026 pick to take the job permanently, biotech investor Jim O’Neill, was still awaiting a Senate confirmation hearing as of late May 2026. In April 2026 the White House removed all 22 members of the National Science Board, NSF’s presidentially appointed governing body — an unprecedented purge of the agency’s entire oversight structure in a single action, per Science magazine.

The researchers who built this dataset are careful not to oversell it. “We could be seeing grant applicants changing the terms they’re using,” DeepAudit’s Leif Rasmussen told the Free Beacon — meaning a 9 percent DEI-language share does not necessarily mean researchers stopped studying underrepresented groups in STEM, only that they stopped writing the words a federal keyword scanner now catches. NSF has scrubbed DEI language from its own solicitations since Panchanathan’s February 2025 guidance, so applicants have a direct incentive to adjust their vocabulary regardless of the underlying research. That ambiguity cuts both ways: the 9 percent figure may overstate how much the substance of federally funded science actually shifted, just as Cruz’s original $2,050,000,000 tally likely overstated how much of the 2021-2024 funding was DEI advocacy versus routine broadening-participation language Congress has required NSF to weigh since the 1990s. Both numbers are real, both rest on documented methodology, and both deserve the same scrutiny.

The trajectory is not in dispute. DEI-coded language in successful NSF grants rose sharply after Biden’s 2021 equity order, peaked near a third of all awards in 2022, and has since fallen to 9 percent — a 25-year low — after a Senate investigation, a director’s resignation, a termination campaign that voided more than a billion dollars in grants, and the wholesale removal of NSF’s governing board. What remains genuinely contested is what the number measures: a real change in what science NSF funds, or a change in how applicants describe it. Both the run-up and the reversal happened in full public view, with named officials, dated executive actions, and a paper trail on both sides. We will update this page if DeepAudit publishes 2026 data or if the Senate holds O’Neill’s confirmation hearing.

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