Comment by nxobject
5 months ago
> The previous administration used executive power to direct various government organizations to factor DEI into all government funding,
Not the NSF. Provisions in NSF's organic statute to create programs that "expand STEM opportunities" were introduced by the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act, and were retained through the CHIPS Act.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/1862s-5
> If there is a point scheme being used behind the scenes, as seems reasonably probable, then selecting all grants to be eliminated was probably not much more than a single SQL query.
No. The NSF review process does not use numeric ratings. Panels of peer reviewers get a tranche of proposals, provide comments individually, and then collectively sort them into competitiveness categories. There is no "DEI score" or "DEI component".
https://www.researchdevelopment.socsci.uci.edu/files/documen...
https://sociobiology.wordpress.com/2013/03/07/exactly-how-an...
The NSF falls under Federal executive authority which is exactly why Trump is able to do what he's doing. Biden did the equal but opposite thing with his very first executive order. It effectively required all branches of the Federal government to institute DEI policies and policies aimed at furthering DEI ends. [1] In fact his executive order specifically worked to undo a previous Trump executive order [2] which forbade Federal agencies from discriminating against/for individuals/groups based on their race or sex.
To put a number to this, by the metric this report (from this topic) was using to measure DEI funding, 0.29% of NSF grants were for DEI stuff in 2021. By 2024, it was up to 27%! [3] Apologies for the excess citations here, but I think it's important on such a charged topic.
[1] - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/01/25/2021-01...
[2] - https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2020/09/28/2020-21...
[3] - https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092... (page 2)
Then Trump's meddling with the NSF is executive authority without oversight – he cannot undo Biden-era legislative acts, which affect the NSF regardless of what Biden ordered elsewhere. Trump does not have complete authority over what Federal agencies do, despite legislation, as a matter of constitutional law – or, rather, JD Vance would like to argue that's the case within the doctrine of unitary executive theory, as well as the Heritage Foundation... we shall see, and the barrage of executive orders here is likely to give us a test case in the Supreme Court
And, of course, we've argued elsewhere that the report's methdology and results are... not a good assumption to begin this conversation on.
DEI stuff will never hold up under legal scrutiny - it runs face first into the Equal Protection Clause in the Constitution, and orders will also contradict the Civil Rights Act. Again, this is how race based admissions in universities were deemed unlawful.
The legislation you previously linked is solely mentioning a series of grants specifically aimed at increasing diversity, with specially allocated funding totaling $23 million. That's not only going to be separate from the NSF budget, but would be ~0.25% of their budget if not. It's unclear of such things would hold up under the Equal Protection Clause, but it's largely irrelevant one way or the other.
A practical but immeasurable issue is the scale of impact. Encouraging diversity is good, impactful and systematic discrimination is not. There's a not entirely well defined line between the two, but I think a program at this scale would have few claim it's the latter.