Comment by somenameforme

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.