At the beginning 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. NSF’s mission, in its own words, is “to promote the advancement of science; to advance national health, prosperity and welfare; to ensure national defense; and for other purposes.” In the early days, the Biden administration set a new goal: to push the boundaries 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 revealed that NSF issued more than $2 billion in grants promoting DEI’s ideology. Our analysis found that the Biden administration has awarded at least $827.3 million exclusively in NSF grants aimed at shaping STEM education.
To conduct our analysis, we first used keywords such as “disrupted,” “privilege,” “latinx,” and “activism” to flag the grants. We then read each noted grant to confirm or deny whether it advanced left-wing ideology. With words like “discontinued,” nearly every grant noted was clearly ideologically charged. Words like “equal” sometimes were and sometimes not. We counted grants promoting “equal testing” as ideological, because that is a term of art for lowering merit-based standards to narrow minority achievement gaps. However, we did not count grants as ideological that merely used “equal” in passing as a synonym for “effective.” Last year, the Biden administration awarded about $120 million in grants to ideologically “equal” projects — about ten times more than in the final year of the Trump administration.
NSF spent about $360 million to make STEM education “culturally relevant” or “culturally responsive.” These keywords were coined by Gloria Ladson-Billings, the professor who introduced critical race theory to K-12 education, and they almost invariably connote efforts to infuse curricula with racialized Marxism. For example, NSF spent $400,000 on a “culturally responsive” project that aims to “design and refine[] . . . modules for raising critical awareness in the preparation of university mathematics teachers.” (Critical consciousness is another term for “Marxist worldview.”) The project will draw on “justice” experts to develop “critical pedagogies” that address “political . . . issues in mathematics education [and] identity.”
NSF grants also focused on rewriting biology to fit gender ideology. The agency provided $905,642 for a “qualitative investigation into sex/gender narratives in undergraduate biology and their impacts on transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming students” to create a “more inclusive environment.” NSF provided $119,520 for a conference titled “Reimagining Biology Education Through Social Justice,” featuring a talk on “Gender Adaptations in Biology Teaching.”
Under Biden, the NSF has figured out exactly what America needs to win the AI technology 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 ways” or “indigenous ways of knowing.” For example, $399,930 was spent on a project to honor “indigenous knowledge” by “incorporating indigenous ways of knowing into engineering education,” but not engaging in “the misappropriation of indigenous knowledge.” NSF provided $1.29 million to promote “youth as participatory designers of Indigenous mixed reality science exhibits” that address “the continued marginalization of Indigenous communities in informal science learning spaces.”
The agency has managed to create awareness in places where, just a few years ago, scientists might have doubted it was possible. NSF spent $600,000 in aerospace engineering to sharpen “students’ critical awareness and sensitivity to injustices within social systems through the integration of macroethics (the ethics of large-scale issues as opposed to individual ethics) into the aerospace engineering science curriculum air”. In addition to using “photon spectrography” to explore “new modes of quantum light imaging applicable to biology and medical imaging,” a $3 million NSF grant in quantum mechanics will “reveal phenomena that elude detection in the human realm of lived experience”. such as “students perceive themselves as science learners through their science identity, [and] racial and gender identity”.
It is 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 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 emphasized the “anti-racism” of Abram X. Kennedy and Project 1619. The proposed rule would have that the Department of Education spend $5 million on grants to improve social studies education. After intense pushback, that program was canceled. Yet the NSF has spent more than 150 times that injecting left-wing ideology into STEM education — essentially without any public notice.
The Soviet Union may no longer exist. But we still have to deal with a rising China, an international AI arms race, and countless crises and diseases that need scientific breakthroughs. Instead of using the National Science Foundation to cultivate the next generation of American scientists, the Biden administration has spent more than $800 million to undercut them by infusing the ideology of diversity into STEM.
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