National Science Foundation Board Members Removed After Review of Grant Awards

The National Science Foundation provides grants to universities and research institutions to promote scientific progress. The National Science Foundation states its mission is to promote the progress of science, advance the national health, prosperity and welfare, and secure the national defense.

It carries out this work chiefly by making grants of taxpayer money. A Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation review found that from 2021 through April 2024, 3,483 grants, more than 10 percent of all National Science Foundation grants, totaling over $2.05 billion went to projects that promoted diversity, equity and inclusion tenets or neo-Marxist perspectives about class struggle.

The committee grouped the grants into five categories: Status, Social Justice, Gender, Race, and Environmental Justice.

$1.5 million grant went to the University of South Florida to include content on anti-black racism in undergraduate civil and environmental engineering curricula. The project replaced some traditional technical coursework with content framed around environmental justice and activism.

The University of Colorado at Boulder received $349,985 for a longitudinal study on how decolonization and social justice movements influence graduate engineering students' career aspirations. The study aimed to build theory on social justice-driven value system development in the engineering profession.

Arizona State University was awarded $3,206,383 for a project called Black Girls as Creators, described as an intersectional learning ecosystem toward gendered racial equity in artificial intelligence education. The project included racially exclusive summer camps.

Virginia Tech received $663,883 in pandemic relief funding to train engineering diversity, equity and inclusion administrators. Another grant supported the creation of sister circles for black women in undergraduate computing programs at predominantly white institutions, framing the research through black feminist epistemologies and structural oppression rather than technical computing advancement.

According to research analyst Andrew Follett, roughly half the National Science Board members are not practicing scientists. They are university administrators, grant officers or career bureaucrats whose expertise lies in navigating federal compliance regimes rather than conducting original research.

The National Science Board had overseen the agency's direction, including a 2020 program called NSF ADVANCE intended to contribute to a more diverse and capable science and engineering workforce. Between 2021 and 2024 the program distributed $270 million in grants.

" — Michael Chamberlain (Washington Examiner) The removal of the board members occurred after officials determined the agency had incorporated activism into its mission in ways that diverged from its core scientific objectives. The action aligned with executive orders directing that government decisions rely on gold standard science and that unconstitutional or discriminatory initiatives be removed from federal institutions and funded programs.