Get the DEI out of science funding, Elon!

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I am skeptical of campaign promises, especially from the incoming U.S. president, as I am skeptical of many of the past and present business promises from Elon Musk. But in an ecumenical spirit, I want to wish Musk and company luck and wisdom if they intend to follow through on their promise to reduce waste and inefficiency in government.

I would suggest one of the first places to turn is the management of science and engineering in the U.S., something that is ultimately central to both maintaining the pre-eminent economic position of the country and addressing the numerous challenges facing the world in the 21st century. If they act as I believe they should, they can provide an important leadership example that should be followed in Canada as well.

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The management of three (FOUR?) of the major U.S. science agencies — NASA, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and the NSF — have all sought to redirect precious resources that should be devoted to cutting-edge science but instead are being spent on social engineering projects related to divisive, dysfunctional and ultimately misplaced Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The same is true for Canadian federal funding agencies. These efforts have, to date, had little impact on significantly altering the demographics of STEM researchers, if that was their purpose, and even a cursory perusal of the titles of DEI grants makes it clear how utterly ridiculous many of these social justice initiatives actually are.

One might argue that some efforts by government agencies to promote diversity is useful, so that diverting a small portion of agency budgets to such efforts is neither wasteful nor inappropriate. However, the magnitude of the resource shift that has taken place is surprising, and worrisome.

Several colleagues and I have attempted in various ways to ascertain the level of DEI spending at American science agencies. One of us recently went to the U.S. National Science Foundation website and downloaded all grants made in 2023, then parsed their XML files and used ChatGPT4 to attempt to classify grants as either primarily scientific or primarily DEI related. The prompt to ChatGPT was:

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“You are a social scientist specializing in the study of woke culture and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Below is the title and abstract of an NSF grant. Determine if the grant is focused primarily on DEI related topics or focused primarily on a scientific topic. Respond with “DEI” or “scientific.”

This prompt was run individually for every one of 12,065 NSF awards. Here are the results.

• 1,061 were DEI.

• 11,004 were scientific.

• The median DEI award amount was $352K (all amounts in U.S. dollars)

• The median scientific award amount was $300K.

• The average DEI award amount was $639K.

• The average scientific award amount was $499K.

• The total DEI award amount was $678 million.

• The total scientific award amount was $5.489 billion.

• The global total award amount was $6.2 billion

One should note several caveats. ChatGPT is particularly sensitive to prompts, and it is likely that slightly different prompts would produce slightly different results. In addition, ChatGPT is known to have a bias toward DEI, and a perusal of individual grant classifications did suggest a slight bias towards being classified as DEI.

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Nevertheless, while different detailed analyses (which we are currently undertaking) might produce slightly different final answers, these results do suggest cause for concern.

Over 10 per cent of the budget of the major federal agency supporting broad-based science and engineering in the United States is not devoted to supporting science. Note also that both the median and average DEI awards exceeded the median and average awards for pure science grants.

As a scientist whose own research was supported for over 35 years by federal agencies, I know how difficult it is to get government funding, and also how tight funds are. In the past federal budget, support for science at the NSF was cut by eight per cent. This entire shortfall and more could have been made up for by eliminating all or most of this DEI programming.

Finally, there is a further incursion of DEI social justice engineering into federal science support that is likely missed by the above analysis. Purely technical scientific awards, which would be classified as scientific by ChatGPT here, nevertheless often have DEI criteria injected into the evaluation process. This can lessen support for some worthy research for which the DEI justification does not pass muster, while also diverting time and resources away from researchers who are required to produce DEI-related justifications in their grant proposals.

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Clearly, a lot more detailed exploration is needed before wholesale redistribution at federal agencies takes place. But there is clearly a great opportunity here to help redirect U.S. science so that it remains competitive with scientific support across the rest of the world, particularly in Asia. There is low-hanging fruit for trimming that I hope Musk and his team will explore in some depth. The first step may be for Donald Trump to sign an executive order restricting DEI considerations in federal grant-making in science, and putting Musk in charge of carrying out the implementation of this order. The second step would be to change the upper-level management of science agencies, to recruit individuals who are primarily interested in supporting cutting-edge science and engineering, with less interest in virtual signalling about social justice.

Removing support of misplaced DEI initiates in science should be a great first step, and provide a great prototype for Canada and other western countries.

National Post

Lawrence M. Krauss, a physicist and author, is President of the Origins Project Foundation. His newest book, an anthology entitled The War on Science: 39 Renowned Scientists and Scholars Speak out about Current Threats to Free Speech, Open Inquiry, and the Scientific Process, (Post Hill Press) will be released in July 2025

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