Woke-Bashing of the Week: Trump’s anti-woke crusade is now coming for science
The Trump administration’s anti-woke drive has turned words such as “equity,” “gender,” “racist” and “climate change,” into ideological red flags to hinder funding for scientific research.
Donald Trump’s second-term assault on so-called ‘woke’ America is being used to determine where billions of dollars of public money go, including money intended to fund scientific research.
Since he returned to the White House, the Trump administration has cut, frozen, delayed or otherwise disrupted up to $177 billion in federal grants, affecting every US state, according to analysis by the States United Democracy Centre and Grant Witness. The disrupted funding spans 17 policy areas, with health, nutrition, environmental programmes and disaster relief among those most affected. The organisations estimate that the disrupted funding amounts to almost 10% of federal discretionary spending.
The administration’s anti-woke drive has turned words such as “equity,” “gender,” “racist” and “climate change,” into ideological red flags to hinder funding for scientific research.
A class-action lawsuit filed by researchers alleges that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been using a list of keywords to identify research that could conflict with the administration’s political priorities. Researchers claim that some grants have been terminated or denied, while others have been subjected to demands that scientists remove flagged language from their applications.
And now the administration appears to be considering taking political oversight of that process even further.
The White House is reportedly drafting an executive order that would establish an external committee with the power to veto NIH grant awards that don’t conform to Trump’s political agenda. The proposed board would include Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, with unanimous agreement reportedly required for grant awards.
The proposal follows a reported clash in the Oval Office in which Vought accused the NIH of continuing to fund what he described as ‘woke’ initiatives that conflict with Trump’s priorities. According to the Washington Post, officials discussed creating a commission to subject NIH grant-making to additional political scrutiny.
That would represent a huge shift in how scientific funding is decided.
The NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, supporting work into diseases and conditions including cancer, heart disease and infectious diseases. Traditionally, research proposals are assessed through expert scientific review rather than according to whether they fit the political preferences of the president.
The administration, of course, has a legitimate interest in deciding how taxpayers’ money is spent. But there is a crucial difference between questioning whether a research project represents good value and deciding that an area of research is unacceptable because it has acquired the political label of ‘woke.’
Research into health inequalities, gender, racial disparities or the effects of climate change does not become less scientifically valid because those subjects have become targets of the American right’s culture war. Nor does removing a particular word from a grant application make the underlying subject disappear.
Yet this is precisely where Trump’s anti-woke agenda becomes more consequential than the familiar political arguments about pronouns, diversity training or university speech. The language of the culture war is being translated into decisions about what gets funded, what gets researched and which scientific questions are considered legitimate.
The administration has already explicitly presented cuts to programmes involving racial, gender and climate-related initiatives as part of its drive to eliminate what the White House calls ‘woke’ programmes. Its own budget materials describe efforts to eliminate funding associated with what it characterises as “radical gender and racial ideologies”.
Now that logic is reaching deeper into scientific research.
And when the government starts deciding which scientific subjects are acceptable according to the president’s ideological agenda, the culture war stops being just a war of words. It starts shaping what America is allowed to study.
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