Is DEI grant funding of science apolitical? Hardly.
Posted by Ed Folsom, August 11, 2025.
The AP story is a real howler. The headline blares: “Trump executive order gives politicians control over all federal grants, alarming researchers.”
The story tells us:
Scientists say the order will cripple America’s scientific engine by placing control over federal research funds in the hands of people who are influenced by politics and lack relevant expertise.
“This is taking political control of a once politically neutral mechanism for funding science in the U.S.,” said Joseph Bak-Coleman, a scientist studying group decision-making at the University of Washington.
…
The administration has already terminated thousands of research grants at agencies like the NSF and NIH, including on topics like transgender health, vaccine hesitancy, misinformation and diversity, equity and inclusion.
Right – In the existing state of affairs, where federal research funds are not “in the hands of people who are influenced by politics,” where science is funded purely through a “politically neutral mechanism,” the abundance of apolitical neutrality has brought us thousands of research grants to study “transgender health,” “vaccine hesitancy,” and “misinformation,” much of it through DEI-biased selectivity. How thoroughly apolitical.
Through the lens of an entirely left-centric worldview, what better indication of political neutrality is there than to have thousands of research grants awarded for the advancement of the left’s latest cultural-political obsessions; political obsessions that represent Science™ itself?
I’ve never heard more shouting about “our democracy” (i.e. the pre-2025 political status quo) and all the things supposedly threatening it than over the past couple of years. Yet any action taken to move governmental decision-making away from administrative state bureaucrats, toward supervision by elected officials or those appointed by them, is somehow cast as a threat in itself. Oh no, they’re politicizing science! Politicians are seizing control over federal grant money!
If those pesky elected officials would just hand over our money to panels of unelected experts in the administrative state, and let them do with it what they will, why we’d have pure, neutral, scientific, progressivist nirvana. That would be real DEMOCRACY™; free from the influence of all those politicians we elect to office.
Here’s the executive order that set off the hyperbolic hyperventilating by our guardians of apolitical scientific neutrality. Give me a break.
