From the Commerce Department:
U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz (R-Texas) released a database identifying over 3,400 grants, totaling more than $2.05 billion in federal funding awarded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) during the Biden-Harris administration. This funding was diverted toward questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.
I saw many scientists complain that the projects from their universities that made Cruz’s list were unrelated to wokeness. This seemed like a surprising failure mode, so I decided to investigate. The Commerce Department provided a link to their database, so I downloaded it, chose a random 100 grants, read the abstracts, and rated them either woke, not woke, or borderline.
Of the hundred:
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40% were woke
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20% were borderline
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40% weren’t woke
This is obviously in some sense a subjective determination, but most cases weren’t close – I think any good-faith examination would turn up similar numbers.
Why would a list of woke grants have so many non-woke grants in it? After reading the hundred abstracts, I found a clear answer: people inserted a meaningless sentence saying “this could help women and minorities” into unrelated grants, probably in the hopes of getting points with some automated filter.
For example, from Grant 1731:
New Security Exploit in Energy Harvesting Systems and Its Countermeasures: An Energy Harvesting System (EHS) has emerged as an alternative to battery-operated Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Instead of using a battery, EHS self-powers its device by collecting ambient energy from external sources such as radio frequency, WiFi, etc. However, since such ambient energy sources are unreliable, their resulting power is inherently unstable and often goes out. To address the problem, EHS leverages a capacitor as an energy buffer and computes when the capacitor secures a sufficient amount of energy, i.e., capacitors are at the heart of any EHS devices. Unfortunately, capacitors can be unreliable in the presence of frequent power failure across which they continuously charge and discharge, losing their original capacitance over time. More importantly, attackers can exploit the capacitor reliability issue to cause incorrect outputs or degrade the quality of service in targeted EHS devices. To this end, this research project focuses on investigating attack surfaces and designing cost-effective countermeasures. The project outcome will lay the foundation for batteryless Internet of Things services by maintaining their quality of service and security. The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program.
Did you catch the last sentence?
The project also aims to integrate research findings into undergraduate teaching and promote equitable outcomes for women in computer science through K-12 outreach program.
Some version of this sentence was in most of the nonwoke grants that made it into Cruz’s database. They promised to investigate some totally normal scientific topic, and then at the end they said somehow it would cause equity for women and minorities. I assume somebody told them that if they didn’t include this sentence, the Biden NSF would ding them for not having enough equity impact.
Typical examples include:
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We will do outreach, and probably some of it will inspire underrepresented minorities to go into STEM.
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We will employ undergraduates or PhD students, and probably some of them will be underrepresented minorities.
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People will benefit from our work, and probably some of the beneficiaries will be underrepresented minorities.
This was probably 90% of the false positives. But there were other categories, including grants that accidentally used scientific terms that had alternative woke meanings. For example, Grant 1424:
Cis-Regulatory Basis of Developmental Plasticity and Growth in the Development and Evolution of Beetle Horns, a Class of Highly Diversified Weapons – This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY22, integrative research investigating the rules of life governing interactions between genomes, environment and phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. How organisms develop is regulated through the interactions of genes and environmental conditions like nutrition. Gene regulation (turning genes “on” or “off”) therefore is an important point of control for many aspects of development, such as growth. Further, when gene regulation is modified by evolution, it can lead to the emergence of new traits. Yet, exactly how gene regulation is controlled is not fully understood. The fellow will research horned beetles, which are well known for their diverse forms of environment-dependent development, in order to understand how environment affects gene regulation to promote diversity.
This one gets off to a rocky start by mentioning the word “cis” (a cis-regulatory pathway is when genes regulate the expression of other genes on the same DNA molecule). Then it ends with the words “promote diversity” – in context referring to how genes promote a diversity of beetle phenotypes, but probably this looks bad in a simple CTRL+F search.
Other grants have both of these failure modes at once. Here’s 2674:
Building Reliable Advances and Innovations in Neurotechnology (BRAIN) – Disability is becoming a leading cause of healthcare concern because of the increase in survivable trauma and an aging population. Millions of adults live with neurological disorders, brain injury, mental illness, limb loss or paralysis. There is a need for accessible technologies that can more effectively address the care and rehabilitation needs of these patients. However, innovation in neurotechnology faces several challenges: the pace of innovation exceeds the rate of evaluation for acceptable performance; standards for the validation of safety, efficacy, and reliability of neurotechnology are lagging; current technologies are costly, limiting their deployment for treatment of disabilities; and the need to train new generations of physicians and engineers in emerging technologies steadily increases. The Industry-University Cooperative Research Center for Building Reliable Advances and Innovations in Neurotechnology (IUCRC BRAIN) will address the above challenges. The center’s vision is built on a convergent research approach to the design and validation of reliable, ethical, patient-centered neurotechnologies and their use in understanding neural systems. BRAIN leverages wide-ranging expertise from neural, cognitive and rehabilitation engineering to neurorobotics, neuromodulation, and ethical artificial intelligence to enhance the rate of development and empirical validation of new neurotechnologies through partnerships with industry and other strategic partners while developing a highly skilled workforce; evaluating the impact of these technologies on quality of life; and integrating knowledge across disciplines – such as the humanities with neurotechnologies – to understand collective intelligence, and augment physical and cognitive capabilities. The center’s mission is multifold: to accelerate the progress of science and advance the national health by transferring neurotechnology to end users and to promote access for underrepresented minorities in science, technology, engineering, and math by broadening new participation and retaining current participants. BRAIN will address problems in the neurological space that disproportionately affect underrepresented groups. BRAIN will become a neurotechnology hub by creating a pipeline from discoveries to solutions, while helping students, scientists, and engineers solve one of the greatest unmet medical and health care needs of our time. The University of Houston site – a Hispanic-serving institution and the lead site for the center – will focus on multi-scale, multi-modal, and trans-disciplinary approaches to advance our understanding of neural function and translate discoveries to create neurotechnology for diagnostics, neurorehabilitation, and improving the human condition. The center will maintain a project repository comprised of products and services for 10 years after the completion of this project.
Did this one get caught because it (pointlessly) boasted that its lead site, the University of Houston, was “a Hispanic-serving institution”? Because it used the word “trans” in describing itself as “trans-disciplinary”? Or because it mentioned “disability” too much in the process of talking about how it could cure disabilities?
About 40% of the database was examples like these. I also marked another 20% as “borderline”, but I was being excessively generous: these were mostly also non-woke things with one sentence about minorities to pass a filter, but on topics that could possibly be viewed as political. For example (3047):
Bioengineered Nanobarrier to Protect Against SARS-CoV-2 and Other Viral Infections of the Nasopharynx – The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has dramatically impacted the way humans live and has resulted in more than 6 million deaths worldwide. This project uses a topical barrier to enhance the defense capabilities of the lining found in the nose, which is a highly novel method to prevent severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS CoV-2) infections. The aim of this Early-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) project is to engineer a nasal spray and new type of applicator that can deliver a special coating that prevents viral and microbial infection. This user-friendly approach, if further developed, has the potential to be effective in preventing SAR-CoV-2 variants from infecting humans. Moreover, the innovative barrier could reduce the risk of other airborne threats, e.g., could be rapidly employed during the flu seasons or new emerging pandemics. The in silico computational models developed can also be used to expedite the development of accurate and precise countermeasures. The planned studies will provide opportunities to train engineering and biomedical science students who work collaboratively through highly interdisciplinary (engineering, molecular biology, virology and pharmacology) research studies and will enhance ongoing education and outreach activities focused on attracting underrepresented minority groups into these areas of research.
Realistically this got in because of the last sentence – the one saying that it will do outreach and this might attract underrepresented minorities. But I marked it borderline because maybe, possibly, Ted Cruz thought that studying COVID prevention was “woke”.
The remaining 40% of grants were actually woke. But not all of them were stupid. About half of the woke grants were STEM Career Day type things which went too far in talking about how they would cater to underrepresented minorities (STEM Career Day grants which only included the usual single sentence got classified as borderline). Here’s a grant that got marked woke:
Supporting Talent with Aligned Resources for STEM Students – This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at Salish Kootenai College, University of Montana, Montana Technological University, and Blackfeet Community College. Salish Kootenai College and Blackfeet Community College are both tribal colleges. Over its six-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 105 unique full-time STEM students who are pursuing associate and/or bachelor degrees in biological and biomedical sciences, mathematics and statistics, physical sciences, engineering, computer and information sciences, and/or natural resources and conservation. First-year students in bachelor degree programs will receive four-year scholarships while transfer students and first-year students in associate degree programs will receive two-year scholarships. Students in the project will have access to a wide variety of supports such as individual mentoring from STEM faculty members and peers and monthly professional development opportunities with students from all four institutions . . . The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The aims of this project are to increase the first-year retention and graduation rates for each student cohort, improve transition after graduation to either a STEM career or further higher education, and advance knowledge about issues and factors impacting advancement along the academic pathway. Montana faces post-secondary persistence challenges with two of its largest population groups: Native Americans and individuals from extremely rural areas. Each group faces unique persistence challenges, with some commonalities (e.g., strong ties to family/land, culture shock, stereotypes). Students with positive STEM-based identities perform better academically and are more likely to persist to earn a degree and stay in a STEM field. However, STEM-based identities can clash with personal identities, especially for students from marginalized communities. This project will add understanding in how to develop integrated identities that incorporate STEM identities and personal/cultural identities.
I couldn’t in good conscience call this non-woke, with its discussion of Native Americans from marginalized communities and their integrated identities and so on. But the overall plan (try to get Native Americans to go into STEM) isn’t “neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda”. It’s just cringe and overdone.
A small percent of the grants involved, maybe 10% – 20%, did strike me as extremely dumb, in exactly the way I imagine that Ted Cruz expects woke science to be extremely dumb. Here’s one of the worst offenders (2756):
Examining Blackness in Postsecondary STEM Education Through a Multidimensional-Multiplicative Lens. Despite well-intentioned university efforts to support Black undergraduate STEM students, policy and practice reforms run the risk of not appropriately benefiting all Black people due to pervasive, deficit-based assumptions about Black racial identities and the types of structural engagement needed to advance holistic, racial well-being in transformative and sustainable ways. Stated simply, STEM contexts do not adequately support Black undergraduate STEM students because STEM educators and practitioners remain unsure of what Blackness means for individuals, thereby constraining true racial equity endeavors. Contemporary literature regarding race posits instead that embodiment(s) of Blackness differ across multiple dimensions and axes, including ethnic identity (e.g., African American, Caribbean American, Nigerian American), place identity (e.g., South, Midwest), and generational identity (e.g., first-generation, second-generation, third plus generation). Black students from different ethnic and generational identities having varied perceptions of the racial climate and understandings of their STEM experiences. Recognizing the scope of Blackness and its implications for creating and sustaining holistic, heterogenous conceptions of racial equity in STEM, the team will establish a collaborative network among six institutions (two HBCUs, two PWIs, one majority Black institution, and one HSI) located across the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, Southwest, and Midwest regions of the US to study how Black undergraduate STEM students’ notions of Blackness vary with respect to these dimensions…
I think this is bad – but it’s only 10 – 20% of the database.
Still, if true that would be ~500 woke grants representing ~$250 million in funding. I agree with Cruz that the government has funded a lot of woke garbage. Getting rid of it ought to be an easy win. But this just makes it even worse that the administration has bungled it so badly that they make the DEI establishment look like paragons of competence in comparison.
When I discussed the Trump administration cancelling good USAID programs, some people objected that I was asking too much. The liberals (they said) had so carefully sunk their tentacles into everything that it would be impossible to sort the woke garbage from the genuinely important programs, and rather than let them use the genuinely important stuff as human shields, we should do away with all of it.
I think this overestimates the difficulty of sorting. It took me one hour to review 100 of these grants and see which ones were really woke. That suggests it would take 34 hours – less than a work week for one person – to go through the entire set. The administration isn’t failing to do this because the liberals have made everything so confusing that they’re unfortunately forced to throw out the baby with the bathwater. They’re failing to do this for lack of spending an employee-week on something before announcing it. Announcing a flawed list (without taking action yet) isn’t the worst sin, but the USAID experience has suggested they sometimes do take action based on these lists before correcting them, so I thought I would complain early.
Grant 1542 is an attempt to come up with better treatments for ovarian cancer, which currently has a 60% mortality rate. After presenting a really interesting theory of how cells evade chemotherapy and how they might stop it, they dutifully include one sentence talking about how, if they cure cancer, they will do some outreach to underrepresented minorities in STEM about it.
It reflects poorly on the Biden administration that you could only get a grant to cure cancer if you suggested you might teach an underrepresented minority child about it. But surely it also reflects poorly on the Republicans when they propose it for cancellation just because it did include the sentence about minorities. Just fund research to cure cancer without judging it on whether there’s a sentence about minority outreach in the grant proposal!
