The Great DEI Defunding

By Inez Feltscher Stepman

Sunday, July 19, 2026

 

The Trump administration is waging a quiet but seemingly effective war against a system that has tilted the playing field in favor of the left for generations.

 

The share of grants that contain woke terms awarded by the National Science Foundation has reportedly crashed from a high of more than a third under the Biden administration in 2022. Grants issued for projects that contain words related to DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) fell to 1990s levels — making up about 9 percent of the total — by the end of 2025, a trend that has likely continued this year.

 

The Washington Free Beacon used AI-assisted research to track the rise — and fall — of federal support toward institutional leftism in just this one agency, from almost nonexistent in 1990 to its peak in the post-racial reckoning of the early 2020s. The pattern at the NSF is likely one that has held across federal agencies, which are responsible for distributing and keeping tabs on the money Congress allocates to them.

 

Some have questioned the good  news, pointing out that reports like the Beacon’s don’t account for misleading language and that applicants may just be hiding the ball. Certainly, in hyper-ideological environments like universities, there is a lot of slippery renaming going on to avoid the Trump administration’s civil rights enforcement; DEI centers, for example, are being quietly christened “Centers of Community Belonging.”

 

But even if a certain percentage of the drop-off reflects renaming shenanigans, the numbers demonstrate real change and should be celebrated. Especially in the hard sciences, much of the DEI explosion among grant recipients was itself driven by the previous administration’s priorities or by cultural pressure. That environment has obviously shifted. Cancer labs or federal contractors may be relieved to lose some of the ideological baggage that came with federal money and focus on what they do best.

 

The Trump administration also is systematically examining the checks going out the door, in a way that has never been attempted by any previous administration. It’s not at all unlikely that this hard steering has produced real results among grant recipients.

 

In the first days of the president’s second term, a series of executive orders barring federal money from DEI and related projects were rolled out. This act of priority-setting was followed by the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, which was unsuccessful in its stated aim of substantially reducing federal spending, but successful at identifying programs and grants with ties to woke buzzwords and ideology. This gave  political appointees an excellent roadmap of where to look in their own agencies. Just this past week, the comment deadline closed on a little-remarked-upon rule from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), requiring that grantmaking be closely supervised by political appointees and adding additional safeguards for transparency and against fraud.

 

For decades, a neat little game has been played between the sprawling federal bureaucracy and a mushrooming, left-wing NGO complex. Congress would appropriate money to agencies using vague legislative language, leaving flexibility for agency bureaucrats to translate mission statements into specifics and grants. And while critics of the OMB rule have absurdly come out against “politicized” grantmaking, the reality is that the prior status quo was that those who staffed the bureaucracy — that is, people who skewed to the left — were effectively shoveling enormous sums of taxpayer cash at fellow ideological travelers without the burden of having to explain themselves to voters.

 

The much-reduced USAID funding is a perfect example of this model. The enabling legislation for USAID, passed in the 1960s, says that the money is to be used to support U.S. foreign policy by assisting other nations with their development and security. (Some of the only concrete directions given by Congress for that pot of money were that it not be spent in communist countries, unless toward the goal of getting them out from under that system’s boot.)

 

From that gauzy instruction, federal bureaucrats in recent years have spun out grants such as $2 million for sex “transition” and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala, or $1.5 million to advance DEI in the corporate sector of Serbia.

 

The cozy relationship between the left-wing activist apparatus and federal bureaucracies has been an important background factor of American — and global —  politics for decades, turbocharging the left’s causes with taxpayer money, without even the cursory democratic check given to legislation actually passed by Congress.

 

If the Free Beacon’s report is any indication, the Trump administration is waging a quiet but highly effective war against a system that has been tilting the playing field in favor of the left for generations. The downstream effects of the Great DEI Defunding may not be evident for years to come, but may fundamentally transform the game in unanticipated ways.