With President Donald Trump and his administration cutting federal funding from major universities for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and allowing antisemitism, some Americans – especially students – may be concerned with how this affects their education.
Despite their concerns, the situation is not as dire as it appears. Impacted universities have not exactly been clear or completely honest about the grants they lost.
The Trump administration at first paused $400 million in federal funding from Columbia University last month. This was followed in April by the administration pausing over $1 billion to Cornell University, $790 million to Northwestern University and $510 million to Brown University.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has data publicly available on many of the grants that were eliminated. These terminated grants expose just how wasteful the universities were with taxpayer dollars.
Columbia University, for example, wasted nearly $47,000 on “personal healthcare networks of transgender and gender-diverse adults after gender-affirming surgery,” over $1 million for the university’s new “Anga Center for Climate Justice, Health Equity, and Community Well-Being” in East Africa, and $400,000 on “studying PRIDE to enhance cancer screening guidelines for transgender users of gender-affirming hormones.”
These are just a few of more than 160 terminated grants listed from Columbia with a majority based on DEI and radical gender ideology research, but Brown University was just as bad.
Brown University spent nearly $1.3 million on “examining health comorbidities and healthcare utilization disparities among older transgender and cisgender adults in the U.S.,” $700,000 on “intervention to enhance PrEP persistence among African American men who have sex with men,” and $350,000 on “making universal, free-of-charge antiretroviral therapy work for sexual and gender minority youth in Brazil.”
As ridiculous as some of these grants may sound, leaders of these universities panicked and publicly derided the Trump administration’s actions.
Before stepping down as interim president at Columbia, Katrina Armstrong claimed that the funding freeze “will immediately impact research and other critical functions” of the university. While this comment from the former interim president is alarming considering
what she may consider “critical,” Columbia at least appears willing to work with the Trump administration to eventually receive federal funding again.
Meanwhile, Brown University President Christina Paxson appears ready to resist.
Paxson said that she would be “compelled to vigorously exercise our legal rights” to fight back. She unfortunately appears more than willing to oppose the administration so that DEI initiatives can continue to receive funding, rather than prioritizing the education of her students.
As depressing as it may sound, DEI programs are to be expected these days from Ivy League universities. They were captured by left-wing ideologues decades ago. What is surprising is the number of grants the Trump administration has also eliminated from universities in red states.
In one example, the University of Mississippi spent $35,000 on “cross sex steroid therapy and cardiovascular risk in the transgender female.” The University of Arkansas spent $2 million on studying “universal basic income and structural racism in the U.S. South.” The University of Central Florida spent $410,000 on research regarding “facilitators of and barriers to healthcare utilization among racially and ethnically diverse transgender and gender nonbinary young adults.”
DEI is even embedded in Alzheimer’s disease research. Emory University spent $1.7 million “building community and research engagement among sexual and gender minority older adults at risk for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.” The University of Nevada, Las Vegas also spent $650,000 studying Alzheimer’s disease in older transgender adults.
This is research dealing with a disease affecting a growing number of Americans. There is no reasonable explanation as to why millions of dollars were spent connecting it to gender ideology.
The Trump administration is cutting federal funding from universities throughout the country to ensure that careless spending on nonsense like this is eliminated. If university administrators can guarantee that taxpayer dollars will be spent readying students for the workforce moving forward, then they have no reason to fear the administration.
The situation is not dire at all. Universities need to end wasteful spending on unnecessary DEI programs. The solution is that simple.
Casey Ryan is a writer and investigative reporter at Defending Education.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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