The National Institutes of Health (NIH) continues to fund more than a billion dollars in diversity, equity and inclusion programs, even after President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies to eliminate them.
While other agencies have moved to eliminate the “illegal and immoral programs” targeted in Trump’s day-one executive order, NIH is still funding over $1.3 billion in active grants that include DEI components — from race-based hiring schemes to “anti-racist” training initiatives and diversity-first faculty pipelines. At least $441 million of those grants explicitly cite DEI in their project descriptions, according to NIH data compiled by watchdog group Do No Harm.
“The NIH spends billions and billions of dollars, and those are taxpayer dollars,” Dr. Kurt Miceli, the group’s medical director, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “So we really need to be sensitive to what those dollars are being used for, and we need to be good stewards of those dollars.”
Among the still-active grants is a $28 million 2022 award to Mount Sinai — the largest hospital network in New York City — which pledges to embed “an anti-racist mindset” and “justice, equity, diversity [and] inclusion,” or JEDI, into every layer of its medical research infrastructure until it expires in 2028. A $10 million grant to the University of Michigan from 2023 similarly promises to “expand the diversity of voices” in research and train “diverse types” of clinicians across the state until 2027.
Another $40 million artificial intelligence initiative from 2024 under the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute is tasked with applying AI to biomedical data in order to address “sex-related disparities in research,” part of a broader NIH effort to increase women’s representation in machine learning and genomics. The program is scheduled to continue until 2029.
Many of the programs remain fully funded more than two months into Trump’s second term — despite the executive order eliminating similar initiatives at agencies like USAID.
“There are some of these longstanding grants that maybe didn’t have anything to do with DEI originally,” Miceli said. “Unfortunately, DEI concepts were added at the time.”
Adding DEI language to existing grants — even those that weren’t originally ideological — is possible in part because of how NIH funding is structured. Many of the agency’s research programs operate on multi-year grant cycles, usually five years in length, with funds distributed incrementally in 12-month budget periods, according to NIH policy documents. Under this structure, researchers can revise or supplement their grants during annual renewals — a window that, under former President Joe Biden, often became an opportunity to layer in DEI language without changing the scientific core of the project.
Once approved, those grants became legally binding contracts between the federal government and the recipient institution. Terminating them requires formal justification, NIH policy documents say, such as a violation of grant terms or voluntary relinquishment by the recipient — a process both uncommon and administratively burdensome.
Not all of the active programs were designed as ideological projects from the outset. Some were originally focused on traditional scientific aims — like the role of genomics in Alzheimer’s, studies on cancer detection and prevention or antibacterial research — but incorporated DEI language, often during renewal phases, to align with the previous administration’s priorities. That blending of science with political signaling has created a gray zone, Miceli said, where ideology can become embedded without being the stated goal.
“Maybe it’s recognized that that’s not really what the grant is for,” he told the DCNF. “And maybe as that’s realized by folks receiving the monies, they can subtract that political ideology from the core basis of the grant.”
Unlike NIH, other agencies haven’t been so slow to act. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced earlier this month that 83% of USAID’s programs were cancelled following a six-week review, terminating some 5,200 contracts that “spent tens of billions of dollars in ways that did not serve (and in some cases even harmed) the core interests of the United States.”
While many of those cancellations targeted overseas disinformation campaigns, ideological nonprofits and gender identity programs, the distinction between those initiatives and domestic scientific grants remains a point of debate. Some may argue DEI language doesn’t fundamentally alter the underlying science, while Miceli contends it distorts institutional priorities and shifts funding toward identity-based criteria rather than merit.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency, has also begun enforcing the administration’s broader push to eliminate left-wing ideology from federal programs — freezing certain gender-related research grants and launching department-wide compliance guidelines. But NIH, which operates semi-autonomously with its own grant infrastructure and institutional leadership, hasn’t announced any equivalent action. There is no sign of a portfolio-wide audit, revised funding criteria or updated peer review standards — despite NIH being the largest grant-granting body in the federal government. Its DEI-heavy portfolio remains mostly intact, even as other agencies have begun purging theirs.
NIH’s continued support for these programs could place the agency in violation of federal law.
“Federal law prohibits covered agencies from using race and decisions pertaining to admissions, hiring, promotion, compensation and such,” Miceli explained.
Miceli was referring to statutes like Title VI and Title VII, which prohibit race or sex-based discrimination in federally funded hiring, admissions and promotion decisions. Yet multiple NIH-backed programs continually prioritize “diverse” candidates or recruit faculty specifically “committed to DEI.” The University of Michigan grant, for example, funds its chief diversity officer to build a faculty pipeline explicitly tied to those ideological goals.
“And certainly, when you see programs focused on using this idea of diversity to perpetuate DEI ideology, I think it unfortunately makes its roots even deeper and is even more harmful, perhaps, than the dollars assigned to it in longevity,” he said.
Despite the inaction so far, Miceli believes reforms are still possible.
“I think we’ll see a lot of positive change in terms of how we evaluate future grants,” he said. “And I’m certainly encouraged by Dr. Bhattacharya [Trump’s nominee for NIH director, still awaiting Senate confirmation] being there and really taking this on and making sure we’re promoting science at the NIH.”
But without a formal audit or clear compliance roadmap, many of the programs born in the last administration remain untouched — and continue to channel taxpayer dollars into ideological hiring schemes and research initiatives that have long been at odds with federal anti-discrimination law, but were tolerated under the banner of social equity.
Neither the White House nor the NIH immediately responded to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
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