Where scientific research focused on DEI stands after a year of

In 2025, many federal scientific grants were disrupted, frozen or cut under the Trump administration, affecting thousands of research awards and billions of dollars in funding. Much of that science was focused on DEI - diversity, equity and inclusion. Some scientists argue that we're just beginning to understand the implications of these disruptions. NPR's Katia Riddle reports.

KATIA RIDDLE, BYLINE: In the early months of 2025, Noam Ross started hearing about federal research grants getting canceled.

NOAM ROSS: Especially on topics related to health equity and transgender health, LGBTQ health of various sorts.

RIDDLE: Ross is a researcher himself and now runs a nonprofit called rOpenSci that supports open source scientific coding. He spent time tracking and studying infectious disease. As he watched his colleagues losing grant after grant, he wanted to help. He noticed there was no central database to gather information on which grants specifically were being cut.

ROSS: And I have a background where I've done a lot of projects of essentially trying to arrest data from, like, uncooperative government systems and, you know, badly organized databases. And so I started sort of trying to scrape this information off of NIH websites and such.

RIDDLE: A project called Grant Witness was born. He and a colleague tracked science and research grants cut in 2025 across federal agencies. He says he's been struck by the extent to which DEI has been targeted. A report from the Urban Institute examining his data, for example, found that nearly 90% of the canceled grants at the National Science Foundation included at least one word related to DEI. He worries that the administration sees this research as a distraction from real scientific investigations.

ROSS: And I think, like, it's really important to go in and report on, like, all of these health equity projects and minority health projects. They are really important for our collective health.

RIDDLE: Take research by Whitney Wharton, a professor at Emory University.

WHITNEY WHARTON: All of my research is under the Alzheimer's prevention umbrella.

RIDDLE: She focuses on lifestyle and pharmaceutical interventions to prevent Alzheimer's. Wharton got an email in February saying two of her grants were canceled.

WHARTON: I've been with my wife eight years, and she's seen me cry like three times. This was the fourth time. Like, I was absolutely gutted.

RIDDLE: She studies longitudinal groups of people and evaluates their risk of getting Alzheimer's and how to prevent it. One such group is trans people. That's the grant that NIH specifically told her they would no longer pay to study.

WHARTON: And they said that issues surrounding the trans community - and now I'm paraphrasing - were often unscientific, lacked rigorous scientific investigation and did not benefit the majority of Americans.

RIDDLE: Wharton says she is concerned about the well-being of trans people, but that is not the primary reason she's focused on this and other marginalized groups, including certain racial demographics.

WHARTON: I do that not for necessarily the sake of inclusivity. I do that because certain groups of people are more at risk for Alzheimer's disease compared to others.

RIDDLE: People who are under resourced, socially vulnerable, disproportionately stressed or lonely, among other risk factors, are more susceptible to certain diseases. That's the case for many marginalized groups. Research already shows that Black people are significantly more likely to develop Alzheimer's than white people. She's trying to determine if that's true for other groups as well.

WHARTON: The risk factors that I am studying are overrepresented in these groups. Those would be things like social isolation, aging alone in place.

RIDDLE: If she can specifically help those groups at higher risk of getting Alzheimer's, she says, she can help everyone avoid it.

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