Soon after President Donald Trump retook office, researchers and academics across the country began receiving startling news. They were abruptly informed, often mid-project, that their federal grant funding had been terminated. Form letters bearing the news often offered few details beyond that their work no longer aligned with agency priorities.
As part of a lawsuit filed by University of California researchers, a handful of federal agencies confirmed earlier this month in court documents that they cut grants if researchers' projects “expressed, or were presumed to express, viewpoints disfavored by the Administration."
Those court documents offer insight into how the Trump administration undertook a swift campaign to revoke research funding for work related to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and other subjects at odds with its political agenda.
Federal agencies relied heavily on keyword searches when terminating grants held by UC researchers, court documents revealed. While the searched terms varied across agencies, they focused on initiatives facing significant conservative opposition, such as DEI and green energy.
The UC researchers allege the grant terminations violated their First Amendment rights by targeting their work based on viewpoint and subject matter and have asked the federal judge overseeing the case to rule the revocations unconstitutional.
The keyword lists used by four of the federal agencies named in the UC lawsuit — the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Endowment for the Humanities — elucidate the wide net cast by the Trump administration when targeting grants.
Federal agencies targeted grants focused on DEI, climate change and other topics
Of the four agencies, NSF used the most keywords by far. It told the court it pulled its search terms list directly from a 2024 report released by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, which alleged the Biden administration had politicized science at the agency. NSF also mentioned, but did not list, terms related to misinformation.
The report shared hundreds of terms it used to screen grants to determine whether they were related to DEI or promoted “neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle.” The list included "injustice," "ally," "prejudice," "institutional," "discrimination," "historically," "minority," and "traumatic."
NIH worked off of a shorter but similar list, which included “workforce diversity” and “health equity.” The agency noted that it also used “various permutations” of each keyword.
While the Defense Department terminated grants using similar terms — such as "pay equity," "LGBTQ," and "neurodiversity" — it also sought to cut funding for projects related to climate change and green energy.
Grants that referenced alternative energy sources such as solar, wind or geothermal energy were targeted for termination, as were those that used terms like "climate change," "carbon neutrality," "decarbonization," "pollution control," "air quality management" or "federal sustainability," the department said in court documents.
Those four agencies told the court they used their keyword lists and avoided assessing each grant individually, instead identifying awards to cancel “using general criteria.”
NSF provided a list of the grants held by UC researchers that it cut using this method but did not tie specific search terms to each terminated grant.
NEH similarly provided the court with a list of grants revoked based on keywords including "environmental justice" and “transgenderism," along with "diversity, equity, and inclusion" and its variants. But like NSF, NEH did not specify which keyword triggered each termination, though it did sometimes share portions of the grant that resulted in it being flagged.
NIH, however, did tie specific terms to cancellations in some cases.
NIH cut at least $2.6M in grant funding for projects using the phrase “structural racism”
One project at the University of California, San Francisco sought to study how racism affected the mental health of adolescents and young adults who had contact with the legal system, as well as racism's impacts on substance abuse.
Another, at the University of California, Los Angeles, focused on gestational diabetes among Asian Americans.
Both were canceled by NIH — the former was flagged for using the phrase "structural racism," and the latter for "health equality."
Dozens of additional projects saw their NIH grants canceled not because they used certain phrases but because they had diversity supplements — additional funding awarded by the agency that aims to boost support for researchers from underrepresented and disadvantaged backgrounds.
UC researchers have won two preliminary injunctions in their case, which blocked grant terminations made via form letters across several federal agencies.
NIH told the court it specifically targeted grants awarded to researchers affiliated with UC’s 10 campuses. In one example, the agency suspended over $500 million in funding to the University of California, Los Angeles — funding that has since been ordered restored.
