President Trump’s Executive Orders ending governmental diversity, equity, and inclusion preferences and programming are a dramatic reversal of the initiatives of the Biden administration. Part of this reversal includes ending DEI programs supported by the federal government, including “equity-related grants.” Researchers who receive grants from billion-dollar-budget agencies, like the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, are now removing words from grant proposals in order to comply with Trump’s executive orders. Because these executive orders are vague and governmental direction has often been unclear, researchers with active proposals are unsure whether their projects are still eligible for funding.

The NSF and NIH are now analyzing key words within grants to determine compliance with executive orders. Certain words will flag further review, like “pregnant person” or “gender.” These words make the project ineligible for funding only in certain cases. As an example, the word “accessibility” would be flagged for review, but if a grant proposal is about “data accessibility,” then the proposal would not be in violation of the executive order. If an NSF grant proposal is deemed ineligible, it must either be modified or risk being terminated in part or in full.

Agencies have also taken down websites that may no longer comply with these executive orders. The Center for Disease Control cannot issue publications with certain banned words as well. These government actions do not present First Amendment problems because the government is generally permitted to speak as it wishes on its own websites.

First Amendment problems may arise, however, because these executive orders have a chilling effect on how scientists apply for funding. Compliance with the executive orders may also have larger-scale impacts on the scientific research being performed. When private researchers self-censor in order to receive government funding, this may implicate the heart of the First Amendment’s concern of government perversion of the marketplace of ideals in the search for truth.

Before I present some aspirationally objective legal analysis of these executive orders, I must note President Trump is not the first president to condition grants, including scientific grants, on a scientist’s or academic’s adherence to the president’s preferred political or ideological approach. For example, President Biden required statements about diversity and inclusion plans in order to apply for certain research grants, including NASA research grants. Many researchers, including liberal scientists, believed this politicized and skewed research in certain directions and introduced factors into the grant decision-making process that were unrelated to the merits of the research. Researchers were also encouraged to apply for diversity experts and to allocate funding to these experts instead of to their primary research.

It is therefore inaccurate to state, as this Washington Post article does, that the “scientific enterprise” has previously been politically independent. Unfortunately, both parties have distorted the search for truth with their favored ideological approaches. I would applaud a return to the prioritization of truth over social justice or ideological aims in our research institutions. The question is, however, what governments are constitutionally permitted to do, not how they should behave.

That said, Trump’s policies seem to present grave speech harms to researchers and organizations who rely on federal funding and wish to, for example, conduct research about certain subjects, such as health inequities. If, as Trump’s executive orders imply, compelling researchers to focus on DEI topics is problematic, then it is also problematic to prevent researchers or grant recipients from using this approach. Both Biden’s and Trump’s executive orders proclaim to be combatting discrimination, and opponents of both accuse the other of perpetuating discrimination. The operative question is what constitutional limits are placed on the ability to condition grant funds to achieve these aims. My tentative answer is that there seems to be a First Amendment problem here.

In analyzing the free speech clause of the First Amendment, courts distinguish between government employees, who have very limited speech rights when speaking in their official capacities, and private citizens, who have robust free speech rights. (This is why I can use the word “diversity” all I want in this blog, and no one can punish me for it.) Grant recipients exist somewhere between government employees and purely private citizens.

The government has discretion to selectively fund certain programs through grants. For example, the government can pay grantees to run an anti-smoking campaign but does not have to fund a pro-smoking campaign. The Supreme Court has held that recipients of federal funding for pregnancy-related services can be denied funding if they engage in “counseling, referral, and the provision of information regarding abortion as a method of family planning” without violating free speech. The government can choose how to allocate its resources to promote certain policies.

However, the government cannot condition receipt of funding on refraining from speech that is outside the purposes of the program. As an extreme example, the government cannot condition receiving funding for the production of high quality musical works on musicians never talking about Vietnam. The Supreme Court has held that a government policy that requires those who receive funding to serve populations affected with HIV to explicitly oppose prostitution is a First Amendment violation, because this speech-restriction was outside of the scope of the program. According to the Court, “by demanding that funding recipients adopt—as their own—the Government’s view on an issue of public concern, the condition by its very nature affects ‘protected conduct outside the scope of the federally funded program.'”

As an example of this, in 2020, a federal trial court in California held that Trump’s conditioning grant funding on an LGBTQ organization’s no longer promoting “divisive topics,” such as implicit bias, likely violated the First Amendment. The court held that Trump had no power to condition grant receipt on not discussing certain topics in the organization’s community advocacy.

The situation at issue here, however, may be distinguishable. The Trump administration could argue that it is not preventing researchers or scientists from advocating particular views outside of the scope of the federal grant aid. Instead, Trump could argue, the government is selectively funding certain research with methodologies that do not reflect certain discriminatory ideological views. This is a dangerous argument, given that the point of science is to discover truths, not promote or oppose a particular agenda.

As a closer analog to funding of the sciences, the Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment is not violated when the National Endowment for the Arts considers whether an artist has shows “decency and respect” for diverse beliefs and values in their art in awarding grant funding. However, part of the Court’s rationale was that this decency and respect was not a requirement in receiving grant funding, just a consideration. To the extent that scientists with certain approaches cannot receive federal funding as a requirement, Trump’s executive order is more constitutionally suspect.  

A district court has held that the federal government couldn’t condition a Stanford scientist’s receiving a contract to study artificial hearts on a confidentiality clause, which allowed the government to block publication of research. Although this case is legally distinct, it means funding science by the government has its First Amendment limits, and they may be exceeded here.

I do hope someone challenges these executive orders because clarity on what is constitutionally permissible will be invaluable to the grant recipients, including scientists, who work to advance the state of our knowledge. Vague and uncertain standards lead to extra censorship as people try to comply with requirements they don’t fully understand.

There are other executive orders that may be constitutionally infirm. I have limited this analysis to grant proposals because conditional funding presents discrete First Amendment issues. This blog does not address, for example, the executive orders that impact K-12 curriculum and diversity programming in higher education.

Edit: This language, in Rust v. Sullivan, indicates there may be a good basis for challenging President Trump’s funding conditions: “the university is a traditional sphere of free expression so fundamental to the functioning of our society that the Government’s ability to control speech within that sphere by means of conditions attached to the expenditure of Government funds is restricted by the vagueness and overbreadth doctrines of the First Amendment.”