Neuroscientists fear Trump’s DEI order may tank diversity-focused grants

The fate of multiple grants aimed at increasing diversity, equity and inclusion in neuroscience has become unclear after the first week of President Donald Trump’s second term.

Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday that called for the federal government to “terminate all ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ ‘equitable decision-making,’ ‘equitable deployment of financial and technical assistance,’ ‘advancing equity,’ and like mandates, requirements, programs, or activities, as appropriate.” Government websites describing diversity-related awards, including the faculty diversity award page for the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, were no longer publicly accessible as of Thursday morning, although pages detailing requests for applications for the awards remain online at the time of this article’s publication. And federal employees in roles related to increasing diversity were placed on paid leave starting Wednesday at 5 p.m., CBS News reported.

“With the current climate of what the current administration is doing, it does scare me,” says Andrew Mendiola, assistant professor of pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego. Mendiola started his lab in late 2023 thanks to a government award designed to increase diversity among scientists, called Maximizing Opportunities for Scientific and Academic Independent Careers (MOSAIC). “What’s going to happen next year? Am I going to be able to pay the grad students I have and the staff I have right now, which I’m using this award to do? It’s a time of real uncertainty.”

Recipients of diversity-focused grants say they have not yet heard from their program officers about what to expect regarding future funding. “We’re just in a holding pattern, figuring out what might come next,” says Mari Sosa, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, who last year received the BRAIN Initiative Advanced Postdoctoral Career Transition Award to Promote Diversity, which funds scientists for up to two years at the end of their postdoctoral work and up to three years as a principal investigator.

Only adding to the confusion, employees of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the National Institutes of Health (NIH), have been prohibited from communicating with the public until 1 February, according to a memo issued Tuesday by Dorothy Fink, acting head of the HHS, as reported by National Public Radio.

Neuroscientists also expressed concern on social media about study sections and other meetings scheduled to discuss grant applications that were suddenly canceled on Wednesday, as reported by Science.

Administration transitions have temporarily paused NIH communications and upended scientific meetings in the past, but this week’s halt has been particularly disruptive, says Jason Shepherd, associate professor of neurobiology at the University of Utah, who adds that the canceled study sections in particular caught him by surprise. “That made us concerned and worried because that’s not happened before with the transition.” HHS and NIH employees who oversee neuroscience-specific grants did not respond to The Transmitter’s requests for comment.

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The D-SPAN grant provides support for researchers who have overcome numerous hurdles to make a career in science possible, says Rob Woodry, a graduate student in Jonathan Winawer’s lab at New York University, who applied for a D-SPAN award in October.

“It’s one thing to be rejected from a grant—we can deal with that,” Woodry says. “It’s another thing entirely to not even have the grant looked at, or even reviewed or considered.” Woodry’s application was scheduled for discussion at a study section starting on Wednesday, but no dates have been announced for rescheduling the meeting, he says, which is frustrating.

Shepherd says he is worried that the radio silence on diversity grants and programs in particular might become permanent, effectively terminating an influx of money many scientists rely on to start their scientific careers: “The biggest concern right now is the complete halting and wiping out of diversity-related funding mechanisms and offices.”

Ashley Juavinett, associate teaching professor of neurobiology at the University of California, San Diego, says she is also not optimistic about federally funded neuroscience programs and grants specifically aimed at increasing diversity in the field. Juavinett runs the STARTneuro program, which helps undergraduate students from diverse backgrounds get research experience after transferring to her university. The funding for the program is coming up on its fifth and final year, she says. Given the new administration’s aims, “it’s really hard for me to imagine this continuing to exist.”

Shepherd, Juavinett and others speculate that many DEI-focused grants, programs and even offices may be terminated or significantly reduced. “These programs that have been painstakingly built up for the last decade have now been, within a day, basically wiped out,” Shepherd says. “And it’s not clear they’ll be back.”