So what are the local tribes supposed to call themselves if not indigenous people? Most of the tribes in my area have awesome natural resources departments. Tribes do science. Are they getting defunded?
Now grant applications cannot mention the inclusion relation between sets. Grant writers will need to substitute "monomorphism in the category of sets" for "inclusion." The good news is the category theorists who write that "equality is evil" will be funded.
Inclusion a.k.a. inclusion criteria are again used in a TON of research papers … obviously whoever came up with this list has never done a research paper.
I don't think I have read a study on any topic in any field that does not contain at least two of these words. Even the unscientific/fictional fields like economics would be frozen here.
Ha...the fact that using the word "women" will get you flagged but not "men" is very telling. #humansubjectsresearch #diversity #DEI #whatthehellishappening
"Internal guidance" sounds like Anticipatory Compliance. Everyone should read #book "On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century" by Prof Timothy Snyder.
But what about the list of words? -- From note at the top it seems that the list was not part of the guidance, but "culled" (extracted?) from a set of grants that already had words flagged?
But rather than offer a reply that focuses on more than a singular takeaway, you chose to share your singular takeaway from having read the replies. Gotcha.
Some of those terms will be in any paper that includes basic statistics!
My god , the people now running the USA really are ignorant in their ideological crusade.
Wow really seems like they kinda want to kneecap scientific progress in the US with a metal baseball bat or something. Now why would they do such a unbelievably backward, stupid, stupid thing?
Oh I can think of a few reasons and I'm sure everyone else can too.
There are very few criminology papers that won’t be flagged for review with that subset of keywords. And entire strands of criminology, such as hate crime and feminist criminology, would fall foul to it. Two extremely important and salient areas right now
We are gonna be Gilead in 180 days..aka project 2025 under guise of cuts. I guess I am a Martha since I am a menopausal cat lady. But, more than likely I will end up on the wall. Cuz …
F NO!!!!!
It's galling to ban words from science research. But of all of these. All of them, this one scares me the most:
"women"
Women are also scientists. Women also work in the administration. Women voted for h*m.
Every single word, idea, & person matters.
But holy fuck, how revealing.
A grant gets pulled because it uses the word "inclusion"? This is insane. I'm a healthcare lawyer frequently advising clients on a wide range of clinical trials. Most clinical research protocols set forth "inclusion" and "exclusion" criteria to screen eligible study subjects based on medical history
Could somebody please explain - what does "retain flag" mean and what is EO language? I'm neither a researcher nor native speaker so I can't fully make sense of this. But I do understand it's horrible. And does END refer to ending the grant or the search?
Would be so grateful for explanation ☺️
Denke hier gehts eher Richtung "woke" Ausdrücke so wie bei DEIA (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility). EO könnte für equal opportunity stehen?
This looks more like a flow chart to add annotation than to do triage. Is there another diagram that shows how the annotation is being used to triage grants or advance them to the next stage?
It's a really great, short article. And I did see that you included something. This helps you figure out how to include the info. Sorry for not modifying my template. I know you're doing the work.
Have you heard what they do after this decision tree? I don't know if I've ever reviewed a grant in my physical science field that wouldn't be category 3. It's pretty hard to take broader impacts seriously and not hit on a few of these words.
I know this is beside the horrific point here, but that somebody thought that process needed a decision tree is truly a commentary on the stupidity of it all. Forget a meeting that could have been an email - that decision tree could have been a single sentence.
So the word appears, it’s rejected? No grants for studying black holes, the barrier reef, anything involving a math inequality? Just a quick search, no context? What can you study?!
I suspect you have answered your own question. Uneducated incurious folks are easier to control. Research is the antithesis of what they are going for here.
It clearly tells the Professors “Stop conducting research and stop giving funds to the overseas students!” This is utterly ridiculous! The next four years are gonna be extremely difficult for the US academic climate. Brace for impact!
NSF is being ridiculous here and putting their staff to unnecessary work.
All they need to say is that by law* all NSF grants since 2011 have addressed broader impacts, always some element of DEIJ, and law supersedes EO so that practice will continue until the law changes.
Because otherwise they wouldn't get to "retain" info on who used what words? I feel like this should be unjustified paranoia, but it's the only difference in outcome
This is—literally—a visual guide for how to “correctly” suppress information. That somebody (likely a scientist or engineer) made and distributed to a large group of people to assist them in doing so.
The stupidity of the flow chart design suggests it is made by a think-tanker. It contains no useful guide for evaluation except throwing "none of this allowed" in your face.
End means end of process, not end funding. The last box in the bottom right is the one that would continue funding.
(Though I share your doubts that this is the genuine flow chart)
Even if you wrote none of those words (moronic take, I know), this gaslighting includes a decision tree WHICH ends in a loop, no matter if the language was found or not. Is the intent to appear to look for something, while rejecting every one, or is it chasing their tail?
What does "flagged" mean? What happens after a grant is flagged? Words like "bias" are extremely common in any research involving statistical analysis. This list of words will flag almost everything.
Does "keyword and context" mean that just the keyword is not enough, but that is has to be in the context the EO is targeting?
e.g. in the case of "systemic", "systemic inflammation" would be ok, "systemic climate risk" would be flagged
Great info. I couple follow up questions. How many categories.What are the categories. Is category 3 a no way in hell or just a nope? I know I will be asked these questions in defense of Musk.
Everything else aside, that's the stupidest "decision tree" in the history of decision trees. Literally one question of whether the document contains taboo words anywhere yes no.
This is insane, if true. Is there anyone else who can corroborate? Any time I feel like knee jerk rage, my spidey sense tingles. Someone in this lazy administration of bros went out of their way to create a decision tree?
Any sort of health issue that, for example, just happens to effect women at a greater proportion of the population now gets cut. Breast cancer research, chronic fatigue syndrome, ovarian cancer, etc.
This is a more byzantine decision process than I'd like to see from my totally magnanimous and hyper-efficient overlords. I suggest the more straightforward:
"Does proposal contain keywords and context..."
Much less offensive to the sensibilities of decent, efficiency-loving folk.
The tree logic seems to say nothing will ever get approved, regardless . And, on a nitpicky note, it also seems to have misused the word “implicate”?? How can this be real?
It's so telling that the only criteria on the decision tree are individual words identified in isolation. No context whatsoever. These people are dumb as fuck but also lazy
So, what does it mean to be flagged? That someone will look into it to see if it was a "false positive"? Or is that immediate disqualification of the project?
This decision tree could have six nodes removed and have exactly the same logic. It makes things look more complex than they are. Single yes-no decision is if the keywords are in any of the title, abstract, project description, etc, and there are only two outcomes.
There aren’t even two outcomes on this decision tree. There’s only one outcome. So there should only be two nodes on the tree. The rest are unnecessary.
So I was a grant coordinator for a small amount of time. if this list is so absurdly prohibitive, won't that leave a lot of either research or minor programs forced to look for other sources of grants from 501(c)3s' or just shutter entirely?
And, bureaucratic barrier to keeping any flagged project is high as a program officer has to put in writing a justification for not banning a project. That will take courage (including preparedness for punishment/revenge).
Alt Text field holds up to 2000 characters. Copy from text and post into field is recommended. If the information is on a webiste, include a link in your main message.
Describe the flowchart. You have 3000 characters that you could use to capture the text in the flowchart decision points. Even if that’s not enough to capture all of the text and connections, it might be enough to convey more of the gist of the flowchart.
Your decision tree doesn't indicate a grant was canceled, just that it was flagged as suspect for the EOs. People said the same thing about Texas's own review and didn't understand that people having to do this crap have to have a methodological way to show they addressed the EO.
This decision tree clearly shows their intent is to silence research as a whole, otherwise the critical path would be towards publishing data not flagging studies.
OMG. Thank goodness I finished my doctorate when I did. 80% of those words are in my doctoral project. The only one they missed is disparities. Or maybe I missed it on the list.
These keywords could show up in the text of ANY grant involving human participants. If you say you're going to study men and women, you get flagged. If you say you're going to control for socioeconomic status - totally standard practice - you get flagged. Disability? Flagged.
Glad to see that my research on “Elderly white men exhibiting narcissistic traits: Does Exaggerated Wealth result in decrease in empathy” will still get published
So theoretically you could be talking about the "blood-brain barrier" and that would set it off? Good luck to all you physicians doing research into brain surgery out there!
At least the terms - Sociopath, Psychopath, Meglomaniac, Oligarch, and Billionaire are not listed as flagged keywords so those would be great studies to perform with grant money.
Elon’s child coders don’t have enough experience to know how the terms are used or what they mean in the context of research, and they are too dumb or too arrogant to be aware of what they may not know.
That list was generated by AI - it’s incomplete, asymmetrical and bizarre. It makes no sense even from a fascist perspective to ban words like historically, institutional, or indeed even women.
I am begging the people making these lists to attend one single class period of foundational research methods. You literally can’t conduct research with any level of reliability without accounting for some of these topics.
I conducted studies for writing and annotation. I wouldn’t be able to do the same research now or extend my research. How disgusting and insane is that? I can’t conduct research to help students improve reading comprehension, critical thinking, and writing skills.
Does it match the list in the appendix of this report? An Oct 2024 investigation by Ted Cruz into how (I mean it's so fucking ironic I could weep) the prior administration politicized the NSF by allowing it to study "DEI."
One of Trump’s first executive orders was Executive Order 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” 🚩🚩🚩
I found several words/phrases on the list that are likely to be in a mathematics grant that's purely about math. You're not going to get very far without using the words equality and inequality. Status, inclusion, diverse, etc. and quite a few of the others might also be common.
Literally try to write any paper with any hard math proofs without using the words equality, inequality, status, excluded, systematic, discriminatory etc.
What does the flag do? Block the application? Send it for further ideological purity testing? Provide data back to DOGE? I know it's hard for whistleblowers but more context would be useful
The word "systemic" is on the banned list, so if I study systemic inflammation & health, flagged. If I study political science, flagged. If I study trauma, flagged. Keep in mind that the largest mental health provider in the country is the Veteran's Administration, but we can't study trauma now?
What you don’t study, does not exist, is probably the take. Hence, nobody is responsible for the consequences as they don’t exist. It is easier not to look at problems than to tackle them. Trump government is nuts and I feel sorry for their voters who believed lies.
If you even mention any social, economic, or political institutions….churches, schools, for profit corporations, agencies, legislatures or councils, nonprofits….you're gonna get flagged.
The group I support as a Research Admin isn’t NSF… but we do DISABILITY research. If this is the list they’re using everywhere that entire funding agency will be flagged.
And if in Horticultural Extension, which publishes information on systemic pesticides... what will they do? Shut down a 100+-yr program operating in all 50 states?
head trauma is right out then, trauma center, trauma team, trauma surgeon, blunt trauma, wow what a disaster this is going to be, not even getting into how problematic “female” and “women” will be.
It's idiotic. But as long as u know the keywords, you can play Alias. Male and non-male. You can use Latin. Would probably also be best use of AI to "translate a text" to keep the meaning but not use keywords.
If I study anxiety via threat-biased attention, the word "biased" gets me flagged. You can't design a study of humans without using at least one of the terms on the banned list, which means that biomedical, brain, social science research is now on ice in the USA
I lead one of the more than 900 local CASA programs in the country - Court Appointed Special Advocates - we train and place court appointed advocates onto cases of child abuse and neglect.
This is a violation of your 1A period- I think Professors and the like should consider legally challenging this- I mean what reasonable person bans scientific nomenclature other than religious weirdos who dance w/snakes and drink kerosene
Please include "sexual".
I am a sex researcher and federal PO's have warned us about this search term for decades. It is not related to the new DEI, it has just always been the case to ensure nothing related to sexual health is funded unless it pushed abstinence.
So basically any research in any field can be denied a grant...
I hope that every single person who gets their grants knocked back because of this sues the hell out of the gov because if you don't, research and scientific progress is dead.
I’m sure program officers in other depts/offices (like Office on Violence Against Women, Office on Victims of Crime, Bureau of Justice Assistance, SAMHSA) will be forced to use a similar decision tree, which will pretty much flag most discretionary grant funding, regardless of statutory authority.
Any thoughts on how this might impact Head Start funding ultimately? There's a lot of DEI language in the policies governing how we operate at all levels, up to the national level, I think.
I wonder if there are any scientific papers in the field of biological sciences without any of these words, regardless of the topic. If this list is genuine, this is completely insane.
This is the apotheosis of the joke where someone says they don't use pronouns and someone replies with a quote of theirs but with all the pronouns removed.
We have to fight them. Research that isn’t targeted to certain demographics or genders or whoever it impacts is worthless. Same for funding programs designed to help certain demographics. They exist for a reason. I hate these people.
This little flowchart also bans the study of about half of statistics, data science, and machine learning. I can think of a dozen papers from the top of my head that use a bunch of these flagged terms and have absolutely nothing to do with anything but Math/Computer Science.
The way racists and sexists will destroy themselves in order to hurt the underclass needs to be studied.
We would have had universal healthcare in the 60s in idiots didn't have it out for black people so much. 😒
I’ve sat on an NSF granting committee, and projects that didn’t address researcher positionality would be ranked lower. These words are universal for sociology and many geography grants.
So does this mean no type of science of any kind exist or can be studied. It’s flagged because project 2025 says no science? Is this the Dark Ages of the Middle Ages returned?!
"Female." But not "male." It doesn't matter, because there goes basically any epidemiological study. Or any biomed study, for that matter. How are you supposed to NOT control for gender? Are these people literally stupid??
This could hamper or end all research in the USA. So many of these are used all the time across STEM. It's ridiculous this will damage or destroy US research, higher education ect. How long before the USA has a massive brain drain?
It's even diffucult to design a study in nulear chemistry (my field) without stating that sth is "excluded", data are "biased" or sth "underrepresented in literature". Wenn we deal with analyzing archeologic artifacts, it's even "cultural heritage". This is ridiculous.
OMFG, THEY’RE LAUNCHING EUGENETICS, ON TOP OF BEING RACIST NAZIS, THEY LITERALLY WANT PEOPLE WHO THEY DON’T THINK ARE QUALITY HUMAN BREEDING SPECIMENS TO DIE.
My God. Is this the end of legitimate scientific research in the US? Are Musk and Trump just going to replace the NSF with Answers in Genesis and the creationist Discovery Institute?
This is what happens when people with no understanding of what is being evaluated set the criteria for evaluation.
Idiots crippling brilliant minds with no one in a position to stand up & say "This makes no sense, those rules can't apply here just because you've never used words with other meaning."
Framing this as a form of evaluation, even if it is an idiotic one, is an underreaction I think. This is clearly deliberate sabotage, as explicitly promised by Vance, Trump, Musk and others.
I mean, not just grants involving human participants as study subjects. Any grant. Period. Biologist here, studying non human species, and I use many of these words in proposals, reports, publications.
And just to be clear, sometimes I use them in reference to humans because we have decided that specific topics (amounting to equity and inclusivity) matter.
If you're a thorough researcher in ANY human science, social or not, bias is going to be acknowledged. I'm surprised my economics prof didn't open class with this, because this severely hinders credible research in economics, especially behavioral economics.
Ah, but I don't see "gay" on there, so ironically, it's apparently now okay to say gay.
Double ironic ... every other word's banned, so can now ONLY say gay.
to define even just „women“ or „female“ as „DEIA language“… they really go far….🤢
Just medical studies - considering different effects - are eradicated then …
Apart from *every* scientific / human topic…
This is inacceptable and will harm + cost many lives
Havoc to science, universities, knowledge🤯
this - it just seems if you pass the flagged words and implied to flagged words - then they have to work out how to "provide an actual explanation"?
hmm so confusing
Nevermind that the broader impacts section is congressionally mandated so it's pretty much guaranteed that most, if not all, grants will have language that is found to be in violation of that EO.
My NSF Phase II SBIR that got rejected at the end of last year was pretty much a straight engineering project... and that proposal has at least half a dozen of the banned words in the technical merit and commercial impact parts of the proposal, let alone broader impacts.
Is this the best that "tech bros" can do? 🤣 No nodes based on information gain? That is not a decision tree, not even a query, and is ignorant of what keywords are for. (Screening out research into "trauma" would be interesting)
Musk cannot even control the fake accounts, misinformation, and disinformation on his own social media site and now he thinks he knows better about how to do science.
He doesn’t, the point is just to restrict it. This list wipes out all social science research, and a whole lot of other scientific research too. Can’t study women’s health anymore either.
he name of Einstein disappeared from physics classes, and the unit of frequency, the hertz, could no longer be designated by this Jewish name. »
Victor Klemperer, LTI: The language of the Third Reich, ed. Counterpoint, p. 141.
Female is a bad word and can't be used? I notice male isn't a trigger word. I hiss and spit on their stupid list and will shred it with my claws and put it in the used cat litter bag.
The word “institutional” would be triggered by the phrase “institutional review board” — which many grant applications for biomedical research would use.
Comments
LESSON 1: Do Not Obey In Advance
https://youtu.be/9tocssf3w80
#USpol #USpolitics #Books "On Freedom" too
https://snyder.substack.com/p/twenty-lessons-on-tyranny
Thanks for sharing.
"THAT'S it BANNED!"
Devils
My god , the people now running the USA really are ignorant in their ideological crusade.
Sorry
So any neurological studies that include research into the blood-brain barrier would automatically be booted.
JFC
Oh I can think of a few reasons and I'm sure everyone else can too.
Instant turn down.
Just FYI.
F NO!!!!!
Take of that what you will
From now on there will only be males and unpersons.
"women"
Women are also scientists. Women also work in the administration. Women voted for h*m.
Every single word, idea, & person matters.
But holy fuck, how revealing.
Would be so grateful for explanation ☺️
I quoted and did my best re: the decision tree but I'd still like to read this. Thanks!
This is a violation of the Constitution’s Equal Protections Clause on the basis of at least sex, race, and disability.
There needs to be a legal challenge.
@amyklobuchar.com
All they need to say is that by law* all NSF grants since 2011 have addressed broader impacts, always some element of DEIJ, and law supersedes EO so that practice will continue until the law changes.
This is one step - “does the application contain banned words?”
This is what anticipatory obedience looks like.
🧪
This flow chart simply says end all funding..... There is no path that leads to anything but "End'
(Though I share your doubts that this is the genuine flow chart)
This way, people can see what's going on.
If it was already "AI", no-one could understand what the data sets mean after it has been trained.
e.g. in the case of "systemic", "systemic inflammation" would be ok, "systemic climate risk" would be flagged
They just don't give a fuck about people's lives
Is this real? It’s the most bizarre thing I’ve read. Just confirming - this is madness
"Does proposal contain keywords and context..."
Much less offensive to the sensibilities of decent, efficiency-loving folk.
I wrote a poem following the NSF’s decision tree, turning their bureaucratic logic into verse
Flagged for Thought: A Decision Tree Poem
🔗 poem:https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGdUhhooU/
What would you read to blind person next to you?
[picture of cat under Add alt text on screenshot]
https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-add-alt-text-to-images-on-bluesky-and-why-you-should/
This will cripple science in the USA.
Hopefully, the rest of the world will benefit from the resultant brain drain
Slingers are needed, I recall even the compilers were hard to come by
in 1999 ...
Watch all research leaving the US. 🤷😢
How to turn the US into North Korea. 🤷
So what, are they "human, but not men"?
And I have to puke when I try to think this thought.
skin BARRIER
brain BARRIER
patient ADVOCATE
SES score in regression analysis (SOCIOECONOMIC status)
FEMALE, WOMEN
What the fuck
That list was generated by AI - it’s incomplete, asymmetrical and bizarre. It makes no sense even from a fascist perspective to ban words like historically, institutional, or indeed even women.
Which means they'll just pick and choose what they want.
Direct link to pdf here: https://www.commerce.senate.gov/services/files/4BD2D522-2092-4246-91A5-58EEF99750BC
DO BETTER.
Good fucking luck.
Republicans hate us all
Trauma, historical, female, women, disability, status, victim…
Humans aren’t medically identical
This goes beyond erasure
It goes into eradication
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00245-6?utm_source=Live+Audience&utm_campaign=614c4c600e-nature-briefing-microbiology-20250130&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_b27a691814-614c4c600e-498669248
closer to fascism
(May God have mercy on us.)
Welcome back to the dark ages.
What they're demanding would basically destroy social sciences entirely, and plenty of other fields would be crippled.
This is what happens when people with precious little understanding of science use ChatGPT to generate a "list".
I scrubbed my online presence and use a fake name here just to stay out of the crap. Now I'm waiting to see my publications disappear.
The Great Barrier Reef
I am a sex researcher and federal PO's have warned us about this search term for decades. It is not related to the new DEI, it has just always been the case to ensure nothing related to sexual health is funded unless it pushed abstinence.
I hope that every single person who gets their grants knocked back because of this sues the hell out of the gov because if you don't, research and scientific progress is dead.
i think trump is an agent saboteur, paid by russia or china bc no man can be this fucking dumb
We would have had universal healthcare in the 60s in idiots didn't have it out for black people so much. 😒
"Historotically, research on the blood-brain barrier has focused on how much it excludes some compounds from entering parenchyma of the brain."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics
This essentially makes all double-blind research impossible. You've gotta be kidding me. 😤
Like just using synonyms? Or which would not normally be up to academic standards but which are the best that can be done.
Then just do the study properly?
Idiots crippling brilliant minds with no one in a position to stand up & say "This makes no sense, those rules can't apply here just because you've never used words with other meaning."
The orange jew knows who his masters are.
Anyone researching mono-crops, and their negative impacts, is gonna have trouble writing a paper.
Because you know the lazy shit is using Grok or a similar AI to sift through these papers looking for words that get their panties in a bunch.
Double ironic ... every other word's banned, so can now ONLY say gay.
Just medical studies - considering different effects - are eradicated then …
Apart from *every* scientific / human topic…
This is inacceptable and will harm + cost many lives
Havoc to science, universities, knowledge🤯
hmm so confusing
They could’ve communicated the goal this simply.
*headdesk*
End of decision tree.
Victor Klemperer, LTI: The language of the Third Reich, ed. Counterpoint, p. 141.
These are like some of my most used words.
Next stop is NEH grants?!