Applicants seeking funding from the National Institutes of Health for, among other things, basic research, conferences, and training for young scientists will no longer be required to include diversity plans in their applications, according to a new policy publicized by the NIH on Monday, which Mother Jones is the first to report.
The NIH quietly posted the new measures on a grants webpage, waiting until Tuesday to alert employees. The directives likely do not come as a surprise, given that the NIH has terminated several grants supporting research focused on marginalized people—including, as I just reported yesterday, a project focused on training researchers to study domestic violence and maternal mortality—to comply with Trump’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion across government. The announcement is nonetheless significant, two NIH employees say, because it marks the first time the agency has explicitly said officials won’t review current and future applications with diversity in mind. Deadlines for some of the relevant grants are just around the corner, in April and May.
One employee I spoke to, a scientific review officer who reviews grant applications, told me she and her colleagues had received internal instructions several weeks ago to disregard the parts of applications that address diversity. But publication of the guidelines, she said, “definitely reflects the priorities of an administration that doesn’t value diversity.”
The updated rules appear to eliminate the inclusion of diversity plans in seven application categories: Two that help fund science conferences, and five that support training opportunities for undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral researchers. People might have used the diversity plans in such applications to propose setting aside money for researchers from underfunded institutions to attend and participate in key conferences, for example, or to explain how they would provide training opportunities to underrepresented researchers, including women and people of color, the scientific research officer told me. The requirement of the diversity plan in the conference grants was instituted at the start of President Joe Biden’s term; it is unclear when the others were first implemented.
The guidelines also target two other application components used more broadly across the NIH. One is called the Plan for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives (PEDP). Proposed by the NIH’s BRAIN Initiative in 2021, the PEDP asked applicants to explain how their team and research process would foster inclusivity—whether by including underserved populations in the research process as partners or diverse investigators on the research team, by way of a few examples.
The PEDP proved so popular within the NIH, the scientific research officer said, that other institutes began adding it to their own grant applications. The other NIH employee I spoke with, who analyzes how grants are spent, said the elimination of this component will likely “stunt research that shows impacts to different groups, whether they be by sex or by race.”
Another eliminated grant component is the trainee diversity report, which was included to help the NIH assess how “institutional training grants, career development awards, and most research education grants” were being spent, according to the agency webpage. The NIH employee described the elimination of the diversity reports as an attack on “the racial makeup of trainees in these grants”—which is troubling given that Black and Hispanic people, in particular, along with women overall, remain underrepresented in STEM jobs and in research.
“They don’t seem to want to know about, or care to know, about, the makeup of these trainees,” the NIH worker added.
The NIH webpage says that not only are the diversity plans not required, but that even if they are submitted, they will be ignored.
Representatives for the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services, the umbrella agency that oversees it, did not immediately respond to questions from Mother Jones.
The scientific research officer sees the updated guidelines as grim. “I think we will lose a lot as an agency,” she told me, “in understanding who’s involved in research and who we’re reaching.” The other NIH employee told me we are seeing in real time how Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to DEI “is directly going to impact science.”
Speaking to these researchers, I could not help but think of what Rebecca Fielding-Miller, an associate professor of public health at the University of California, San Diego—who’d had an NIH grant terminated, possibly for including “equity” in the title—told me when we spoke on Sunday: “The result is going to be the systematic removal of women and people of color from the act of research. At the end of this, we’re going to end up with an academy that is more white, more wealthy, more male, more cisgender, and it’s going to reinforce the same problem.”
