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Last week, staff were briefed on a new process for vetting grant proposals that are found to be out of step with a presidential directive on diversity, equity,

Last week, staff were briefed on a new process for vetting grant proposals that are found to be out of step with a presidential directive on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI),... In the new structure, even if a revised proposal gets the green light from a division director, a new body whose membership has not been determined will take a fresh look to ensure it conforms to the agency’s new standard for making awards. So they're going to install gatekeepers to shoot down anything that even hints at DEI. I assume members will be hand picked by the Emperor from a Moms for Liberty short list.

chuckadams 1y ago
These are the same people that zeroed out research funding on transgenic mice because they thought it was the same as transgendered.
- biofox 1y ago
  This has been repeated in several places, but it's not entirely accurate. Having looked through a partial list of the studies that were cancelled, many of them seemed to be looking at the effects of sex hormones (e.g. on memory or wound healing). These could involve transgenic mice that overexpress hormones or receptors, but also injection of exogenous hormones. Still a ridiculous reason to defund medical research.
  - vachina 1y ago
    > partial list of the studies that were cancelled https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO Honestly, having seen the list, I reserve judgement.
- busterarm 1y ago
  That ended up not being the gotcha that y'all thought it was and CNN had to add a correction on their fact-check because mice were indeed being administered cross-sex hormone therapy, just not for the purpose of changing their sex. One of the experiments in particular was to determine how gender-affirming care would affect humans, which indeed makes it at odds with the administration's DEI policy and is not just them being dumb about what transgenic means.
  - tessierashpool 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - busterarm 1y ago
      it's a footnote on CNN's own fact check of the story. I literally had already mentioned where the citation is in my post.
    - alabastervlog 1y ago
      The truth is mixed. What the White House got wrong was characterizing the studies they canceled as being on "transgender" mice, while the mice (at least, in many cases, IDK if all of them) were not in any way "transitioned", so there's no reasonable way to describe that as being a study on "transgender mice". However, many of those studies were definitely about the effects of e.g. hormone therapy used to support human transitions. Some language used by the White House suggests that they may indeed have thought the mice were transgender because the mice were in fact transgenic, but those studies also were related to transgender healthcare, so, it's probably not accurate to say that the confusion is why those were cancelled. It's probably because they did in fact have to do with transgender healthcare. It is also the case that studies involving hormones that had dick-all to do with transgender healthcare were cancelled because, I guess, too many keywords matched whatever inept search the fascists did. E.g.: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526#description https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526#descriptio...
    - hyeonwho4 1y ago
      The White House press release had links to the eight grants in question. The claimed values of the grants were inflated by the press release, but they did actually involve studying the effects of cross sex hormone administration, so in this case the claims of confusion between "transgender mice" and "transgenic mice" were the fake news. (Also, the claimed 8M USD over N years is peanuts compared to the money spent annually on developing actual transgenic mice.)
  - exe34 1y ago
    > is not just them being dumb That's a wild take for anything this admin does.
burnte 1y ago
They're even sending letters to foreign governments "ordering" them to cut all DEI programs. OTHER GOVERNMENTS. Insanity.
- boxed 1y ago
  They sent one to the municipality of Stockholm. The majority leader in Stockholm responded by suggesting they could just turn off the water and sewer system for the embassy :P
  - bilbo0s 1y ago
    I thought HN User burnte was being hyperbolic in the assertions that post put forth. Then I read a few articles. sigh. I mean, I guess we'll try to find competent and sane leaders again in 4 years. I don't know? There's not much else we can do at this point if this is the level of irrationality you're dealing with. I'll add in way of explanation to non-US citizens that in the US, we've always had a fixation on certain minorities, one in particular, that has teetered on what I would call "unhealthy". That's where a lot of this comes from. Still monumentally irrational behavior, but I just wanted to offer some explanation of the national psychology driving these kinds of non-sensical actions.
    - inverted_flag 1y ago
      > I mean, I guess we'll try to find competent and sane leaders again in 4 years. I don't know? There's not much else we can do at this point if this is the level of irrationality you're dealing with. There are absolutely not going to be free and fair elections 4 years from now. People really need to start preparing for this reality.
      - i80and 1y ago
        I still think it's possible we'll have free elections still, assuming the SAVE act fails. If it passes, as a democracy we're probably failed beyond repair in my lifetime.
Supermancho 1y ago
> So they're going to install gatekeepers to shoot down anything that even hints at DEI. Or science that conflicts with the whims of Trump's administration. This includes anti-scientific rhetoric and conflicts with the bribe pipelines.
dfxm12 1y ago
All this extra bureaucracy doesn't seem very efficient.
- DrillShopper 1y ago
  The efficiency will trickle down
  - watersb 1y ago
    Getting downvoted for sarcasm is a noble act.
    - DrillShopper 1y ago
      It is my cross-eyed bear
762236 1y ago
DEI in practice is illegal (we don't get to make decisions based on race, or other protected categories of a person's identity). I get trained on this once a year at work. What we do instead is improve the probability that underrepresented people can enter the hiring pipeline, e.g., by investing in schools.
- hackyhacky 1y ago
  > DEI in practice is illegal No, it isn't, and this assumption is based on a poor understanding of what DEI is. The right paints DEI as a directive to hire less-qualified people based on their race. In reality, DEI just ensures that everyone gets a fair chance regardless of their race.
  - kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
    You speak of equal opportunity. What happens in practice is enforced equal outcomes which entails compromising on principles and standards to get the desired result. i.e. "Group X is under-performing at math" so therefore the problem is with inherent bias in math and we won't expect engineers and scientists to have competency in this domain to get the makeup of people we have decided upon from the start.
    - hackyhacky 1y ago
      > You speak of equal opportunity. What happens in practice is enforced equal outcomes which entails compromising on principles and standards to get the desired result. Yes, I am aware of what you think DEI hiring practices are, but speaking as someone who has actually applied these policies, I'm telling you that that's not what happens. The propaganda simply is not true. Under DEI hiring policies, we were required to document *outreach* to underrepresented groups in order to get a more diverse hiring pool. We *never* lowered our standards and always hired the best applicant.
    - nickpsecurity 1y ago
      I'll add the people that promoted it often said that amongst themselves while more publicly just talking about "diversity." They usually believed in imtersectionality, redistribution of wealth/power, etc. Their fix is systematic discrimination against specific groups to redistribute power to achieve the outcomes. And, if other groups become dominant, they still favor them over white people. We've seen that these ideologies are conflict-oriented, racist, and less effective. They were forced on us by policy and law by people who in no way represented most of Americans' thinking. Now, a different group favoring no racism, equal opportunity, and generosity to all groups based on need is reversing the prior group's work. Everyone who had been discriminated against will appreciate ending that discrimination.
UncleOxidant 1y ago
[flagged]
- damnitbuilds 1y ago
  "If it's not ideologically aligned it won't get funded." As I show elsewhere in this thread, the previous administration forced applicants to include irrelevant DEI language in grant applications.
  - freejazz 1y ago
    I think if Trump just wanted people to swear loyalty statements instead of cutting all the funding, shutting all these departments, cancelling research, etc., they'd be unhappy but still fine with the fact that the research goes on...
  - kelnos 1y ago
    If you really think that's the same thing, I'm not sure what to tell you. Your ability to compare situations and evaluate consequences is completely broken.
    - damnitbuilds 1y ago
      [flagged]
  - VerminOctopus1 1y ago
    Was it the Biden administration doing this? Are you sure this wasn’t happening at the university or state level?
    - damnitbuilds 1y ago
      The NSF did it.
- kbelder 1y ago
  That's not any different than it has been.
cubefox 1y ago
I think you can consider "DEI" as unfair racial discrimination even if you don't consider yourself a conservative. It's not the case that you have to agree with everything "your" side says, and disagree with everything coming from "their" side.
- Ar-Curunir 1y ago
  DEI in these grant proposal didn’t really have anything to do with affirmative action. Rather, it covers a wide swathe, including setting up undergraduate research programs for poorer students, offering travel scholarships, outreach programs at high schools, and so on. It’s easy to get caught up in culture war nonsense, but that nonsense doesn’t usually align with what’s on the ground.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago
  If you think that then you misunderstand what DEI really means. Conservatives assume black people can never be smart and therefor hiring standards must fall for DEI programs to happen. The reality is that there are more smart black and white people capable of doing your job than you are capable of hiring. So maybe consider taking the black woman who is just as qualified so your department is no longer so lily white and male dominated. That is all DEI is. Conservatives have just misrepresented it so badly to the public to the point where even the nonconservative public believes their lies.
  - cubefox 1y ago
    There is data (e.g. on Harvard university admissions) which shows that average SAT cut-off scores of admitted students are very different for various racial groups, which strongly hints at DEI based discrimination. I don't agree with that happening. I think people should be admitted/rejected based only on their ability, not partly based on whether they happen to fall in some group for which the quota has to be increased/decreased.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
ponow 1y ago
These are welcome changes, as the practice of DEI (not it's idealization) is actively discriminatory and intolerant of dissenting views. Let competence be the only metric.
- zmgsabst 1y ago
  [flagged]
- tzs 1y ago
  If competence were the only metric (or even a metric that this administration actually cared for) 90% of the appointees of this administration would not have been hired.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    It's not an either-or. This administration can have the average IQ of a bdelloid rotifer, but that doesn't mean that every single ideological position of all the people they are mad at is valid.

chuckadams 1y ago

These are the same people that zeroed out research funding on transgenic mice because they thought it was the same as transgendered.

biofox 1y ago
This has been repeated in several places, but it's not entirely accurate. Having looked through a partial list of the studies that were cancelled, many of them seemed to be looking at the effects of sex hormones (e.g. on memory or wound healing). These could involve transgenic mice that overexpress hormones or receptors, but also injection of exogenous hormones. Still a ridiculous reason to defund medical research.
- vachina 1y ago
  > partial list of the studies that were cancelled https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO https://airtable.com/appGKlSVeXniQZkFC/shrFxbl1YTqb3AyOO Honestly, having seen the list, I reserve judgement.
busterarm 1y ago
That ended up not being the gotcha that y'all thought it was and CNN had to add a correction on their fact-check because mice were indeed being administered cross-sex hormone therapy, just not for the purpose of changing their sex. One of the experiments in particular was to determine how gender-affirming care would affect humans, which indeed makes it at odds with the administration's DEI policy and is not just them being dumb about what transgenic means.
- tessierashpool 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - busterarm 1y ago
    it's a footnote on CNN's own fact check of the story. I literally had already mentioned where the citation is in my post.
  - alabastervlog 1y ago
    The truth is mixed. What the White House got wrong was characterizing the studies they canceled as being on "transgender" mice, while the mice (at least, in many cases, IDK if all of them) were not in any way "transitioned", so there's no reasonable way to describe that as being a study on "transgender mice". However, many of those studies were definitely about the effects of e.g. hormone therapy used to support human transitions. Some language used by the White House suggests that they may indeed have thought the mice were transgender because the mice were in fact transgenic, but those studies also were related to transgender healthcare, so, it's probably not accurate to say that the confusion is why those were cancelled. It's probably because they did in fact have to do with transgender healthcare. It is also the case that studies involving hormones that had dick-all to do with transgender healthcare were cancelled because, I guess, too many keywords matched whatever inept search the fascists did. E.g.: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526#description https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10891526#descriptio...
  - hyeonwho4 1y ago
    The White House press release had links to the eight grants in question. The claimed values of the grants were inflated by the press release, but they did actually involve studying the effects of cross sex hormone administration, so in this case the claims of confusion between "transgender mice" and "transgenic mice" were the fake news. (Also, the claimed 8M USD over N years is peanuts compared to the money spent annually on developing actual transgenic mice.)
- exe34 1y ago
  > is not just them being dumb That's a wild take for anything this admin does.

burnte 1y ago

They're even sending letters to foreign governments "ordering" them to cut all DEI programs. OTHER GOVERNMENTS. Insanity.

boxed 1y ago
They sent one to the municipality of Stockholm. The majority leader in Stockholm responded by suggesting they could just turn off the water and sewer system for the embassy :P
- bilbo0s 1y ago
  I thought HN User burnte was being hyperbolic in the assertions that post put forth. Then I read a few articles. sigh. I mean, I guess we'll try to find competent and sane leaders again in 4 years. I don't know? There's not much else we can do at this point if this is the level of irrationality you're dealing with. I'll add in way of explanation to non-US citizens that in the US, we've always had a fixation on certain minorities, one in particular, that has teetered on what I would call "unhealthy". That's where a lot of this comes from. Still monumentally irrational behavior, but I just wanted to offer some explanation of the national psychology driving these kinds of non-sensical actions.
  - inverted_flag 1y ago
    > I mean, I guess we'll try to find competent and sane leaders again in 4 years. I don't know? There's not much else we can do at this point if this is the level of irrationality you're dealing with. There are absolutely not going to be free and fair elections 4 years from now. People really need to start preparing for this reality.
    - i80and 1y ago
      I still think it's possible we'll have free elections still, assuming the SAVE act fails. If it passes, as a democracy we're probably failed beyond repair in my lifetime.

Supermancho 1y ago

> So they're going to install gatekeepers to shoot down anything that even hints at DEI. Or science that conflicts with the whims of Trump's administration. This includes anti-scientific rhetoric and conflicts with the bribe pipelines.

dfxm12 1y ago

All this extra bureaucracy doesn't seem very efficient.

DrillShopper 1y ago
The efficiency will trickle down
- watersb 1y ago
  Getting downvoted for sarcasm is a noble act.
  - DrillShopper 1y ago
    It is my cross-eyed bear

762236 1y ago

DEI in practice is illegal (we don't get to make decisions based on race, or other protected categories of a person's identity). I get trained on this once a year at work. What we do instead is improve the probability that underrepresented people can enter the hiring pipeline, e.g., by investing in schools.

hackyhacky 1y ago
> DEI in practice is illegal No, it isn't, and this assumption is based on a poor understanding of what DEI is. The right paints DEI as a directive to hire less-qualified people based on their race. In reality, DEI just ensures that everyone gets a fair chance regardless of their race.
- kevin_thibedeau 1y ago
  You speak of equal opportunity. What happens in practice is enforced equal outcomes which entails compromising on principles and standards to get the desired result. i.e. "Group X is under-performing at math" so therefore the problem is with inherent bias in math and we won't expect engineers and scientists to have competency in this domain to get the makeup of people we have decided upon from the start.
  - hackyhacky 1y ago
    > You speak of equal opportunity. What happens in practice is enforced equal outcomes which entails compromising on principles and standards to get the desired result. Yes, I am aware of what you think DEI hiring practices are, but speaking as someone who has actually applied these policies, I'm telling you that that's not what happens. The propaganda simply is not true. Under DEI hiring policies, we were required to document *outreach* to underrepresented groups in order to get a more diverse hiring pool. We *never* lowered our standards and always hired the best applicant.
  - nickpsecurity 1y ago
    I'll add the people that promoted it often said that amongst themselves while more publicly just talking about "diversity." They usually believed in imtersectionality, redistribution of wealth/power, etc. Their fix is systematic discrimination against specific groups to redistribute power to achieve the outcomes. And, if other groups become dominant, they still favor them over white people. We've seen that these ideologies are conflict-oriented, racist, and less effective. They were forced on us by policy and law by people who in no way represented most of Americans' thinking. Now, a different group favoring no racism, equal opportunity, and generosity to all groups based on need is reversing the prior group's work. Everyone who had been discriminated against will appreciate ending that discrimination.

UncleOxidant 1y ago

[flagged]

damnitbuilds 1y ago
"If it's not ideologically aligned it won't get funded." As I show elsewhere in this thread, the previous administration forced applicants to include irrelevant DEI language in grant applications.
- freejazz 1y ago
  I think if Trump just wanted people to swear loyalty statements instead of cutting all the funding, shutting all these departments, cancelling research, etc., they'd be unhappy but still fine with the fact that the research goes on...
- kelnos 1y ago
  If you really think that's the same thing, I'm not sure what to tell you. Your ability to compare situations and evaluate consequences is completely broken.
  - damnitbuilds 1y ago
    [flagged]
- VerminOctopus1 1y ago
  Was it the Biden administration doing this? Are you sure this wasn’t happening at the university or state level?
  - damnitbuilds 1y ago
    The NSF did it.
kbelder 1y ago
That's not any different than it has been.

cubefox 1y ago

I think you can consider "DEI" as unfair racial discrimination even if you don't consider yourself a conservative. It's not the case that you have to agree with everything "your" side says, and disagree with everything coming from "their" side.

Ar-Curunir 1y ago
DEI in these grant proposal didn’t really have anything to do with affirmative action. Rather, it covers a wide swathe, including setting up undergraduate research programs for poorer students, offering travel scholarships, outreach programs at high schools, and so on. It’s easy to get caught up in culture war nonsense, but that nonsense doesn’t usually align with what’s on the ground.
kjkjadksj 1y ago
If you think that then you misunderstand what DEI really means. Conservatives assume black people can never be smart and therefor hiring standards must fall for DEI programs to happen. The reality is that there are more smart black and white people capable of doing your job than you are capable of hiring. So maybe consider taking the black woman who is just as qualified so your department is no longer so lily white and male dominated. That is all DEI is. Conservatives have just misrepresented it so badly to the public to the point where even the nonconservative public believes their lies.
- cubefox 1y ago
  There is data (e.g. on Harvard university admissions) which shows that average SAT cut-off scores of admitted students are very different for various racial groups, which strongly hints at DEI based discrimination. I don't agree with that happening. I think people should be admitted/rejected based only on their ability, not partly based on whether they happen to fall in some group for which the quota has to be increased/decreased.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]

ponow 1y ago

These are welcome changes, as the practice of DEI (not it's idealization) is actively discriminatory and intolerant of dissenting views. Let competence be the only metric.

zmgsabst 1y ago
[flagged]
tzs 1y ago
If competence were the only metric (or even a metric that this administration actually cared for) 90% of the appointees of this administration would not have been hired.
- int_19h 1y ago
  It's not an either-or. This administration can have the average IQ of a bdelloid rotifer, but that doesn't mean that every single ideological position of all the people they are mad at is valid.