BUZZ
National Science Foundation is operating 3 programs that violate equal protection, Justice Department finds
Three National Science Foundation programs to increase racial minority student involvement in the hard sciences are unconstitutional, the U.S. Department of Justice ruled Wednesday.
These “race- and sex-based programs administered by the National Science Foundation violate the Constitution’s equal-protection guarantee,” the department wrote in the decision.
As Inside Higher Ed reports, the department determined that the NSF should end the programs, each of which target college students and university faculty in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields, or STEM.
The decision quoted the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard: “Racial discrimination is invidious in all contexts. … [It] demeans the dignity and worth of a person to be judged by ancestry instead of by his or her own merit.”
One of the three programs at issue, the Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation program, supports projects that aim to increase the number of “Black, Hispanic, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander” students who pursue STEM degrees.
The department found similar discrimination issues with the other two programs: the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program and the Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate program.
About $104 million was budgeted for the three programs this year, the report states.
Additionally, the Justice Department identified two other programs that are problematic but correctable, according to the report:
The Organizational Change for Gender Equity in STEM Academic Professions ADVANCE program can continue as long as it doesn’t limit participation to women or give preferential treatment to applications from any sex. The grant money could still be used to study issues such as sexual harassment or gendered faculty workload inequities, the decision stated. And the Advanced Technological Education program, which offers grants to community colleges to increase STEM offerings, can continue as long as no preference is given to any racial or gender groups, the decision says.
The Justice Department did not find constitutional problems with four additional programs that it investigated in response to a request from NSF General Counsel Angela Williams.
Over the past two years, the Trump administration has been cracking down on federal grants through the NSF and other agencies that fund constitutionally questionable and left-wing ideological programs.
In an August 2025 executive order, for example, President Donald Trump mentioned taxpayer funding being used to support “drag shows in Ecuador.”
A number of university programs also are facing civil rights complaints for alleged race- and sex-based discrimination, including a Hispanics-only program at the University of Southern California and Loyola Marymount University, and a women-only tech initiative at a New York community college.
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