// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
The federal keyword lists that canceled billions in research funding
In court documents, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and others shared which words they used to target grants.
Soon after President Donald Trump retook office, researchers and academics across the country began receiving startling news. They were abruptly informed, often mid-project, that their federal grant funding had been terminated. Form letters bearing the news often offered few details beyond that their work no longer aligned with agency priorities.
As part of a lawsuit filed by University of California researchers, a handful of federal agencies confirmed earlier this month in court documents that they cut grants if researchers' projects “expressed, or were presumed to express, viewpoints disfavored by the Administration."
Those court documents offer insight into how the Trump administration undertook a swift campaign to revoke research funding for work related to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts and other subjects at odds with its political agenda.
Federal agencies relied heavily on keyword searches when terminating grants held by UC researchers, court documents revealed. While the searched terms varied across agencies, they focused on initiatives facing significant conservative opposition, such as DEI and green energy.
The UC researchers allege the grant terminations violated their First Amendment rights by targeting their work based on viewpoint and subject matter and have asked the federal judge overseeing the case to rule the revocations unconstitutional.
The keyword lists used by four of the federal agencies named in the UC lawsuit — the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Endowment for the Humanities — elucidate the wide net cast by the Trump administration when targeting grants.
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Of the four agencies, NSF used the most keywords by far. It told the court it pulled its search terms list directly from a 2024 report released by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, which alleged the Biden administration had politicized science at the agency. NSF also mentioned, but did not list, terms related to misinformation.
The report shared hundreds of terms it used to screen grants to determine whether they were related to DEI or promoted “neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle.” The list included "injustice," "ally," "prejudice," "institutional," "discrimination," "historically," "minority," and "traumatic."