The National Institutes of Health is reportedly continuing to award grants that fund diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and initiatives despite President Donald Trump’s order for federal agencies to cease DEI efforts, The Daily Caller reports.
Do No Harm, a medical policy organization that advocates against diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the field of medicine and medical education, found that the NIH continues to fund grants for anti-racist training programs and other diversity initiatives.
According to the group, the NIH is spending about $440 million on grants that “explicitly cite DEI in their project descriptions” and more than $1.3 billion on active grants with diversity components.
“The NIH spends billions and billions of dollars, and those are taxpayer dollars,” Dr. Kurt Miceli, medical director for Do No Harm, told the Caller. “So we really need to be sensitive to what those dollars are being used for, and we need to be good stewards of those dollars.”
The NIH usually awards research grants on five-year cycles during which time the funding is released incrementally over the course of a 12-month budget period. During the annual renewal period, researchers are able to receive or supplement their grants, which are considered legally binding contracts once approved and cannot be terminated without formal justification.
“There are some of these long-standing grants that maybe didn’t have anything to do with DEI originally,” Miceli said. “Unfortunately, DEI concepts were added at the time.”
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