Leaked Decision Tree Shows How the Government Now Decides What Is Thought Crime

"You can't design a study of humans without using at least one of these terms."

Unless you've been living under a rock, you're probably aware that the United States' federal government is lurching toward an unabashed oligarchy, with the Trump administration actively cutting through agencies with an extremely regressive agenda.

One of those agencies is the National Science Foundation (NSF), which previously supported research and education in the fields of science and engineering through publicly-funded grants.

That now all seems poised to change. A week ago, one of Trump's many executive orders seemed to freeze all NSF grants, to the shock of the academic community.

That pause subsequently got walked back, but the Washington Post reports that teams there are now combing through any active research involving a secret list of words, to inspect whether it falls afoul of Trump's draconian new crackdown on anything even close to identity and diversity.

The partial list flags terms and phrases including "equity," diverse groups," "under served," along with some identity-based demographic nomenclature such as "LGBT," "Indigenous community," "Black and Latinx," as well as "BIPOC." Others, like "sense of belonging," are downright baffling.

As if those weren't broad enough, the blacklist also includes any mention of "women," "racial," "gender," and "trauma."

"These keywords could show up in the text of ANY grant involving human participants," wrote Dr. Darby Saxbe, a USC professor who published the list. "You can't design a study of humans without using at least one of these terms, which means that biomedical, brain, social science research is now on ice in the USA."

The list also comes with a "decision tree" for reference by the employees conducting the reviews, showing them how to sort work into categories of acceptable and unacceptable — a process that sounds an awful lot like the "thought crime" described by George Orwell in the iconic 1949 novel "1984."

Last year, the NSF reported distributing some $9 billion in grant money, supporting over 350,000 researchers, teachers, and students. While that's a massive boon for the scientific research community, it's chump change compared to the national federal budget of $6.9 trillion — or just over a tenth of one percent of the nation's total expenditures.

If Trump and co. wanted to target ineffective use of government funds, he might set his sights on the US Armed Forces, which together accounts for roughly $1.5 trillion in federal resources, the most of any G7 nation.

You'd be forgiven, then, for wondering what the justification for going after such a tiny agency could possibly be. After all, the NSF is by all accounts a global leader in scientific research — literally setting the global standards of the WHO's Drinking Water Safety and Treatment guidelines, for example. As with everything this administration has shown us so far, the point is to debase Trump's stated enemies.

"The goal seems to be to create chaos, demoralize researchers, and undermine science and research," Dr. Saxbe told this publication. "The keywords are so broad that they would apply to any research conducted with humans, including neuroscience, child development, economics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. It is already having a chilling effect on the science community."

The release of censored phrases, which so-far has not been acknowledged by the agency, is likewise in contradiction with previous instructions for grant proposals, furthering the confusion.

"The NSF... was charged by the US Congress in 1980 with the goal of 'broadening participation,' eg, by training a more diverse scientific workforce," Saxbe explains. "All NSF grants are required to have language about 'Broader Impacts,' or how this work will benefit society, for example by providing opportunities to trainees from diverse backgrounds."

"In other words," she says, "anyone who follows directions in a grant proposal is going to get flagged for 'DEI language.'"

As NSF grant-writing forms a major cornerstone to STEM research, it remains to be seen what broader implications this will have for the research community going forward. Unfortunately, this is likely just a taste of things to come as Trump and his merry band of cost cutters continue to ravish the critical agencies governing our country.

More on research: The Publisher of the Journal "Nature" Is Emailing Authors of Scientific Papers, Offering to Sell Them AI Summaries of Their Own Work