The Supreme Court recently issued another ruling that seeks to end racial discrimination. most recently in specially-created political districts. What has not been an issue, because it was not obvious like universities and Louisiana politics, is how grants get chosen.

A new study says that there was a component of racial favoritism in science funding as well, and it's only been revealed in the wake of NIH grant cuts.

To the public, science is like sports - a meritocracy. The best win. The reality is more like politics. It helps to have friends, and it's important that you say you will do what they want you to do. After the COVID-19 vaccine saved millions of lives and got a Nobel Prize, for example, both the NIH and the University of Pennsylvania attached themselves to it. Both were blatantly lying. The NIH had refused to fund the mRNA work of Katalin Karikó, Ph.D. Penn not only refused her tenure, they demoted her because she believed in mRNA but the federal government did not. She quit academia specifically because she knew the private sector funded nearly all actual basic research(1) while government often wanted to engage in cultural agendas or fund 'safe' studies guaranteed to show a positive result before the grant was up.

If the new data are accurate, the problem for scientists who actually want to be creative could be even worse. It reveals that some scholars may have been getting funding because of their skin color or LGBTQ+ status, not because of their work.



The claims are made using surveys of people whose grants were cut so victimhood could be a factor but if the 941 responses are valid, it also they were often not getting funded for science; they were getting taxpayer money to do surveys that would conclude things like that the health care system needed to be changed to serve their demographics. Nearly half of the science funding that should go to science was instead going to culture studies. Some of the grants cut were because the recipients were spending their days being antisemitic. Apparently no administration (including the Trump 45 one) had been asking the NIH for any indication they were funding science, at least not since Senator Tom Coburn's "Wastebook" days, when he'd ask why taxpayers had no choice in spending $35 million for academics to 'study' why politicians say nonsense in campaigns.

Yet if they were only chosen because of their demographic status, and that funding stops, media and academics get to claim the government opposes those minorities. It's a genius political move for them, but won't help science one bit. Because in too many cases it was not science being done at all.

And that will hurt Republicans this fall.

One of my favorite stories of Republicans being outmaneuvered by Democrats in media sentiment was from 2007 when Democrats got control of Congress and switched to corn-based utensils from plastic in the Congressional cafeteria. The knives broke easily, requiring more of them, the spoons wilted in soup. Staffers were annoyed. The waste had to be shipped deep into Virginia in emissions-belching trucks for expensive, high-energy composting. And it lost a lot of money.

When Republicans got control back, the outgoing committee head asked his successor, Rep. Dan Lungren, for a favor; if he would be the one to revert the cafeteria back to plastic. Members of Congress always want someone to owe them a favor, so Lungren said sure. All Congressional staffers were happy.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco then declared Republicans hated the environment and were giving staffers in the cafeteria cancer. She had encouraged California to redistrict and they did and Lungren was suddenly in a solid Democratic territory and in 2012 he was voted out.

By trying to cut science funding that was not going to science, the NIH may believe they're doing a good thing, but Democrats are playing chess, not checkers. They'll have media allies claiming that the NIH is targeting Native American and LGBTQ+ scientists, even if no science was cut at all.

And the narrative will sell better than reality.

Citation: Rebecca Fielding-Millera, Natalie Vawter, Laramie R. Smith, Nicholas Metheny, Abigail M. Hatcher, Sarah Peitzmeier, Targeted termination of scientific grants and minoritised researcher status in a national survey: a cross sectional analysis, The Lancet Regional Health – Americas, 2026; 0 https://www.thelancet.com/journals/TLRHAMERICAS/article/PIIS2667-193X(26)00108-0/fulltext

NOTES:

(1) The government and its funded academics are always careful to only claim NIH is the largest "public funded" research organization. It is not like the old days, when Whole Foods could blatantly lie about its food using no pesticides because media were all in their tribe. Social media has created so much parity that a lot fewer can get away with dishonesty.