Roughly $10.6 million in National Science Foundation grants to USC researchers across 19 research projects are featured on a list of “woke DEI” research compiled by Sen. Ted Cruz and his team. 

The database, published Feb. 11, targets grants funding projects in some way related to social justice, environmental justice, status, race or gender. The report is part of the senator’s stated aim to weed out DEI and “neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda,” according to a press release from the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science & Transportation. Up to $4.4 million of the total funding is undistributed, which might not be distributed if the Trump Administration cuts funding for DEI-related initiatives.

Several USC researchers whose projects appear on Cruz’s list said they haven’t heard anything from the NSF yet and are continuing their work as planned. Some were puzzled to see their projects in the database, saying their work isn’t directly related to DEI.

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Hossein Hashemi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, leads a research team studying millimeter-wave systems for uses including wireless and satellite communications. His work got a $750,000 grant from the NSF’s Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems, roughly a third of which hasn’t been paid out yet.

Hashemi suspects one phrase in his research description about “actively recruiting women and underrepresented minorities” for research positions landed his project on the list. He doesn’t think that will lead the agency to actually move to cut his funding. 

“The focus of our grant is purely engineering and technical without any DEI relevance,” Hashemi wrote in a statement to the Daily Trojan. “The sentences like ours in the abstract have been a norm in NSF awards.”

Since the 1990s, a federal mandate has required NSF to consider a project’s proposed inclusion of women and underrepresented groups in STEM in grant decisions. 

Cruz’s list names more than 3,400 grants totaling $2 billion across hundreds of private and public universities. Of the USC-based research projects, the database labeled almost all as having been selected “not due to the strength of the application but because the applicant identified a group of people as a discriminated, oppressed class,” according to Cruz’s team.

Slightly more than three-quarters of the grants that were targeted involved views on social justice, and about a quarter involved views on gender, which the team found to be “far-left” and extreme. The report also marked a quarter of projects for “addressing ‘racial inequity and White Supremacy.'”

The NSF and the National Institutes of Health award billions of dollars in research funding to colleges and research centers across the country. USC-based projects — in fields ranging from engineering and Earth sciences to computing and cyber infrastructure — received more than $38 million in NSF grant funds in the 2024 fiscal year.

The “woke DEI” research database is based on a Cruz-led October report criticizing the Biden-Harris administration’s funding of academics who “parrot the talking points of the woke neo-Marxist left.” 

On Jan. 27, the White House issued an executive order pausing federal funding for DEI-related activities. The NSF froze payouts for active grants the next day, but two federal courts issued opinions within the week temporarily blocking the freeze. The future of funding for existing grants flagged in Cruz’s database remains uncertain.

The journal Science reported Feb. 5 that NSF senior managers had chosen 10,000 out of about 50,000 active grants to review for purportedly DEI-related keywords like “women” and “race.”

Seeing his research on Cruz’s list came as a shock to Travis Williams, a professor of chemistry leading an NSF-funded project on composite materials recycling that has used less than half of its $600,000 grant so far. His team works on chemical approaches to upcycling unused materials, like old wind turbine blades, to be used in manufacturing.

The project is part of an NSF program called Boosting Research Ideas for Transformative and Equitable Advances in Engineering, which supports researchers transitioning into a new field. Williams guessed that the mere inclusion of the word “equitable” in the program name landed him on the list. 

He hopes a closer look at his project’s focus will show NSF managers that the research aligns closely with the Trump administration’s priorities.

“[President Donald Trump] likes manufacturing, he likes clean energy, he likes energy independence, and he likes creating American jobs,” Williams said. “Those are all values I share and that I’m working on.”

Amid the “attitude of uncertainty” the funding threats have created, Williams said he is prepared to adjust his work’s focus away from any DEI deliverables if it means saving valuable research.

“I respect the administration’s prerogative to advance their priorities. As an inventor, as a researcher, I like to align with those priorities and help them,” Williams said. “If you pull all those grants, you leave this huge swatch of our energy and [research and development] capabilities of the country in the lurch.”