The National Science Foundation Has Spent $268 Million of Borrowed Money on Grants for Phony Environmental Justice Research

Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is the ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and put out a detailed report exposing the political corruption within the National Science Foundation, Titled “Division, Extremism and Ideology: How the Biden-Harris NSF Politicized Science,” the report documents what many of us have witnessed for years as the NSF has funded anti-fracking junk science.

Here are some excerpts from the report, beginning with an overview and then focusing on phony environmental justice:

Since the beginning of the Biden-Harris administration, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has increasingly funded research and programs that color scientific investigation and engagement projects through the lens of political ideology, undermining objective hard science disciplines such as physics, chemistry, and biology in which facts and theories can be precisely measured, tested, and independently reproduced.

The U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation minority staff (Committee), which oversees federal science agencies including NSF, analyzed 32,198 Prime Award grants NSF awarded to 2,443 different entities with project start dates between January 2021 and April 2024. 1 Committee analysis found 3,483 grants, more than ten percent of all NSF grants and totaling over $2.05 billion in federal dollars, went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle.

The Committee grouped these grants into five categories: Status, Social Justice, Gender, Race, and Environmental Justice. For the purposes for this report, “DEI funding,” a “DEI grant,” or “DEI research” refers to taxpayer dollars NSF provided to a research or engagement program that fell into one of these five groups…

Finally, of the 3,483 DEI NSF grants, 362 were categorized by keywords and phrases that invoke Environmental Justice; research and projects that tended to allege discrimination in the environmental sciences as a barrier to scientific inquiry in the discipline; and researchers who claimed they were incapable of studying climate science without first acknowledging the identity of supposedly oppressed populations. Grants were given to projects that emphasized the importance of activism over scientific investigation.

In 2022, NSF awarded San Jose State University $401,744 for an ongoing project to “transform … science teaching and learning through empowering teachers and students as climate justice action researchers and change agents.” The project is meant to foster the “development of a hub for justice-centered science education and will produce school-based materials and professional development activities that examine the interwoven nature of climate justice and racial justice.” No project materials were published during the Committee’s investigatory period, but the project is expected to launch a program website, “open-access climate justice action research curricular units, and publications related to the teaching of climate justice.”

…The University of California, Irvine received $5,681,900 to create “effective and equitable solutions to climate change” through the development of a “diverse and culturally competent geoscience workforce.” The UC Irvine grant recipients wrote they were “transform[ing] the culture of the geosciences through building a learning ecosystem that brings on-the-ground challenges of environmental justice and sustainability into the heart of geoscience research and education” and addressing “climate impacts and solutions, as well as social and environmental justice, systemic racism, and knowledge imperialism that discounts different ways of knowing.”

The Geological Society of America received $199,657 to explore the “intersection of mental health and the geosciences” and to create “a stronger geoscience workforce that appropriately represents the communities most affected by climate change and environmental injustice.” Grant recipients worked to develop “new knowledge about mental health in situations specific to the geosciences” to “situate these within the broader STEM mental health context, and within the context of structural racism and other bias.”

Can anyone rationally define what climate justice really is? No, not without constructing some long paragraph of Marxist gobbledegook meant to deceive and obstruct. This is what happens when leftists with no skills, except to deceive and destroy, capture an institution. Thank you, Ted Cruz, for letting the world know what's happened to the NSF. Now, it's time to cut their funding to zero until they reform or abolish the agency. We don't need it. We can't afford it. It's doing more harm than good. And, while we're at it, let's cut the phrases ‘climate justice’ and ‘environmental justice’ from the Federal lectionary.

#NationalScienceFoundation #Climate #ClimateChange #NSF #CoveringClimateNow #Science #EnironmentalJustice #ClimateJustice