Science Policy Can’t Be Driven by Advocates

When it comes to pragmatic policy questions like the federal funding of science, there’s often implicit pressure to avoid culture war issues. The headline-grabbing pushback against progressive flashpoints can, some argue, become a distraction from things that matter, like technological stagnation or competition with China.

There’s truth to the objection. Virtually every major institution has adopted some sort of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policy, meaning the impulse to blame DEI can become an ever-available foil for failing leadership.

But it’s wrong to say that “culture war” issues categorically distract from the hard-nosed policy questions. The two can easily become intertwined. When progressive fads become enshrined in federal funding decisions, the downstream effects can be profound. A recent episode illustrates how.

Ryan McNeil, a professor at Yale School of Medicine who advises policymakers on “harm reduction and addiction treatment interventions,” conducts his research thanks to a $2.5 million R01 grant, the gold standard of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding.

In July, as a part of his project, McNeil interviewed Shawn Hill, cofounder of an organization that objects to concentrating addiction-related harm reduction services (e.g. safe injection sites) in neighborhoods like Harlem. Unsurprisingly, the two disagree, though the depth of philosophical disagreement only became explicit after the interview, when McNeil unintentionally broadcasted his unvarnished thoughts, revealing the political orientation of his taxpayer-funded project.

“That dude sucked,” McNeil groaned to his research assistant after Hill logged off, unaware that their transcription software would email all participants a recording of the entire call. “His primary concerns were basically around, frankly, white discomfort,” he later added. “Let’s try to get some more interviews with people who suck,” he said while wrapping up his unintentionally public debrief, “I want to find someone who we can give enough rope to hang themself with.”

Understandably outraged, Hill published the audio on his organization’s website, noting that the “integrity of any academic study is founded on unbiased research and a willingness to listen to research subjects,” and that McNeil revealed “a clear pre-existing research outcome bias.”

It shouldn’t be surprising that McNeil might aim to deliver research that validates his preordained conclusions. His Yale faculty page describes how he collaborates with “peer-driven drug user, sex worker, and tenant rights organizations” in order to “align his research with community priorities.” One might ask whether you can conduct unbiased research that is carefully aligned with activist groups. It’s revealing that the project was funded by our government in the first place.

At scale, the priorities that led the NIH to fund McNeil’s project generate bad research and waste serious money. On one hand, it highlights the need to root out policies that explicitly inject ideological goals into research. On the other hand, it reveals the need, and opportunity, for broader reform.

Many non-scientists might be surprised by the NIH’s sheer size and influence, especially compared to private funding. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) boasts a $24.2 billion endowment, making it America’s largest private funder of biomedical research and second-wealthiest foundation. In 2023, HHMI gave out $750 million in scientific research grants. Those numbers are dwarfed by the NIH, which has an annual budget of $47.5 billion, nearly twice HHMI’s total wealth. In 2023, the NIH gave more than $750 million to each of its top three funding recipient institutions.

The NIH inevitably sets the tone at universities around the country. For administrators, the NIH is a key source of funding, as a decent portion of grant money goes straight to host institutions in the form of “indirect costs.” Yale Medical School netted half a million dollars from McNeil’s R01 grant. For scientists, receiving an R01 signals career success. For young scientists, NIH postdocs are highly sought after. Everyone in the pipeline is inevitably attuned to the goals of the NIH, such that even the small priorities become important.

With its sheer level of cash-based influence, it should be notable that the NIH has embraced progressive political priorities. In 2011, a report suggested there’s racial bias in the review of NIH grants, which remains widely cited to justify various “equity”-focused NIH policies. Over the years, these policies have grown substantially.

Signs of this priority are most obvious in certain funding opportunities, such as the Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program—a quarter-billion-dollar program designed to fund DEI-focused “cluster hiring” at universities and medical schools around the country. As a key requirement, recipient institutions have to heavily weigh “diversity statements” while hiring their newly funded cohorts of scientists. The priority also shows up in the research itself through projects that promote “culturally-responsive” drug addiction recovery and “color brave conversations in families.”

The subtler, but more significant, effect of this stated priority might be in the basic nudges from NIH to scientists and universities. Over the years, NIH officials have made statements suggesting that diversity priorities should play a role in the grantmaking process itself—through, for example, the somewhat opaque “select pay” mechanism which allows NIH officials to fund grant proposals that help achieve certain priorities (like diversity) even when the proposals don’t meet the existing, more rigorous standards for funding.

Even while the agency is somewhat vague, the incentive is clear. If the largest funder signals that DEI is a priority, it’s not hard to predict how institutions will respond: by expanding their DEI footprint, hiring administrators, creating training programs, and creating hiring protocols that reflect this. Scientists often groan at these requirements, though—considering the stakes—they usually go along.

To give an example, the University of California San Francisco consistently ranks among the top recipients of NIH funds, having received $780 million from the agency in 2023. The university is also intensely focused on social justice programming, perhaps not coincidentally. That programming reached its peak with the creation of a task force on “Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Anti-Racism” (IDEA) in research, which resulted in the hiring of an associate vice chancellor whose sole domain is integrating social justice goals into the institution’s research practices.

To give some impression of the task force’s tenor: When it solicited comments from UCSF faculty, several objected to its premise, and stated that they didn’t believe the institution was racist. In response to these comments, the task force report declared in bolded letters: “Task force members were traumatized by a striking number of comments that denied the existence of inequities and racism, and others that minimized the burden that racism has imposed, particularly on Black Americans at UCSF.”

The UCSF task force is no doubt filled with true believers who do not need a federal agency to encourage them. But it doesn’t hurt that UCSF’s priorities seem to be aligned with those of the NIH, which awarded UCSF its “DEIA in Biomedical and Behavioral Research Prize.” UCSF’s prize application, which I acquired through a records request, highlights the accomplishments of the task force.

These examples and scores of others raise questions about ideological interference in research. While some elite universities have moved away from mandatory diversity statements in faculty hiring, the NIH has rolled out a version of the policy for grant applicants. A growing number of NIH grants now require applicants to submit a Plan for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives (PEDP).

Similar requirements have proliferated throughout federal science funding more broadly. In 2022, NASA began rolling out mandatory “inclusion plans” from its grant applicants. When the director of the Department of Energy’s  Office of Science, Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, stepped down from her role, the American Institute of Physics noted that one of her signature achievements was requiring all grant applicants to submit Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research plans.

The development has attracted scrutiny of prominent scientists and scholars, who point out that an ideologically tinged entry requirement damages the truth-seeking enterprise and undermines trust in science.

All of this indicates a profound lack of seriousness, and it gives conservatives wide latitude to propose something better, an agenda that could shape funding priorities and factor into the appointment of agency officials. It’s easy to forget that science in America is, in large part, a function of federal policy. Whether anyone will take that opportunity remains to be seen.