How we cured DEI at the National Institutes of Health

Since the National Institutes of Health was founded as a one room laboratory in 1887 its mission was simple; perform biomedical research to enhance health, lengthen life and reduce illness and disability for Americans. Scientists for more than one hundred years have taken this scientific approach to turn discoveries into better health. This mission unites all Americans of every race, color and creed. Everyone wants science that benefits their health.

Over the last decade and a half this mission has been corrupted by a new mission and ideology: diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). This political ideology was reflected in all aspects of the NIH, including hiring practices, promotion and tenure, employee training, performance reviews, communications, management and, yes, even science.

For its entire history NIH funding decisions were made to reach scientific goals. DEI drove decisions to be made to reach political goals instead, requiring NIH scientists to write DEI statements – de facto loyalty oaths – and researchers outside the NIH applying for grants to write plans for enhancing “diverse perspectives” (another name for a DEI statement). Scientific reviewers were chosen based on DEI criteria, and those making funding decisions received bonuses for promoting DEI.

At the end of every fiscal year, NIH program officers handed out “diversity supplements” to universities, directing money to training programs based partly on scientists’ race, rather than their scientific ability. In 2022, the NIH announced funding for universities to conduct “system-wide” DEI audits to address “shortcomings” in addressing “structural racism.”

Scientists learned that the best way to maximize their chance of a slice of NIH money was to promise that their work would help achieve racial nirvana, however remote from utopian ideological pursuits the proposed work actually was. Most scientists obsequiously complied to avoid the risk of career harm, whether they were true believers or not.

NIH policy was fundamental in the DEI-ification of the nation’s top universities and research centers. Even before the fevered days of 2020, when the mania for DEI at universities reached a fever pitch, scientists were often required to write DEI loyalty oaths to be hired or promoted.

In 2020, at Stanford University, radical students circulated a blacklist of professors they considered guilty of wrongthink and harassed them for their ideological impurity. The administration published an “elimination of harmful language” banned word list, creating a hostile work environment for those whose beliefs fell outside the bounds of orthodox DEI-ism. All of this occurred with the approval and even applause of university leaders. Stanford was not alone; top universities embraced similar policies.

None of this reorientation of the NIH and the universities toward DEI translated into improving the health status of Americans. Between 2011 and 2019, life expectancies of nearly every racial group in the US flatlined. All Americans shared in the expanding chronic disease crisis that has made America among the least healthy economically developed nations on earth. Chronic disease does not discriminate and DEI is not the solution.

NIH’s devotion to DEI ended when President Trump took office in January 2025. At the NIH, we dismantled the DEI apparatus and refocused the NIH on its age-old mission. We oversaw a large-scale effort by all parts of NIH to eliminate DEI from its processes, including eliminating loyalty oaths and other DEI statements, removing DEI from performance reviews, hiring and promotion, and purging DEI from all facets of scientific review, notices of funding opportunity (NOFO) and grant decision making.

Though activist courts have restricted our ability to excise many DEI-focused grants from our portfolio, NIH has now terminated hundreds of NOFOs and modified the terms of more than 6,000 grants that contain unscientific DEI-related statements, projects and methods. Because DEI was so deeply embedded in the NIH’s portfolio, it will take some time to complete the work, but by the end of this fiscal year, we will have restored merit and science-based research to their rightful place at the NIH.

We continue to enthusiastically support research that advances the health of all Americans, regardless of their age, race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, or other characteristics. We will unapologetically invest in rigorous science – research that genuinely improves the health of minority populations, rather than serving political ideologies that misuse taxpayer resources.

The NIH will not fund research based on ideologies that promote differential treatment of people based on race or ethnicity, nor will we fund studies exploring broad, poorly defined concepts such as racial microaggressions or implicit bias. Such work diverts resources away from projects that advance the health and longevity of all Americans, including minority populations.

So that the NIH never again strays from its mission, we have established new formal priorities for the NIH, with DEI removed and gold standard science leading the way. Scientists will no longer have to mouth DEI shibboleths to garner funding but instead propose excellent science that helps make America healthy again.