How DEI Corrupted the NIH

The medical agency has poisoned itself in the name of “diversity.”

The National Institutes of Health, which provides funding for breakthroughs in medical science, has long enjoyed a trustworthy reputation. But, in keeping with the Biden administration’s “whole-of-government equity agenda,” the NIH has shifted its priorities away from science and toward “the science of scientific workforce diversity,” subordinating medicine to the latest ideological fad: diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI.

With the help of Open the Books, a nonprofit research organization, we have obtained documents detailing the NIH’s descent into left-wing racialism. The agency, which is supposed to prioritize hard science, has made DEI a top priority, shelling out millions on “diversity” initiatives that do nothing to advance medical research.

At the beginning of his term, President Biden signed an executive order implementing DEI throughout the federal bureaucracy and Congress directed the NIH to develop “a strategic plan with long-term and short-term goals to address the racial, ethnic, and gender disparities at NIH.” In short: less focus on curing cancer, and more attention to making sure no one cures cancer without acknowledging his “responsibility to correct systemic racism and inequities.”

The NIH immediately got to work implementing the executive order across the mammoth agency. The plan, which applied to fiscal years 2023 through 2027, required “the participation of all 27 Institutes and Centers (ICs); Offices within the Office of the Director (OD); and working groups, staff committees, advisory groups, and employee groups across NIH.” Altogether, the agency reported, it had “identified a community of almost 100 offices, committees, and groups working within the NIH-wide DEIA ecosystem.”

Overseeing this bureaucracy is the NIH’s Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, which has more than 50 employees. The office’s mission: to “identify and eliminate discrimination from the agency’s personnel policies, practices, and working conditions.” As part of its efforts, it has created digital information hubs on “Understanding Systemic Racism” and “Racism in Health,” and planned an “Anti-Bullying Training” session for employees—all methods to advance racialist ideology, rather than the department’s scientific mission.

The leader of NIH’s DEI apparatus is Marie Bernard, the agency’s chief officer for scientific workforce diversity. Bernard, to whom ten NIH employees report, has been thoroughly involved in the organization’s diversity efforts, co-leading the development of its DEI plan and co-chairing multiple diversity projects. One of these projects, NIH UNITE, which was established in 2021, “acts as a think tank to promote equity” and “identifies and addresses any structural racism that may exist within the NIH and throughout the biomedical and behavioral workforce.” In other words, the agency has 11 full-time employees focused on combatting “structural racism.” By their own account, they’re making progress.

In addition to ramping up internal DEI measures, the NIH has overhauled its external funding efforts. One major priority is “Health Equity,” a trendy new academic discipline that, in theory, studies health disparities between groups—for example, African-Americans’ disproportionately high rates of Alzheimer’s—and tries to identify causes and find solutions. In practice, however, Health Equity is critical race theory’s window into medical science, yielding trifling grievance reports focused not on medical outcomes but on the demographics of the medical-research workforce itself.

The programs vary in complexity. Some are simple: the NIH, through UNITE’s DEIA Prize Competition, launched at the beginning of President Biden’s term, cumulatively has sent $1 million to ten universities that have “implement[ed] innovative strategies to enhance DEIA in research environments.” Others are more sophisticated: the Diversity Program Consortium, a cross-institutional initiative first established by President Obama, is designed to train students and develop faculty “from groups underrepresented in biomedical research.” These initiatives are supposedly intended to help the underprivileged, but they are, in practice, highly ideological, promoting, for example, “liberatory race-conscious mentorship” done “through the framework of critical race theory.”

The permanent bureaucracy within the NIH was already fertile ground for this kind of thinking. Even under President Trump, who ostensibly opposed this ideology, the agency was a significant funder of left-wing racial science—a practice that the Biden administration continued.

Consider several of NIH’s funded projects, which began under Trump and endured under Biden. The agency allotted $3 million to Columbia University, for example, to use Twitter “to enhance the social support for Hispanic and Black dementia caregivers” and to study the “ethical use of minority detection algorithms.” Remarkably, this award funded the creation of a “Black Tweet detection algorithm” to help curate posts “tailored to Black and Hispanic dementia caregivers.”

The NIH also bankrolled several bizarre initiatives focused on LGBT issues. It granted Yale University $3 million to study HIV risk by tracking gay men with GPS monitors; the project’s ultimate goal was to develop “a real-time phone app” partially on the tracking data. The agency also awarded Stanford $3.7 million to study “[s]ex hormone effects on neurodevelopment” in “transgender adolescents,” which researchers hope will “advanc[e] the empirical basis of clinical care for this vulnerable population of youth.”

These examples point to a key nexus: that between NIH, which controls billions in taxpayer funds, and major universities, which receive them in the name of DEI. The agency has spent an astonishing amount of taxpayer money under the current administration on DEI-inflected projects in research, undergraduate recruitment and retention, and faculty hiring—all to entrench the ideology in academia.

The most important of these initiatives is the NIH Common Fund’s Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) program, which was created in 2021 and “aims to enhance and maintain cultures of inclusive excellence in the biomedical research community” by funding the “recruitment of a diverse group of faculty” at research universities. NIH FIRST has subsidized such programs at 16 universities, including Cornell, USCD, Northwestern, and Drexel. The agency says that its efforts to make faculty more “diverse” will help to “ensure[] that the most creative minds have the opportunity to contribute to realizing our national research and health goals.”

The program has been used explicitly to justify increasing minority hiring. Cornell, which received $5,141,750 in FIRST funding, admitted to using the program “to increase the number of minoritized faculty in the biological, biomedical, and health sciences . . . . across six colleges and 20 departments. Remarkably, the university says it “is in an excellent position to test the hypothesis” —note the uncertainty—“that FIRST Cohort faculty will be successful.”

Some of these faculty members aren’t even focused on medical research. One new hire is an assistant professor of interpersonal communication who studies “how undocumented immigrants draw on communication identity management and advocacy strategies to challenge [structural] barriers.” Another is a behavioralist who “applies social theories to public health, focusing on the intersections between individual, interpersonal, and structural factors contributing to health inequities.”

Taken together, these initiatives raise a troubling point: taxpayers have agreed to fund the NIH on the understanding that their money will be used by talented scientists to expand our knowledge of the natural world and to cure illness and disease. But the federal government, blinded by a corrosive left-wing ideology, is using that money to fiddle with the demographics of elite institutions, design an HIV tracking app, and build AI that can tweet like a black person—whatever that means.

The deeper lesson is this: racialism erodes competence and quality. It has already done great damage to American universities. We should not be surprised that an approach guided by critical race theory, which denies the very existence of objective truth, is incapable of producing real science.

The only way to clean up our medical research institutions, and, by extension, our federal grantmaking agencies, is put the science back in medical science—and leave the ideology at the door.

This article was originally published in City Journal