The Department of Justice ruled that three race-based programs aimed at diversifying STEM are unconstitutional.
The National Science Foundation can no longer administer three programs meant to boost racial and ethnic diversity in science, technology, engineering and math fields after the Department of Justice ruled that they were unconstitutionally considering race or gender.
The decision, issued Wednesday, calls for the termination of long-running programs that aim to help students from underrepresented backgrounds earn STEM degrees, build capacity for STEM education at Hispanic-serving institutions and diversify STEM faculty. The opinion also claimed there are unconstitutional aspects of two other programs, which can continue as long as the sex-specific elements are removed.
Together, the three discontinued programs accounted for about $104 million of the $938 million that Congress most recently allocated to the National Science Foundation for STEM education. The DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel said the NSF can still use the money on other initiatives related to STEM education. The NSF has spent decades trying to attract more women and racial minorities to STEM careers, but the agency shifted its priorities in spring 2025 to align with the Trump administration.
To support its conclusion, the DOJ memo cites the 2023 Supreme Court ruling banning race-conscious admissions policies. The administration has used an expansive interpretation of the court’s decision to crack down on race-based policies and programs and eliminate $350 million in funding for minority-serving institutions. DOJ lawyers have also warned that money for other programs at colleges that serve significant portions of racial and ethnic minorities could be in jeopardy.
In this week’s decision, the Office of Legal Counsel argued the government can only take “race-based action” to remediate specific instances of past discrimination, rather than to address general societal disparities. The OLC wrote that Congress hadn’t found sufficient evidence of illegal discrimination to warrant the three programs slated for termination.
Ebony O. McGee, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Innovation and Inclusion in the STEM Ecosystem at Johns Hopkins University, said those narrow criteria don’t make sense for programs that are designed to “expand access and opportunity that was historically foreclosed to people of color.”
“This opinion insists that agencies need specific, documented instances of discrimination, but discrimination is in the air,” McGee said. “Discrimination, particularly within STEM fields, hides behind the values of objectivity, individualism, hypercompetitiveness.”
In the decision, the OLC wrote that because the following three programs are generally responding to statistical disparities, they are unconstitutional.
- The Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation program, which began in 1990, offers funding to groups of colleges that serve large portions of students from certain demographic populations. The program funds several projects, all of which ultimately aim to increase the number of STEM bachelor’s degrees awarded to students who are Black, Hispanic, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, according to NSF.
- The Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program, part of the Hispanic-serving institution program, offers grants to boost institutional capacity and increase graduation rates among STEM majors. The DOJ argued that the program can’t continue because the grants are only available to HSIs, or institutions at which at least 25 percent of the student body must be Hispanic. (The administration has said that designation is unconstitutional.)
- The Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate program, which aims to diversify and reduce systemic inequity in the STEM workforce, offers grants that contribute to institutional policy change and faculty professional development. The DOJ found that it was unconstitutional because there wasn’t sufficient evidence of past racial discrimination.
Two other programs were identified as having unconstitutional aspects, but the DOJ argued that they could continue if they are reworked to exclude race- or sex-based considerations. The Organizational Change for Gender Equity in STEM Academic Professions ADVANCE program can continue as long as it doesn’t limit participation to women or give preferential treatment to applications from any sex. The grant money could still be used to study issues such as sexual harassment or gendered faculty workload inequities, the decision stated. And the Advanced Technological Education program, which offers grants to community colleges to increase STEM offerings, can continue as long as no preference is given to any racial or gender groups, the decision says.
The National Science Foundation asked the DOJ in May to evaluate the programs. Others included in the review survived. Those programs include the Tribal Colleges and Universities Program, the Graduate Research and Fellowship Program, Advancing Informal STEM Learning, and the Robert Noyce Teacher Fellowship Program.
