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Protesters gather during Stand Up for Science, a rally against cuts to science and research funding, outside the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, DC, on Friday, March 7, 2025.
As President Donald J. Trump’s new administration clamps down on government spending, some scientists have received interrogatory emails from the federal agencies that fund their work.
A questionnaire sent last week to recipients of grants from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) asked whether their research projects would “contribute to limiting illegal immigration” or “defend against gender ideology,” among other things.
Luis Zaman, an evolutionary biologist and ecologist who is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, shared screenshots of the surveyon social media. A CDC spokesperson confirms their veracity, adding that the agency had sent the survey to all “grantees and partners.”
The survey reflects the Trump administration’s move to leverage federal agencies to enforce the president’s recent executive orders. “We did send those questionnaires or surveys out executing on the president’s agenda,” the CDC spokesperson tells C&EN. The survey mirrors language from several of Trump’s recent executive orders as well as a document issued by the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) last month directing agency heads to review foreign assistance. The OMB document includes a draft survey that is nearly identical to the CDC-issued one.
Multiple questions in the survey invoke new policies designed to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, define the “biological reality of sex” as limited to binary male and female categories, and crack down on drug trafficking. All told, the CDC questionnaire refers to at least nine different executive orders, several of which are generally unrelated to CDC-funded research.
The survey is the latest in a string of communications from federal agencies aiming to enforce the Trump administration’s priorities. Michael Busch, a research scientist at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, tells C&EN over email that he’s received “similarly spurious questionnaires and cease & desist notices” from NASA over the past month and a half. He says his work, primarily studying near-Earth asteroids, is funded by grants from NASA and the US National Science Foundation (NSF). (Busch emphasizes that he is speaking only for himself and not on SETI’s behalf.)
In January, for instance, NASA sent a memorandum directing contractors and grantees to “cease and desist all DEIA activities required of their contracts or grants,” referring to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility. NASA spokesperson Jennifer Dooren confirms the memo.
Researchers at the receiving end of these memos are caught in the middle of ever-changing federal policies. The memos reflect Trump’s efforts to use funding agencies as political tools: for instance, federal grant-making agencies were at one point required under an executive order to “end the Federal funding of gender ideology” and “assess grant conditions and grantee preferences” to ensure grant funds would not promote the idea that gender is a spectrum divorced from biological sex. (Scientists have rejected the view that even biological sex is binary; sex and gender are both complex.)
Last week, after a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of parts of that executive order, NSF director Sethuraman Panchanathan sent an email advising grantees that the NSF would not, in fact, withhold federal funding “because a health care entity or health professional provides gender-affirming care,” as it was previously ordered to do.
The constantly shifting orders—and for many grantees, hearing from the federal government so frequently in the first place—have created an atmosphere of uncertainty. Atmospheric chemist and Johns Hopkins University associate professor Sarah Hörst says she had to “double-check” that the email had really come from Panchanathan. It also came from an email address she doesn’t typically communicate with: NSF_Business_Applications@NSF.gov. NSF spokesperson Mike England confirms to C&EN that the email is real but declines to comment further.
Busch and Hörst say their institutions have generally advised employees to forward any unusual communications to their office of general counsel instead of responding directly.
“It’s not a bad general rule,” says Hörst in a message to C&EN, but memos like the one from Panchanathan have thrown off her and her colleagues. “We just haven't like received weird communications about grants before.”
Chemical & Engineering News
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