No NIH Grants for Colleges With DEI Programs or Israel Boycotts

If colleges and universities want to receive funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), they’ll have to certify that they don’t operate any diversity, equity, inclusion or accessibility programs that violate federal antidiscrimination laws, under a new NIH policy announced Monday.

The change appears to codify parts of President Donald Trump’s executive orders that banned funding for DEI programs and builds on the strategy to leverage colleges’ research funding to compel certain behaviors. But the new policy goes even further than the president’s directives, barring colleges from boycotting Israel or Israeli businesses if they want to receive NIH grants. Such boycotts are rare in higher education, though calls for colleges to rethink their relationship to Israel have ramped up in the last year.

The policy change is effective immediately and applies to all new and existing grants. If a college violates the new terms, NIH could terminate the grant and require the recipient to pay back the funds. STAT News first reported on a draft of the new policy.

Previous NIH policies required colleges to comply with federal civil rights laws in order to receive federal funding. That includes Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars discrimination based on race or national origin.

Trump and other administration officials have argued that colleges’ DEI programs violate Title VI, though they haven’t been clear about what exactly they consider “illegal DEI.” Still, the NIH and other departments have canceled numerous grants, claiming they run afoul of the president’s anti-DEI orders. Those grant cancellations are the subject of at least two lawsuits.

But while the cancellations so far have been on a grant-by-grant basis, the new policy seems to give the agency more leeway to cut off research funding to entire institutions. The administration has already frozen all of Columbia University’s NIH funding after accusing the institution of not taking enough action to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment. Science reported last week that the NIH also froze funding to Harvard, Brown, Northwestern and Cornell universities.

Jeremy Berg, associate senior vice chancellor for science strategy and planning, health sciences at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and a former director of an NIH institute, told STAT News that “the statutory authority for NIH is to support research and NIH does not have a say in how this is accomplished (as long as it is legal).”

“When I was at NIH, there were discussions about including training aims and accomplishments as review criteria in at least some NIH awards (as NSF does),” Berg told STAT News. “However, the NIH General Counsel’s office was very clear that this was not possible.”

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya didn’t address the reported funding freezes or the policy change during remarks Monday to the Council of Councils, which is made up of representatives from NIH’s institutes and centers. But he did outline his priorities for the agency, promising to return NIH to regular order, and defend the grant cuts, according to Science and STAT News.

Bhattacharya said the anti-DEI orders “aren’t aimed at stopping fundamental research that advances the health and wellbeing of minority populations,” STAT News reported.

He added that he wouldn’t have accepted the job if that was the case.

“I think that the health and wellbeing of minority populations, as well as every American, are a central focus of the NIH and will continue to be under my watch,” he said.