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REVIEW 3 major objections 4 minor 55 references

Comment on "Politicizing science funding undermines public trust in science, academic freedom, and the unbiased generation of knowledge"

T0 review · 3 major / 4 minor · reviewed 2026-08-07 · deepseek-v4-flash

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Pith's one-line read A point-by-point fact-check argues that the 2024 'politicized science funding' commentary misreads the agency documents it cites.

desk verdict A fact-checking commentary worth reading for its archived primary sources and mostly accurate document-level rebuttals, but its central 'few if any' claim is wider than the evidence. read the letter →

arxiv 2505.18196 v1 pith:NJVLYDXE submitted 2025-05-21 cs.DL physics.chem-phphysics.soc-ph

John M. Herbert This is my paper · ORCID
classification cs.DLphysics.chem-phphysics.soc-ph
keywords sciencefundingpolicydiversityequityandinclusionplansgrantreviewcriteriaNSFbroaderimpactsNASADOEPIERfact-checking
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The reading

This commentary tries to overturn the central claim of a 2024 opinion essay that U.S. science funders had 'politicized' grant-making by putting diversity, equity, and inclusion ahead of scientific merit. It argues that the essay's evidence does not survive contact with the documents it cites: few program solicitations required DEI activities, inclusion plans at NASA were explicitly not used to rank or select proposals, and DOE placed the quality of its PIER plan below scientific and technical merit in the review criteria. The author also reproduces the primary agency documents as an archive, so that the actual state of these policies at the end of 2024 cannot be retroactively misdescribed. An epilogue recounts the author's failed attempt to publish the comment, including the withdrawal of an editor and reviewer after the January 2025 pause on federal grant decisions, as evidence that the political climate was already affecting review. A sympathetic reader would care because the dispute is not merely about one essay: if the rebuttal is right, then the claim that federal grants were being steered by DEI quotas and mandatory budget set-asides is a factual error, not a policy disagreement.

What carries the argument

The central mechanism is the reproduced primary-source document, used as evidence against the earlier commentary's citations. The argument turns on a simple distinction: activities a solicitation requires are binding elements of merit review, while activities a solicitation encourages are not; if DEI activities are not required, no budget share must be set aside for them. The load-bearing documents are the NSF MCB 'Let's Talk Broader Impacts' slide deck, the NASA 'Inclusion Plans in Research Proposals' deck, the DOE 'Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research (PIER) Plans' office-hours deck, the NSF privacy-act statement, and the NIH PRIDE funding announcement, all reproduced in the supplementary material. These documents carry the rebuttal by showing, in the agencies' own words, that inclusion-plan quality was not a ranking criterion and that budget requests for such activities were optional rather than mandated.

What would settle it

A systematic count of NSF, NIH, DOE, and NASA funding announcements in force during 2024 that required an inclusion or DEI plan with a dedicated budget line, or that ranked proposals by plan quality, would settle the dispute; if many such solicitations existed with mandatory budgeted DEI activities, the paper's central rebuttal would fail.

Watch

Extended reading notes

Core claim

On the paper's own terms, the discovery is that the specific documents cited by the 2024 commentary do not say what the commentary says they say. The NSF slide deck cited for the 5–10% budget figure is a 'Broader Impacts' outreach talk by an organization that works on outreach, and it does not establish a mandatory set-aside. The NASA inclusion-plan deck states that Inclusion Plans 'will again not be part of the adjectival rating for the proposal and will not inform the selection of proposals,' and it warns against tokenizing diverse team members. The DOE Office of Science deck lists 'Quality and Efficacy of the Plan for Promoting Inclusive and Equitable Research' as the fifth merit-review criterion, below scientific and technical merit, method, personnel, and budget. The NSF privacy statement says submission of the information is voluntary, and the NIH announcement that was cited concerns a program specifically targeted at inclusion and diversity rather than a general grant program. The paper also argues that the broader-impacts criterion at NSF has existed since 1997 under administrations of both parties, so it cannot be a Biden-era imposition.

Load-bearing premise

The broad conclusion that 'few (if any)' solicitations required DEI activities is inferred from a small set of reproduced documents, not from a systematic survey of NSF, NIH, DOE, and NASA solicitations; the related claim that agencies 'seldom (if ever)' micromanage budgets is asserted without a citation.

Editorial extensions

If this is right

  • If the rebuttal is correct, the headline claim that U.S. funders were diverting science money into compulsory DEI budgets is unsupported by the cited sources.
  • The NASA and DOE documents imply that inclusion-plan requirements were procedural: plans had to be submitted and could gate funding, but they did not rank proposals.
  • The NSF privacy notice implies that demographic data collection was voluntary, so it cannot serve as evidence of de facto quotas or identity-based award allocation.
  • Because the paper archives the documents, future researchers can check the 2024 policy record directly even after agency websites removed the material.
  • The paper's reading of the record would mean the original commentary's First Amendment and 'compelled speech' arguments rested on a mistaken factual premise.

Reading between the lines

Editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • Beyond the paper: a systematic survey of NSF, NIH, DOE, and NASA solicitations in force during 2024 could test whether the 'few (if any)' claim holds across the full population of funding announcements, not just the reproduced sample.
  • Beyond the paper: if the reading of the NASA and DOE decks is correct, a concrete test is to compare the archived ROSES-2023 and DOE Office of Science solicitation language with the claim that inclusion plans were never ranking criteria.
  • Beyond the paper: the required-versus-encouraged distinction could be applied to the 2025 policy reversal, framing it as the removal of a procedural plan requirement rather than the abolition of a quota system, unless other evidence shows otherwise.
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Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, and a circularity audit.

Referee Report

3 major / 4 minor

Summary. The manuscript is a point-by-point rebuttal of the 2024 commentary by Efimov et al., which argued that U.S. funding agencies have politicized grant review by prioritizing DEI activities over scientific merit. The author claims that the commentary misrepresents agency policy: that few, if any, program solicitations require DEI activities; that no budget set-asides are mandated; that NASA's Inclusion Plans are not used to rank proposals; that DOE's PIER Plan criterion is ranked below scientific and technical merit; and that NSF demographic data collection is voluntary. The paper reproduces dated government source documents in its supplementary material and closes with an epilogue describing the author's experience submitting the work to a journal.

Significance. If the document-level rebuttals survive scrutiny, the paper provides a useful archival service: the supplementary reproductions of agency slide decks and policy statements are dated and verbatim, and several specific claims are directly supported by those sources, including the NASA statement that Inclusion Plans will not be part of the adjectival rating, the DOE default ordering of merit criteria, and the NSF statement that submission of demographic information is voluntary. The paper is therefore valuable as a correction of specific evidentiary errors in the original commentary. Its value is weakened, however, by overgeneralization from a convenience sample of five documents to the broad claim that 'few (if any) program solicitations require DEI activities,' a claim that is contradicted by one of the paper's own reproduced sources. The unsupported speculation about the motives of named journal staff further undermines the paper's credibility as a scholarly correction.

major comments (3)
  1. [Section 2, first paragraph; Table 1, row 'DEI activities are required for STEM funding'] The central sentence 'few (if any) program solicitations require DEI activities' is not supported by the evidence presented and is affirmatively contradicted by the paper's own reproduced DOE source. Supplementary Material, Ref. 12, slide 2 states that a PIER Plan is 'a required proposal element for all applications submitted to the DOE Office of Science' and slide 7 states that the PIER Plan is 'evaluated as part of the merit review process and thus may inform funding decisions.' At least one major agency therefore requires a DEI-related plan as a scored proposal element. The rebuttal of Efimov et al.'s 5-10% budget claim can be retained, but it should be narrowed to the claim that 'few (if any) solicitations mandate a minimum DEI budget percentage,' which the reproduced sources do support; the broader claim is not established by the convenience sample of five documents.
  2. [Section 2, second paragraph; Table 1, row 'Grant proposals require extravagant spending on DEI activities'] The statement that funding agencies 'seldom (if ever) micromanage budgets in the manner that is suggested' is an empirical claim offered without citation. It is not necessary for the paper's core rebuttal, which is that the 5-10% figure comes from an outreach specialist's advice deck rather than from a solicitation requirement. Please either support the 'seldom micromanage' claim with a policy document or remove it, since as written it repeats the same kind of unsupported categorical assertion that the paper criticizes in Efimov et al.
  3. [Section 4, Epilogue] The passage 'I suspect that these individuals stepped away for reasons other than being too busy' attributes motives to named individuals, namely the reviewer and the associate editor, based only on the timing of a journal administrative change. This is speculation about persons rather than evidence, and it is outside the scope of a fact-checking commentary. The passage should be removed, or explicitly marked as the author's personal conjecture with no assertion of fact, so that the paper does not repeat the practice of making unsubstantiated claims about other people's intentions.
minor comments (4)
  1. [Section 2, first paragraph; Ref. 2] The phrase 'This is debunked in detail elsewhere' is supported by a citation to the author's own prior opinion piece (Ref. 2). The fact-checking should be self-contained or cite the primary agency documents directly, especially because the paper's own sources are already reproduced in the supplementary material.
  2. [Section 2, paragraphs on NASA and DOE; Refs. 11 and 12] The claims about NASA and DOE omit caveats present in the cited sources. The NASA slide (Ref. 11, slide 8) adds that 'some programs may require an acceptable plan for the selected proposal(s) before funding may be released,' and the DOE slide (Ref. 12, slide 7) states that the descending order of merit criteria may be modified by the sponsoring program office. The paper's statements are accurate for the default case, but they should include these qualifications to avoid creating new overstatements.
  3. [Throughout] The manuscript uses inflammatory and non-scholarly language, including 'cabal of authors,' 'paranoid delusion of anti-DEI zealots,' 'anti-DEI crusaders,' and 'legacy elites.' Such phrasing is not appropriate for a fact-checking commentary and should be replaced with neutral descriptions of the disputed claims.
  4. [Section 4, Epilogue] There is a typographical error in the sentence 'the clear statistical reality of While male domination of STEM,' which should read 'White male domination.' The title on the first page also renders the word 'trust' as 'tr ust,' which should be corrected.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged · score 1.0 of 10

No significant circularity: the fact-checking conclusions are anchored in reproduced agency documents, and the author's self-citations are peripheral rather than load-bearing.

full rationale

This comment does not fit or predict any quantity; it rebuts Efimov et al. by reproducing and quoting primary agency sources (the NSF Broader Impacts slide deck, the NASA Inclusion Plans deck, the DOE PIER Plans deck, the NIH PRIDE funding announcement, and the NSF privacy notice). The assertion that 'few (if any) program solicitations require DEI activities' is broader than the reproduced sample, and the DOE PIER source itself describes a required, merit-scored PIER plan, but that is a sufficiency or accuracy concern rather than circularity: the claim is not defined in terms of the conclusion, nor is it obtained by citing the author's own prior result as the only evidence. Self-citations (Refs. 2, 5, 6, and 25) are used for background or as pointers to the author's earlier commentary, but the load-bearing quotations are from government documents reproduced in the appendix. No step in the paper reduces by construction to its own inputs, so the circularity score is low.

Assumptions & free parameters 0 free parameters · 5 assumptions · 0 invented entities

The paper introduces no fitted parameters and no new entities. Its load-bearing premises are the representativeness of the appended documents, an interpretive premise about the causes of demographic disparity, a legal premise about the First Amendment and federal funding, and a normative premise about agency missions. The Epilogue adds an unverifiable interpretive claim about editorial conduct.

assumptions (5)
  • domain assumption The reproduced documents are representative of U.S. funding agency practice across solicitations as of late 2024.
    Section 2 generalizes from one NSF MCB slide deck, one NASA deck, one DOE deck, and one NIH FOA to the claim that few (if any) solicitations require DEI activities; the sample is a convenience sample, not a systematic survey.
  • domain assumption STEM faculty underrepresentation is evidence of systemic barriers rather than of supply-side choices or preferences.
    Section 3 asserts that open pipelines and skewed faculty demographics prove systemic barriers; this is a sociological interpretation supported by cited literature but not established within the paper itself.
  • domain assumption There is no constitutional right to federal research funding, so compelled-speech objections to inclusion plans fail.
    Section 2 and Table 1 rebut the First Amendment argument with the legal proposition that no right to federal support exists; the proposition is stated, not argued with case law.
  • domain assumption Workforce demographic parity is a legitimate component of the funding agencies' scientific mission.
    Section 3 asserts that 'training a workforce whose demographics reflect the U.S. population is one aspect of that pursuit'; this normative premise underlies the defense of inclusion plans.
  • ad hoc to paper The withdrawal of the journal's reviewer and associate editor was politically motivated.
    The Epilogue states 'I suspect that these individuals stepped away for reasons other than being too busy' and attributes the rejection to the political climate; the author offers no evidence beyond timing, and labels it a suspicion himself.

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Cite this review

Pith. "Pith review of Comment on "Politicizing science funding undermines public trust in science, academic freedom, and the unbiased generation of knowledge"." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/NJVLYDXE

@misc{pith2026250518196,
  author       = {Pith},
  title        = {Pith review of: Comment on "Politicizing science funding undermines public trust in science, academic freedom, and the unbiased generation of knowledge"},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/NJVLYDXE}},
  note         = {Machine review of arXiv:2505.18196}
}
read the original abstract

In a commentary published in mid-2024 (to which the present work is a direct response), a number of scientists argue that U.S. funding agencies have "politicized" the process by which grants are awarded, in service of diversifying the scientific workforce. The commentary in question, however, makes numerous unfounded assertions while recycling citations to a fusillade of opinion essays written by the same cabal of authors, in an effort to resemble a work of serious scholarship. Basic fact-checking is provided here, demonstrating numerous claims that are unsupported by the source material and readily debunked. The present work also serves to document the reality of inclusion and diversity plans for scientific grant proposals to U.S. funding agencies, as they existed at the end of 2024. It is intended as a bulwark against retroactive false narratives, as the U.S. moves into a period of intense antagonism towards diversity, equity, and inclusion activities.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2505.18196 by the authors.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Percentage distribution of U.S. resident undergraduate enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions, by [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p104_1.png] view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Percentage distribution of full-time undergraduate enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions, by level [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p106_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Percentage distribution of full-time and part-time postbaccalaureate (graduate) enrollment in degree-granting [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p109_5.png] view at source ↗

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Reference graph

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Pith tools

Reviewed August 7, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.