As the post says - "Buckle Up" because this is the dumbest thing I have ever heard (with stress on the words "dumb" and "ever")
BUCKLE UP SON! MIC DROP)) This administration comes up with the most ridiculously ideas ever. “The federal government drew up a list of banned words, and if your research grant contained one, like "minority," "historically," or "traumatic," it got deleted, cancer studies and vaccine trials and all.
Nobody read the grants. That is not a figure of speech. The Trump administration admitted in signed court filings that when it killed roughly $2 billion in University of California research, it never assessed the science. It ran a word search.
The National Science Foundation didn't even write its own blacklist. It copied the terms out of a 2024 report by Ted Cruz. "Prejudice." "Institutional." "Injustice." Flag the word, kill the grant.
So a study on gestational diabetes in Asian American mothers died because it contained "health equality." Vaccine and cancer research at UCLA, nearly 700 grants, gone. Actual sick people, waiting on actual treatments, told the science meant to help them had tripped a keyword filter.
The agencies put the worst part in writing. They stipulated that they used "general criteria" instead of reviewing each grant, because reading the grants would only have proven the grants were fine. The point was never the research. The point was the vocabulary.
They even conceded that DOGE, Elon Musk's cost-cutting outfit, may have used AI to choose which grants to cut. A machine picking the words. A machine pulling the trigger.
The list is so sprawling that someone just built a public website where you can type in a word and see if it would have flagged your work. It runs to roughly a thousand of them. "Trauma" is on it. So is "disability."
This is a government that spent a decade howling about cancel culture, then built the largest literal cancellation machine in the history of American science, keyed to a list of forbidden nouns.
Then it met Judge Rita Lin.
She looked at the word search, called it "quintessential viewpoint discrimination," and ordered the grants turned back on. Two injunctions. The Ninth Circuit let the core of her order stand. The half a billion dollars NIH tore out of UCLA, ordered restored.
They built a machine to delete words.
A judge deleted the machine! Kudos to Judge Rita Lin!
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