Conservatives in the past have also tried to belittle research grants to justify eliminating them, such as "studying X about fruit flies." It might sound silly to a lay person but drosophila is an incredibly important model organism from which many discoveries have come.
The problem is a highly political, often careless or incompetent, and sometimes blatantly corrupt administration taking a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel to so-called "waste."
[1] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/news/press_releases/2019...
Do you have a source for this? How can you prove it was simply because it was "diversity related" and not because it someone, somewhere determined the budget needed to be cut because the spending was wasteful?
As far as I can tell, the budget never passed, so we have no way to know one way or another the effects.
I have never seen a government entity claim that cutting their budget wouldn't be catastrophic.
(Please don't just respond to the quote - lots of context in the full article.)
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/14/nx-s1-5349473/trump-free-spee...
This language-based filtering began in the first term and has been widely reported.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/16/cdc-banned-w...