The Dirty Dozen: Here Are Wasteful Federal Grants You’re Paying For

1. The State Department — $100,000 to Free to Run, Inc. The grant, which is set to expire at the end of May, was sold as a program for “Building Palestinian girls’ and young women’s resilience through … weekly running and wellness sessions.” Is Hamas on board with this girl empowerment initiative? Free to Run’s founder, Stephanie Case, is a division chief for the the terrorist-tied United National Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

Talk about confusion, Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, told the Washington Examiner the Biden administration’s decision to fund the “Palestinian girls’ fun run confused “the hell” out of him.

“None of this sh*t surprises me, but these things frustrate the hell out of the American people,” Nehls said.

2. National Science Foundation — A two-year grant award expected to top $1.5 million to Florida State University to fund “Black Feminist Epistemologies: Building a Sisterhood in Computing.” The NSF abstract defends the award in part by noting that, “Recent studies reveal that Black women enrolled in undergraduate computing degree programs at predominantly white institutions (PWIs) attest to the lack of support, mentorship, and resources that impede their ability to complete their degrees.” Just who conducted said studies is not clear.

3.  National Science Foundation —  $119,520 for a conference titled “Re-imagining Biology Education Through Social Justice,” featuring a talk on “Gender-Inclusive Adaptations to Biology Teaching.” Imagine that.

4. Department of Agriculture —  $717,000 to Ohio State University. The money is being used to solve the “cultural resistance in the USA and Europe [that] impedes the acceptance of insect proteins as food sources,” according to the project grant. The grant states that “to overcome cultural barriers, a multidisciplinary research initiative seeks to develop sustainable extraction methods for obtaining protein, lipids, and valuable components from insect meal.”  This thing is funded through the end of August 2027.

5. National Science Foundation —$399,930 to Montana State University. This DEI project, funded through September 2027, is supposed to honor “indigenous knowledge” by “infusing native ways of knowing into engineering education,” but without engaging in the “misappropriation of indigenous knowledge.” What about misappropriation of taxpayer money?

6. Institute of Museum & Library Services —  $352,799 to the University of Wisconsin System to investigate “play-based programs and spaces” at museums and develop a “diversity audit tool for practitioners to examine their play programs and spaces for diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility, and belonging considerations.”  The National Leadership grant, funded through the end of next year, is a DEI project “with a specific focus on play offerings for children 0-12.”

7. National Science Foundation  $634,856, also to the University of Wisconsin System. The grant, funded through August 2027, provides federal tax dollars for the exploration of “urgent yet underexplored dimensions of equity-minded pedagogical change work in higher education.” This urgency of equity indoctrination includes “an 8-hour short course, where participants will learn about and identify how racial exploitation and settler colonialism have shaped not only the history of the geosciences, but also its current practices and disciplinary culture.”

8. National Endowment for the Humanities — $54,981 to support a “Critical Game Studies” minor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The grant program brought “rhetorical and literary theories together with feminist studies, queer studies and ethnic studies to investigate how game narratives shape and are shaped by power structures and cultural representations.”  Game night will never be the same. How about some LGBTQ Scrabble? Or Feminist Yahtzee? Something special from Parker Brothers.

9. Department of Health and Human Services —  $792,443  to the University of Texas-Austin. The five-year grant, funded through July 2029, promotes the testing of a hypothesis that “it is cisheteronormativity, the societal belief that everyone is cisgender and heterosexual, that increases risk for exposure to general ACEs [adverse childhood experiences], that cisheteronormativity leads to cisheterosexism, or SGM [social and gender minority]-identity based discrimination, mistreat and violence exposure, and that exposure to cisheterosexism.” What they said. How about the societal belief that this kind of pseudoscience shouldn’t be funded by taxpayers?

10. National Science Foundation  —  $445,600 to Ohio State University for the Girls* on Rock program, which strives to build “an inclusive outdoor STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, the Arts and Mathematics) and mentorship experience — increasing the diversity in the geosciences with respect to gender, race and ethnicity …” Wow. The program, funded through April 2027, offers rock climbing in the Rockies with a DEI twist.

11. Department of Health and Human Services —   $600,000 to the University of Virginia. The grant, funded through July 2029, will help the people involved in this scheme to  “identif[y] and measur[e] domains of structural ableism” which “parallels foundational work across other forms of structural oppression, such as structural racism, classism, ageism, sexism, and heterosexism.”  That works out to about $100,000 per ism.

12. National Science Foundation  — The NSF sure is busy. In this case, it doled out more than $112,000 to Rutgers University to develop “theory around processes of social control, state practices and human agency” about the deportation of “immigrants with criminal records.” The study, which concluded in 2022, was supposed to deepen the “understanding of the relationship between citizenship, the law, and policing practices that have so impacted racialized immigrant communities.” Perhaps Border Czar Tom Homan has a few choice words for “radicalized immigrant communities” about their handling of “immigrants with criminal records.” See also: The Laken Riley Act.