Court filings show how US agencies used keyword lists to cancel research grants

Soon after President Donald Trump retook office, researchers and academics across the country began getting form letters, often mid-project, telling them their federal grant funding had been terminated because their work no longer aligned with agency priorities. A lawsuit filed by University of California researchers has now produced court documents in which several federal agencies confirmed they cut grants if a project "expressed, or were presumed to express, viewpoints disfavored by the Administration." The UC researchers argue the terminations violated their First Amendment rights by targeting work based on viewpoint and subject matter, and have asked the presiding judge to rule the revocations unconstitutional.

The filings name four agencies: the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). All four told the court they used keyword lists and general criteria to identify grants for cancellation rather than assessing each award individually.

NSF used by far the most keywords of the four. It told the court its list was pulled directly from a 2024 report by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, which alleged the Biden administration had politicized science at the agency. That report's search terms, which numbered in the hundreds, were meant to flag grants related to DEI or promoting what it called "neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle," and included words such as "injustice," "ally," "prejudice," "institutional," "discrimination," "historically," "minority" and "traumatic." NSF also mentioned, without listing, terms related to misinformation. It supplied the court a list of terminated UC grants but did not tie specific keywords to specific cancellations.

NIH worked from a shorter list that included "workforce diversity" and "health equity," and said it applied "various permutations" of each term. Unlike the other three agencies, NIH did tie specific keywords to specific cancellations in some cases. A University of California, San Francisco project studying how racism affects the mental health and substance-abuse risk of adolescents and young adults involved with the legal system was flagged for using the phrase "structural racism." A University of California, Los Angeles project on gestational diabetes among Asian Americans was flagged for "health equality." NIH said it cut at least $2.6 million in grant funding tied to the phrase "structural racism" specifically, and that dozens of additional projects lost NIH funding not for any flagged phrase but because they carried diversity supplements, extra money meant to support researchers from underrepresented and disadvantaged backgrounds. NIH also told the court it specifically targeted grants held by researchers affiliated with any of UC's 10 campuses; in one case it suspended over $500 million in funding to UCLA, funding that has since been ordered restored.

The Defense Department's list overlapped with the DEI-focused terms of the other agencies, including "pay equity," "LGBTQ" and "neurodiversity," but it also targeted climate and energy research. Grants referencing solar, wind or geothermal power, or using terms such as "climate change," "carbon neutrality," "decarbonization," "pollution control," "air quality management" or "federal sustainability," were flagged for termination.

NEH's list, provided to the court alongside its own set of revoked grants, included "environmental justice" and "transgenderism," along with "diversity, equity, and inclusion" and its variants. Like NSF, NEH did not tie individual keywords to individual terminations, though it sometimes shared the flagged portion of a grant's text.

UC researchers have already won two preliminary injunctions in the case, blocking further grant terminations made via the form-letter process across the agencies involved.

Key facts

Court documents from a UC researchers' lawsuit show four federal agencies, NIH, NSF, the Defense Department and NEH, used keyword lists and general criteria rather than individual review to cancel research grants after Trump retook office.
NSF's list, the longest of the four, was pulled from a 2024 report by Senator Ted Cruz alleging politicized science, and included terms like "injustice," "discrimination" and "minority."
NIH cut at least $2.6 million in grants tied to the phrase "structural racism" and suspended over $500 million to UCLA, funding later ordered restored; it specifically targeted researchers across UC's 10 campuses.
The Defense Department's list also flagged climate and clean-energy terms such as "decarbonization" and "carbon neutrality," alongside DEI terms like "pay equity" and "LGBTQ."
UC researchers, alleging First Amendment violations, have already won two preliminary injunctions blocking further form-letter grant terminations.

Why it matters

This is the first detailed, document-backed account of the mechanism behind a wave of grant terminations that researchers had previously experienced only as unexplained form letters. It shows the cuts were not case-by-case judgments about research quality or relevance but batch actions driven by word-matching against project text, with NSF's list traced directly to a partisan Senate report rather than an agency's own review process.

Who it affects

University of California researchers whose grants were canceled, including specific NIH-funded projects on racism's mental-health effects and on gestational diabetes among Asian Americans; UCLA, which had over $500 million suspended before it was ordered restored; and more broadly any federally funded researcher whose work touches DEI, climate change or green energy, since the same keyword approach was applied agency-wide, not just to UC grantees.

How to use it

The chapter has no separate application: this is a court-documents story, not a product or service, so there is nothing to license, price or deploy. The practical takeaway for affected researchers is procedural: the case is ongoing, two preliminary injunctions have already blocked further form-letter terminations, and the court filings themselves are now public evidence of how the terminations were carried out.

How solid is it

The account rests on court documents in which the agencies themselves, NIH, NSF, the Defense Department and NEH, confirmed their methodology, including direct quotes from their filings such as "using general criteria" and NIH's admission it applied "various permutations" of each keyword. NIH is the only one of the four that tied specific keywords to specific cancellations in its filing; NSF and NEH provided lists of terminated grants without mapping individual terms to individual terminations, which the source is explicit about.

Risks and caveats

The source gives no combined dollar total across all four agencies and no total count of grants terminated, only specific examples and NIH's "dozens" of diversity-supplement cases. No dates are given for when NSF, the Defense Department or NEH adopted their keyword lists, only that the Cruz report NSF drew from dates to 2024. The case is still in progress: the two injunctions won so far block form-letter terminations but do not resolve the underlying constitutional claim.

“expressed, or were presumed to express, viewpoints disfavored by the Administration”

— federal agencies, in court documents