"No State shall ... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws"
Not only is the PSF not subject to this clause, the only subject to the clause are governments and the PSF is not even capable of violating it. In what way would DEI programs violate this clause?
Remember when the government went anti-DEI crazy and started covering displays of influential women and people of colour at places like NSA? That kind of decision maker may be handling the PSF's grant.
I recently read in the local news that some city department, in order to comply with anti-DEI stuff, was changing its name to remove the word 'diversity'... and nothing else. DEI has no legal definition. It feels like the new "woke", where the actual meaning is irrelevant, and its only real purpose is tribalistic social signalling.
In development we'd just accept it as normal to say "Putting each literal value in its own module is not a reasonable application of modular design." without claiming that the name "modular design" is now misunderstood and irrelevant.
I would like to see this kind of thing treated, socially and legally, as equivalent to saying "This tech organization has a lot of Jews... can we do something about that?" (Indeed, many of the exact same people who are classified as white men who are disproportionately present in tech organizations by DEI advocates are also Ashkenazi or Sephardic Jews, and the DEI advocates are treating their white male identity rather than their Jewish identity as politically salient). If some organization refuses to refrain from treating the disproportionate presence of white men in some organization - or the assumed disproportionate presence of white men - as a problem, I think it's reasonable for the US federal government to refuse to give them grant money.
To solve the “all” problem, none of those people need to be removed from the organization. It merely states that diversity is good. To solve the “a lot of” problem necessitates getting rid of those members.
This is fundamentally why one is discriminatory and the other is not.
like, somebody going to a "women in tech" conference could result in suddenly having to find millions in cash to pay back the government.
But admitting in public that you are giving preferential treatment to anyone other than white men is an instant rage-boner for the Trump administration.
And for half the hn readership, it appears
[1]: https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.h...
add-sub-mul-div•2h ago
Did both parties implicitly understand up until 2017 that going too hard too fast is counterproductive?
themostunique•2h ago
bigbadfeline•2h ago
Of course they did, as they do now, it's game politics 101, it's all in the game plan.
colechristensen•2h ago
Politicians know this, people don't necessarily.
gm678•1h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_tipping_point
nobodyandproud•46m ago
2014 was years before it became a mainstream cry to treat trans women as cis women. I didn’t really hear or notice this until the late 2010s.
I also believe the trans community hurt itself and its own members by pushing this narrative/falling into this trap, though things like the bathroom bill made it inevitable?
Perhaps it’s old fashioned, but what I believe is an acknowledgement and celebration of differences. What the new generation pushed is hiding those differences; by pretending there are none.
It’s much harder to argue against “let’s all agree we’re all human and make this work”.
jancsika•1h ago
The NC Bathroom Bill passed in March 2016, and it had an immediate flurry of corporate backlash that lasted to the partial repeal in 2017. The bill was part of a growing amount of anti-trans rhetoric (and legislation) from the Republicans starting a few years before. But it was the first bathroom bill AFAICT.
Are you saying that the Republicans would have been less likely to pass that bill under a Clinton presidency? If so, what's the extraordinary evidence for that?
Alternatively, if you are saying they would have been more emboldened to pass it, are you suggesting that the backlash would have been smaller under a Clinton presidency? That's in the realm of possibility, but again what's the evidence here? Obama had already shifted to supporting gay marriage before the relevant Supreme Court case (probably due to Biden's gaffe of pre-emptively announcing his own support for it). So I just don't see why you would assume a Clinton presidency would effectively muzzle support for trans rights in this case, or have any effect whatsoever on the NC Bill and its aftermath.
Edit: clarifications