Commentary
The FIRST Program: The NIH’s DEI Money Machine
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Over the last decade or so, many of the chief culprits responsible for advancing DEI initiatives in the medical field have been federal health agencies.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is no exception, pushing guidelines requiring diversity commitments in grant applications to outright funding DEI initiatives. By manning the faucet of federal funding that many universities use to bankroll their research initiatives, the NIH can exert a significant influence over these grantee institutions.
Enter the NIH’s Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation (FIRST) Program.
First announced in December 2020, the FIRST Program is designed to “transform culture at NIH-funded extramural institutions” by “building a self-reinforcing community of scientists committed to diversity and inclusive excellence (IE).”
In other words, the goal of the program is to advance DEI at institutions of higher education through financial incentives, specifically focused on hiring and personnel.
The NIH’s FIRST Program has distributed grants to 16 universities and medical schools, including prestigious and influential institutions such as Cornell University, Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. These schools established school-centered FIRST programs that in turn pursue DEI through hiring initiatives.
Officially, the FIRST Program prohibits racial discrimination in the hiring process.
But in practice, the incentives of the FIRST Program to hire candidates from underrepresented groups predictably resulted in overt racial discrimination.
John Sailer, senior fellow at the National Association of Scholars, documented instances of explicit racism at grantee institutions in The Wall Street Journal.
For instance, faculty members discussed the race and sexual orientation of applicants to determine their fit; one professor at the University of New Mexico even explicitly said they “don’t want to hire white men for sure.”
A grant proposal from Vanderbilt University, which received funding from the FIRST Program, explicitly stated the intent to “focus on the cluster hiring of faculty from minoritized racial and ethnic groups, specifically Black, Latinx, American Indian, and Pacific Islander scientists.”
“Successful candidates will be early stage investigators who are Black, Latinx, or from a disadvantaged background (as defined by NIH),” a description of an Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai job read, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In addition to these examples of explicit racial restrictions, many of the grantee institutions say they prioritize “underrepresented” candidates for FIRST Program hiring initiatives.
Cornell’s $5 million award, for instance, “will support the hiring and retention of 10 new assistant professors from groups underrepresented in their fields, while transforming institutional climate into a culture of inclusive excellence.”
The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai’s $16 million award supports, among other things, a “cohort cluster hiring” initiative to bring on 12 early-stage investigators, targeting those “underrepresented in science and medicine.”
The NIH defines “underrepresented” groups in biomedical research as “Blacks or African Americans, Hispanics or Latinos, American Indians or Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders.”
Northwestern University even explicitly says it is using this definition for its FIRST-funded program, stating that, while it will grant equal consideration to applicants regardless of race, “[w]e especially encourage applications by members of groups underrepresented in the biomedical, clinical, behavioral, engineering, physical, and social sciences as defined by the Notice of NIH’s Interest in Diversity.”
It’s hard to see how racial discrimination was not the inevitable result of the FIRST Program’s aim to incentivize hiring of “underrepresented” candidates, especially considering the NIH’s own definition of “underrepresented.”
And the FIRST Program is hardly the only instance of the NIH’s diversity initiatives leading to discriminatory programming. The agency has routinely
The Enhancing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Educational Diversity (ESTEEMED) grant program, for example, is designed to help undergraduates from “diverse” backgrounds pursue careers in biomedicine. The program, which began in 2017, specified that the grantors should target “individuals from groups identified as underrepresented in the biomedical, clinical, behavioral and social sciences” such as racial minorities and disabled individuals.
The NIH currently lists 16 active ESTEEMED grant programs on its website; each program’s eligibility criteria contains varying degrees of racial preference.
For instance, Clemson University’s “Call Me Doctor ESTEEMED Scholars Program” stipulates that applicants are eligible if they are from the following ethnic backgrounds: “Hispanic or Latino, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, American Indian or Alaska Native.”
The University of Georgia, meanwhile, requires students to be “from a diverse background, including from one or more groups underrepresented in the sciences” to be eligible for its ESTEEMED program.
The University of Texas San Antonio’s program requires applicants to be “ethnically underrepresented in the sciences (Hispanic, African American, American Pacific Islander, Alaskan),” disabled, or financially disadvantaged.
And as mentioned previously, the NIH’s grant requirements also encourage racial discrimination.
Do No Harm Senior Fellow Dr. Kevin Jon Williams, a professor of cardiovascular sciences at Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine, highlighted an NIH grant listing’s discriminatory guidelines in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal.
The grant listing stated that the funding agency “expects applicants to recruit individuals from diverse backgrounds, including individuals from underrepresented groups for participation in the study team.” The updated listing for the grant later dropped the discriminatory language.
If the NIH truly wishes to advance human knowledge and innovation in the biomedical field, these policies and grant programs simply cannot be tolerated.
They are unethical, cruel, and incompatible with the pursuit of excellence. There is no evidence that diversity among scientific personnel produces better outcomes. These initiatives will only lead to the devaluation of merit.
The incoming administration should make it a priority to turn off the DEI funding faucet.