Skip to primary navigation Skip to content
Fired by President Trump? We want to hear from you.
report a concern
April 17, 2025

Ranking Member Lofgren Urges NSF to Ignore Inflammatory Cruz Report, Releases Democratic Staff Report in Rebuttal

(Washington, DC) – Today, Ranking Member Zoe Lofgren (CA-18) sent a letter to National Science Foundation Director Sethuraman Panchanathan urging the Director to disregard Senator Ted Cruz’s inflammatory report in any NSF grantmaking decisions. In addition to the letter, the Ranking Member also transmitted a Minority Staff Report that details how Senator Cruz’s report is deeply flawed, and his demand for grant cancellations is therefore misinformed. 

“I write to you to convey my assessment of an inflammatory and unscientific report issued last October criticizing National Science Foundation (NSF) grants,” Ranking Member Lofgren wrote in the letter. “I urge you to disregard its so-called findings in your grantmaking decisions. Senator Ted Cruz published a report (the ‘Cruz Report’) that claimed that over 10% of NSF grants awarded during the Biden-Harris Administration funded ‘questionable projects that promoted DEI or pushed neo-Marxist perspectives.’ This is demonstrably false, and it is imperative that NSF is not intimidated into accepting these vacuous findings and undermining its merit review process by substituting the Cruz Report’s slander for expert opinion on meritorious proposals. I request that you review the attached report, protect NSF’s gold-standard merit review, and be transparent about the post hoc grant review that you are currently undertaking.”

The Ranking Member continued, “Months after the publication of the Cruz Report, the database of 'questionable' grants was published, and my staff conducted an assessment of that database, with a methodology reviewed by subject matter experts. The findings of that assessment are detailed in the attached report, which my staff prepared at my direction. While it was clear at face value that the claim that 10% of NSF grants were funding ‘DEI’ and ‘neo-Marxism’ was false, the attached report confirms that.”

The Democratic Staff Report can be found here.

The letter can be found here.