Psf Has Withdrawn $1.5m Proposal to Us Government Grant Program

[1]: https://openssf.org/blog/2025/09/23/open-infrastructure-is-n...

Also (and ironically), in the past, this kind of stuff often did have a DEI component of its own. Meaning that a fair bit of that fund would go not to high profile projects, nor to the ones that company actually uses the most, but to whoever can put together a proposal ticking the most "diversity" boxes.

Either way, the point is that companies are simply uninterested in extending any sort of meaningful support, nevermind doing so in proportion to utility derived. And, honestly, why would they? Economically speaking there's no upside to it so long as you can enjoy the benefits regardless and rely on others to prop things up. And ethically speaking, large organizations are completely and utterly amoral in general, so they will only respond to ethical arguments if these translate to some meaningful economic upsides or downsides - and the big corps already know from experience that they can get away with things much worse than not contributing to the commons. It's not like people will boycott, say, Microsoft over its recent withdrawal of support from Python.

So you have to increase the minimum. This could be achieved by contract, ie. not allowing free pulls like Docker have done, or by convincing companies that support PyPI and the like is the minimum. Unfortunately the latter would involve companies thinking and planning for the future, which is massively out of fashion.

> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.

A "prohibited boycott" is apparently a legal term aimed specifically at boycotting Israel/Israeli companies, so unless PSF intended to violate federal law or do an Israel boycott, they probably weren't at risk. They mention they talked to other nonprofits, but don't mention talking to their lawyers. I would hope they did consult counsel, because it would be a shame to turn down that much money solely on the basis of word of mouth from non-attorneys.

US leadership is undermined by the politicization of these grants. That is something that members of this community, largely a US-based, VC-oriented audience, should be deeply, deeply troubled by.

It’s absolutely bonkers. However most of the researchers I work with are operating under a “appease the NIH to obtain the grant, but the just do the research as it was originally intended” approach. It not like the federal government has the ability (or staffing - hah!) to ensure every single awardee is complying with these dystopian requirements.

Now it can spend the money on important stuff like packaging. uv is amazing, but also a symptom of the wrong people stewarding that money.

> It was the PSF’s first time applying for government funding.

It doesn't seem to be a renewal, and they seem to have applied before the clauses were added.

- - -

Additionally, on September 29, 2025, the NSF posted

> The U.S. National Science Foundation announced the first-ever Safety, Security, and Privacy of Open-Source Ecosystems (NSF Safe-OSE) investment in an inaugural cohort of 8 teams

Implying that until that point, there was no distribution of funds as part of Safe-OSE, so no prior years of funding existed

Someone wrote it into the grant agreement. It's a fair bet that they think that has some effect beyond what the law already achieves.

Here's a list of math grants identified by the Senate to be DEI-related because they contained strings like "homo" and "inequality": https://www.reddit.com/r/math/comments/1ioo2x9/database_of_w...

Here's the actual list of NSF cancelled grants: https://www.nsf.gov/updates-on-priorities#termination-list. You can also explore the data at https://grant-witness.us/nsf-data.html. There are 1667 in there, so I'll just highlight a couple and note the "illegal DEI":

- Center for Integrated Quantum Materials

- CAREER: From Equivariant Chromatic Homotopy Theory to Phases of Matter: Voyage to the Edge

- Remote homology detection with evolutionary profile HMMs

- SBIR Phase II: Real-time Community-in-the-Loop Platform for Improved Urban Flood Forecasting and Management

- RCN: Augmenting Intelligence Through Collective Learning

- Mechanisms for the establishment of polarity during whole-body regeneration

- CAREER: Ecological turnover at the dawn of the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event - quantifying the Cambro-Ordovician transition through the lens of exceptional preservation

When the federal government cancels your grant and claws back money you've already spent because they claim something innocuous is illegal, knowing in your heart that they're wrong is not very helpful.

Years later courts may agree no federal anti discrimination laws were violated but it's too late-- the damage has been done.

EO 14151—the policy of which the rewriting of the standard anti-discrimination clause in this way is a part of the implementation—characterizes DEI entirely as illegal discrimination (but the new backformation “discriminatory equity ideology” is not found in the EO, that’s apparently a newer invention to avoid the dissonance of using the actual expansion of the initialism while characterizing it as directly the opposite of what it is.

> we "do not, and will not during the term of this financial assistance award, operate any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws."

There's some ambiguity in syntax as to whether or not "in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws" attaches to "discriminatory equity ideology" or "any programs that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology." Given the (improper) comma before the 'or', I'm inclined to lean towards an intended interpretation of the former. That is to say, the government intends to read the statement as affirming no advancement or promotion of DEI, regardless of whether or not they violate any US laws.

(The current administration also advances the proposition that advancing or promoting DEI itself is a violation of US laws, so it's a rather academic question.)

If you take the money and spend it on research and development and then get hit by a clawback, whether due to "DEI" or some other reason, that is a financially ruinous event to somehow come up with $1.5 million dollars that was already spent.

A shame and a waste as it sounds like the project would have been beneficial outside of the Python ecosystem, had it been funded.

“Discriminatory equity ideology” seems intended to be an expansion of DEI (its not the normal meaning of that term, but the structure would be an odd coincidence if it was intended to be an alternative) in which case the sentence should probably read:

“[...] that advance or promote DEI, or discriminatory equity ideology, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note added comma after ideology).

If “DEI” and “discriminatory equity ideology” were intended as alternatives, the sentence should probably read:

“[...] that advance or promote DEI or discriminatory equity ideology in violation of Federal anti-discrimination laws.” (note removed comma before “or”)

In either case, the “in violation of federal anti-discrimination law” clearly applies to the whole structure. To make it not do so, you’d have to interpret the meaning as best expressed by:

"[...] that advance or promote DEI or, in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law, discriminatory equity ideology.”

That is, that they were intended as alternatives, but also that the “in violation of Federal anti-discrimination law” was misplaced.

But it really doesn’t matter that much how you read it, when you recognize that the whole reason it is in there at all is as implementaiton of the policy in EO 14151, which characterizes DEI (with its normal expansion, not the new one that looks like an expansion but could be read as an alternative) as categorically a violation of federal anti-discrimination law.

After all this whining about cancel culture for years and swearing up and down that the government was going to start cracking down on free speech, they have weaponized the government to do just that in the name of protecting 1A. But it’s not just conservative cancel culture, it’s straight up government censorship.

Therefore, I can definitely see why the PSF's lawyers encouraged giving this clause an extremely wide berth and pulling the grant entirely.

There's a reason that Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all gave Trump money to demolish the East Wing of the White House and build a ballroom. And it's not their love of ballroom dancing.

It's a shame that months of NSF grant-writing work was completely wasted though.