Federal research agencies have turned ordinary academic words into compliance risks. Grant writers are stripping terms from project titles, abstracts, specific aims, public summaries, and publication acknowledgments because reviewers at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation flag them during administrative screening. The words include diversity, equity, inclusion, gender, transgender, women, minority, underserved, systemic, bias, and climate change. A proposal can be returned before scientific review, and an active award can be frozen or terminated, on the strength of the language alone.
The change followed executive orders issued in the first days of the Trump administration. Neither agency has published a single master list of banned terms. Guidance moves through notice files, revised award conditions, and internal reviewer instructions. That split between public guidance and internal enforcement is the part universities are still learning to manage.
Who has to comply
Every researcher named on a federally funded award is affected, including principal investigators, co-investigators, postdocs, graduate students supported by grants, and subrecipient institutions. Grant administrators and sponsored-programs offices carry the burden of checking language before submission. Foreign collaborators on U.S. federal awards fall under the same conditions. Publishers are not directly bound by NIH or NSF language rules, but researchers are, and the language in an article's funding statement or methods section traces back to the award record. That makes publication language a compliance matter by association.
For institutions, the immediate workload sits with research development staff and compliance officers. They review proposals against shifting term lists, maintain internal guidance, and field questions from faculty who believe their approved wording is scientifically accurate and should not be changed.
What changed in 2025
Executive Order 14168, signed January 20, 2025, directed federal agencies to terminate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. A second order, issued the following day, required the elimination of what the administration called illegal DEI and DEIA policies and tied federal support to merit-based opportunity. Within weeks, NIH and NSF began implementing the orders through grant conditions and internal review criteria. This followed the wider NIH grant terminations and funding freeze that had already put award language under closer scrutiny.
The practical result is that grant narratives, contracts, subawards, progress reports, and related materials are screened for what internal guidance calls non-compliant terminology. The phrase banned terminology is a shorthand researchers use. Federal documents tend to describe the process as removing terms inconsistent with agency priorities.
How the terminology bans work in practice
Agency reviewers and automated screening tools flag words in project titles, abstracts, public summaries, and specific aims. In many cases, the fix is substitution, not deletion. A project serving low-income first-generation students might be described as serving students from families with lower educational attainment rather than underserved students. Research on maternal health outcomes can still proceed, but pregnant people is often replaced with pregnant women where a proposal describes clinical populations.
Commonly flagged categories include:
- Identity terms: gender, transgender, nonbinary, LGBT, women, minority, people of color
- Equity and justice terms: equity, diversity, inclusion, systemic, bias, discrimination, marginalized
- Population terms: underserved, vulnerable populations, underrepresented, pregnant people
- Environmental terms: climate change, environmental justice, clean energy in some agency contexts
Substitution is not always straightforward. Health equity is sometimes replaced with health disparities, but that word has also drawn flags. Research development officers advise teams to describe the specific population, the specific exposure, and the measurable outcome without using category labels. That approach passes agency screens more often and leaves the science intact.
Agency guidance remains distributed. The NIH Grants Policy Statement and the NSF Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide set the formal terms. The underlying White House order is available at whitehouse.gov. Researchers should read the notice file attached to each funding opportunity; those notices often contain the term restrictions that the broad policies do not.
Publication language is a separate risk
Articles, preprints, and conference abstracts create a second compliance surface. A manuscript that acknowledges an NIH or NSF award and uses flagged terms in its title or abstract sits in both the federal award record and the published literature. Institutions have been asked to correct grant progress reports and public records when agency staff notice a mismatch. Scientific journals maintain their own style guidance, and several still recommend inclusive language. The tension is practical: a paper that says pregnant people may meet a journal's inclusive-language standard and fail an agency's current expectation. Authors with federal funding are being advised to describe the study population concretely, which usually satisfies both sides.
The publication risk extends to datasets, repositories, and preprints. Some authors now keep two versions of a title or abstract for grant-side and publication-side use. That is not common practice yet, but research communications teams report rising requests to check published outputs for terms that would not have been questioned two years ago.
Practical steps for grant writers
Grant offices at several universities have created internal review checklists because no central federal list exists. The most reliable approach is to distribute the latest notice files and ask investigators to describe, not classify. Specific steps that research administrators now recommend:
- Replace category labels with concrete population descriptions: age group, income band, geographic area, or clinical condition.
- Run a plain-text search for identity, equity, and environmental terms across every submitted file before routing.
- Read the notice of funding opportunity line by line; term restrictions attach there rather than in the broad policy statement.
- Keep a dated record of any agency-requested language change in the grant file. If the award is later audited, that record shows the change was agency-driven.
Faculty should not assume the research office has a definitive list. The lists change by institute, by solicitation, and by month. The safest stance is to write specifically about the people, place, and measurable outcome from the start.
What to watch next
Agency enforcement is not uniform. The same term can pass in one institute and get returned in another. The absence of a single published list remains the central administrative problem. Until agencies issue clear notice-and-comment guidance, compliance is case by case. Watch the notice file attached to each solicitation, not the agency's public statements, because those attachments carry the operative language. Expect more change. What passes review in the spring may not pass in the fall, and the next adjustment will likely arrive by email before it appears in a policy manual.
