Trump’s D.E.I. Cuts Are Hurting Rural, White Americans, Too

U.S.|How Trump’s D.E.I. Cuts Are Hurting Rural, White Americans Too

Lucas Dillard describes himself as sort of a JD Vance, scientist version.

Raised by a single mother in rural Appalachia, he was about to enlist in the Navy when he received a Pell grant that allowed him to go to North Carolina State University.

A work-study requirement delivered a stroke of fortune: a job in a lab with a structural biologist who let him conduct his own research. Those projects got him into a post-baccalaureate program at the National Institutes of Health, where he published papers that helped him get into a Ph.D. program in molecular biophysics at Johns Hopkins.

And last year, his work at Hopkins won a prestigious N.I.H. fellowship that pays the country’s most promising doctoral students to continue their scientific research.

Mr. Dillard’s grant was one of thousands the N.I.H. canceled as it rushed to comply with President Trump’s executive order banning federally funded diversity, equity and inclusion programs. The order accused the programs of using race- and sex-based preferences that it said were “dangerous, demeaning and immoral” and “deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement.”

But Mr. Trump’s push to end D.E.I. has been a blunt instrument, eliminating highly competitive grant programs that defined diversity well beyond race and gender. Those who have lost grants include not only Black and Latino scientists, but also many like Mr. Dillard, who are white and from rural areas, which are solidly Trump country. The administration has decried universities as hotbeds of liberal elitism, inhospitable to viewpoint diversity. The canceled diversity grant programs were intended to make science less elite, by developing a pipeline from poorer areas of the country that tend to be more conservative.

“I think it’s very different in their minds, who is getting the D.E.I. stuff,” Mr. Dillard said. “People on the right, they don’t realize they’re limiting the opportunity of their own kids by supporting this.”