REPORT: Federal Spending on Intersectionality Continues

Executive Summary

Despite the Trump Administration’s decisive and consequential actions to remove unlawful discrimination from federal grantmaking and policy, restore merit and equal treatment under law, and halt taxpayer funding for programs that conflict with statutory purpose, ongoing analysis of federal spending on projects furthering discriminatory intersectionality ideology indicates that more work remains.

In prior reports, the Equal Protection Project (EPP) of the Legal Insurrection Foundation (LIF) and the Defense of Freedom Institute for Policy Studies (DFI) have provided evidence and analysis demonstrating the need for additional action to address the discriminatory use of intersectionality ideology to evade the Administration’s nondiscrimination efforts.

In April 2026, LIF and DFI published Intersectionality: The Rise of a Dangerous Anti-American Ideology and How to Stop It. The report exposed intersectionality as an ideology that sorts people by perceived privilege and oppression, compounds the harms of critical race theory and DEI, disregards equal protection and merit, and can fuel political violence.

In August 2026, LIF and DFI followed with Federal Spending on Intersectionality: The Case for Executive Action to End Identity-Based Preferences in Federal Grantmaking. It documented how intersectional ideology has driven federal spending and called for executive action to ensure that grant notices, eligibility rules, selection criteria, award conditions, and program administration comply with nondiscrimination law.

This update confirms that federal funding of intersectionality continues—and that urgent action is still required. 

Descriptions of recent and active awards do not merely mention intersectionality in passing. They show that awardees use it to shape research design, policy analysis, intervention development, demographic measurement, workforce training, and programs for selected identity groups. The selected awards began between 2023 and 2026 and extend through 2028, 2029, 2030, or 2031. Their implementation, monitoring, payments, renewals, or closeout may therefore still be underway.

A snapshot as of September 24, 2026, of a USAspending search for awards containing the keyword “intersectionality” reveals $257,019,995.74 in obligations and $156,344,735.17 in outlays—up from the approximately $230 million obligated and $140 million outlaid identified in the August report.

The most compelling evidence is qualitative and forward-looking. Full award descriptions frequently show intersectionality operating as a governing framework, not merely appearing as a stray keyword, and the selected awards include performance dates well into the future. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—principally the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—dominates the selected examples; the National Science Foundation (NSF) also funds significant education and workforce initiatives explicitly described using intersectional terminology. The appendix identifies fourteen entries covering sixteen awards that expressly connect intersectionality to identity categories, marginalization, systems of power or oppression, targeted recruitment, institutional practices, policy analysis, or discrimination.

Building on the Administration’s substantial progress, this report recommends a focused executive order extending to federal grantmaking the nondiscrimination principles reflected in Executive Order 14151, Executive Order 14398, and related directives. The order would direct agencies, within sixty days, to update their policies and guidance and then review active and pending awards, while preserving lawful research and legitimate programs administered under neutral criteria. The regulatory language proposed in LIF’s and DFI’s public comment to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) would provide a complementary clarification.