US keywords
Various groups within the US federal government have looked through grants, proposals for funding, and websites for particular phrases. They then investigate documents with these phrases further. This page aggregates information on the phrases reportedly used and provides downloads of them. Sometimes the keywords are entire words or phrases, but sometimes they are just the stems (i.e., “enhancing divers” is one of the phrases, presumably to match both “enhancing diversity” and “enhancing diverse”).
Data sources
- US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation (October 9, 2024): This group released a report (pdf) and press release on projects supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF). It lists the keywords used in its search in different areas. Whether the listed words are used in this report is indicated under the Senate CST Status, Senate CST Social Justice, Senate CST Gender, Senate CST Race, and Senate CST Enviro Justice column headings.
- US Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee (February 2, 2026): a minority staff report from this committee stated that “According to interviews with NIH staff, NIH is using a list of banned words to determine which research receives extra scrutiny and is eligible for continued funding” and included those words as an appendix. Words used are indicated in the Senate HELP column.
- ACLS-AHA-MLA Lawsuit (March 6, 2026): The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the American Historical Association (AHA), and the Modern Language Association (MLA) filed a motion for a summary judgment in their case to restore terminated grants awarded to schools, libraries, and community organizations by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The motion included discovery documents that described the keywords used by DOGE staff to identify grants to potentially cancel (exhibit 9). Words used are indicated under the NEH Lawsuit column. Note that beyond keywords, DOGE staff also submitted grants to ChatGPT with the prompt “Does the following relate at all to DEI? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes.’ or ‘No.’ followed by a brief explanation. Do not use ‘this initiative’ or ‘this description’ in your response” so the keywords in the spreadsheet are not the only source of information used by DOGE. The mass termination of the grants was recently “DECLARED unlawful, unconstitutional, ultra vires, and without legal effect” in a ruling in the US District Court of the Southern District of New York.
- New York Times compilation (March 7, 2025): Reporters Karen Yourish, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Isaac White, and Lazaro Gamio reported that “agencies have flagged hundreds of words to limit or avoid, according to a compilation of government documents.” Words used according to that article are listed under the NYT Article column.
Table of keywords
Type in the search box to filter to only those that contain that word; swipe to see more columns. The Count column is the total of the number of times that keyword is used across all the data sources.
Downloads
This will download all the information from the table.
Wordcloud
We can split each entry into its component words and count the total frequencies of each word: how many documents each appears in. For example, “advancing diversity” appears in two documents, “address diversity” appears in one, so “diversity” is counted as appearing three times from just these phrases. The font size of each word is proportional to its frequency. Only words appearing at least twice are shown for legibility. One can enter a word seen here in the search field for the table above to see all the phrases in which it occurs.
