Are scientists sensitive to political pressures being exerted on them? The question is not new, but it has resurfaced alongside Donald Trump’s time in the White House.
Since February 2025, the American government has released a list of words that are forbidden to be used in articles published by public research and funding agencies, under the threat of losing funding. Words reflecting the “woke” trend and belief in the “hoax” of climate change by researchers in the United States – diversity, inclusion, climate change, etc. – are now terms to avoid in order to receive funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a major public health organization.
Has this financial pressure had an impact on research? To find out, three economists have looked into their own discipline. An interesting case indeed, as economists’ tendency to circulate their working papers in the “grey” literature – before any official publication in their professional journals – allows for close monitoring of what has happened since last year.
A high proportion of self-censorship
Dominic Rohner from the University of Lausanne, Oliver Vanden Eynde, and Philine Widmer from the Paris School of Economics (PSE) delved into the working papers published by the American National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the European Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) between January 2020 and December 2025.
By checking which authors received public funding, they were able to get an idea of economists’ tendency to self-censor. They did this by classifying research based on their level of dependence on public funding, to see if those most dependent were more likely to constrain themselves. The results they have recently published provide a clearly positive answer.
Among the 14,412 scientific articles they reviewed, 1,991, or 13.8% of the total, focused on gender, race, or environment issues and included at least one of the forbidden words.
A gap is widening between papers published by researchers from the most public funding-dependent institutions and others
Their statistical tests show that before the blacklist was announced, the source of funding did not influence the likelihood of using the soon-to-be banned words. However, after the announcement, a gap widened between papers published by researchers from the most public funding-dependent institutions and others.
In the former situation, the probability of using one of the forbidden words significantly decreased, as did the proportion of papers dedicated to Gender-Race-Environment topics (measured by the presence of these themes in the abstracts). For researchers from less public funding-dependent institutions, no significant change was observed.
Terms are excluded, not necessarily the subjects
This result does not prove that economists have completely abandoned these subjects, nor that they publish less, or that scientific production has collapsed. The authors found no effect on the length of papers or the number of publications. What changes is the presence of certain terms, in other words, how research is formulated or presented.
The study does not measure an absolute level of self-censorship, but rather a variation after a political shock, showing a rapid adjustment of lexical content
The study authors also confirm statistically that this adjustment results from individual researchers’ behavioral changes, not a modification in the author pool (where, for example, fewer specialists of censored themes would have published). The study does not measure an absolute level of self-censorship, but rather a variation after a political shock, showing a rapid adjustment of lexical content, consistent with a phenomenon of self-censorship.
Finally, the three researchers clarify that the three main areas designated by the forbidden words (gender, “race,” environment) are equally affected. Likewise, they do not observe any differences in behavior based on gender or the researchers’ seniority: men and women, young and experienced researchers behave in the same way.
In theory, science should be independent of political power. In practice, the study does not say that economists have stopped studying gender, race, and environmental topics, but it highlights that, faced with a threat to their funding, they quickly adjusted how they present their work.
In this Orwellian world, there is no need to explicitly ban research. The mere prospect of losing funding seems enough to change behaviors.
