Us grant writers finally get our own urban legend: the 84 words that the feds have banned in grant proposals. Or have any words been banned?

In the past few months, CEOs of two of our larger nonprofit clients have told me, “There are 84 words that President Trump has banned in federal grant proposals.” As Goldfinger said to James Bond in the eponymous novel, “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”. So, I decided to not wait for enemy action and did a Grok search.

Like most urban legends, there’s a grain of truth in the “84 banned words” meme. But not much. In early 2025, President Trump issued a flock of Executive Orders, including 14151, targeting DEI programs, but there’s no banned words in this EO. Still, some federal agencies like NSF and NIH supposedly tweaked their proposal screening algorithms to flag “certain terms” for non-compliance with administration priorities.

So this is an urban legend, or at least a gross exaggeration, since, while I could find some articles in Forbes, NYT, etc., on this topic, none of them cite a verifiable source. It is fun to note that the number of “banned words” in these articles ranges from 64 to 250 to hundreds! Anyone who’s played Telephone knows how this happens.

The only quasi-confirmation I could find is a purportedly leaked NSF memo on Reddit, which is no longer a reliable source for much of anything. So, I called the second CEO back to ask him where he’d heard about the 84 banned words, and he said he got a “list from his lobbyist.” Lobbyists are even more unreliable than Reddit.

Experienced grant writers know that if something is not included in the NOFO, published in the Federal Register, or in the CFR (Code of Federal Regulations), it’s just gossip. When I was 18, I enlisted in the USAF to avoid the Vietnam War—our first class in basic training was “Rumors and Propaganda!” Thus, what we have here is a classic urban legend, in which something gets published or noticed and pretty soon we’re all looking for Mothman, as in the fun 2002 film starring Richard Gere, The Mothman Prophesies.

Still, S + A understands that acceptable proposal language, which will call “proposalese,” changes over time, and sometimes quickly. We’ve written about this before:

Acceptable Grant Proposal Language Evolves: No More Living on the Down Low and Cultural Sensitivity, Cultural Insensitivity, and the “Big Bootie” Problem in Grant Writing, for example. So, when Trump pulled off the biggest political resurrection in history, we were ready. As Bob Dylan put it, “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Even before Trump was inaugurated in January, we’d begun to change some aspects of our proposalese. Obviously, we jettisoned  specific words like “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion,” along with DEI-adjacent words like “gender,” “non-binary,” “systemic,” etc. Newsflash to the those seeking to ban words. There is something called a thesaurus. Here are some simple replacements for diversity: variety, panoply, heterogeneousness, and so on. This was not difficult for us, as S + A often uses alternative or unusual words anyway so that we don’t put reviewers to sleep. Instead of saying, “The project seeks to reach the full diversity of the community,” we might write, “The project seeks to reach a panoply of community interests.” No algorithm will flag the alternative, even though it means more or less the same as the first.

Here’s an example we used during the Obama presidency. Since the issue of “gun violence” was becoming a big issue, we changed “target area” to “area of focus” and “target population” to “population of focus.”* While this may sound awkward to the ear, it’s about the same as saying “people living with chronic or episodic homelessness” instead of “homeless people,” which we started using during the Biden administration.

The lesson in this folderol over suddenly problematic (I hate the word “problematic” and never use it in proposals) words for grant writers is to pay attention to political trends in the media and vary the language you use. Also, do a word search in the NOFO for clues regarding terms that should or should not be included in a given proposal. If “diversity” is used 10 times in a NOFO, it’s likely OK to use it in your proposal.

* After AZ Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in 2011, Democratic politicians and the media went into a frenzy looking for Republican politicians who’d used the word target or a bullseye target symbol in their ads. President Obama even used his address at a following service to call for a new era of “respect in public discourse.” That lasted about 10 minutes.