Rahsaan McFarland II ’25 doesn’t need to read the news to understand the sweeping reductions in federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs.

Four months into his position at the San Francisco office of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and weeks after the Trump administration unveiled plans to end government DEI programs, McFarland’s employment was terminated. Shortly after, he was put on administrative leave, which McFarland said left him “out of the loop” from the EPA. 

“I really don’t know what’s going on,” McFarland said. “I get some correspondence from the agency, but that correspondence oftentimes leaves me asking more questions.”

Amid pressure from the Trump administration, universities across the country have renamed DEI offices, scrubbed DEI information from their webpages and braced for budget cuts.

McFarland was previously working on tribal nation drinking and wastewater management. He is among the Stanford students and researchers who have been impacted directly by the flurry of executive orders targeting DEI. 

Mentors at Stanford have also seen students turn away from research due to the the federal government’s actions. Suki Hoagland, the internship director for the Earth Systems Program, said that students have started pivoting from DEI topics.

“Students that have family responsibilities and ambitions to be able to help their family financially — it’s going to be maybe too scary to follow a sustainability or an environmental justice path if you don’t know that the jobs are out there,” Hoagland said.

When his position was terminated, McFarland said he felt “disillusionment” with the system he long hoped could be an instrument of change. “I feel like my fears have come true right now, and we’re living through them,” he said.

Attacks on DEI have also taken the form of funding cuts. Five days after the Trump administration’s announcement, the grant Emily Rodriguez ’26 intended to fund her master’s degree research with was suddenly terminated.

Rodriguez researches Asian never-smokers, a group that makes up about one-third of lung cancer patients in East Asia, according to recent studies. This disproportionate impact on Asian patients isn’t explained by current medical knowledge, which predominantly focuses on white male patients, according to Rodriguez. 

Rodriguez and McFarland both say they’re living in constant uncertainty. 

“No one really knows what’s gonna be cut next, so a lot of us are just constantly checking our emails, being like: ‘We’re still working today, right?’” Rodriguez said. 

Although her project is still running thanks to her lab’s funding, which focuses more broadly on epidemiology and has been spared funding cuts, Rodriguez said she expects to have a hard time finding grants to fund her work individually. If her lab starts losing money, Rodriguez fears her project could be the first cut because of its DEI focus.

As students debate their career paths, researchers who have devoted their life’s work to DEI-related topics are also considering how — or whether — to adapt. Earth System Science professor Elliott White Jr., for example, studies saltwater intrusion and its impacts on ecosystems and humans alike. 

Part of his work investigates how “the environments that marginalized communities are in presently are not by happenstance,” said White. “They’re by intentional decisions that were made to either push people into marginal lands or to put industry or other kind of environmentally degrading things in proximity to where those marginalized people already live.”

White described himself as “defiant” against efforts to remove DEI from his work and said he will not alter its substance.

“I arrived here through years of learning, experimentation, of doing research and discovering questions that need solving, and this just happens to be where they’re at,” White said. 

He recently rebuffed requests from a federal employee — with whom he’d been collaborating on the project long before Trump returned to office — to retitle “The Gulf of Mexico” to “The Gulf of America” in a paper he’s working on, resolving to find an entirely different way to refer to the body of water.

As internship director, Hoagland said she will uphold DEI programs. Both in name and in content, the minor in environmental justice will remain, as well as the requirement that all Earth Systems students take an environmental justice class, Hoagland said.

The department also recently established a pot of money to fund undergraduate DEI internships up to $8,500. According to Hoagland, the funding comes from the Doerr School of Sustainability’s budget and supports students who wouldn’t otherwise be able to receive payment for their work. 

But not all institutions will be able to defy the administration’s demands. According to White, even if wealthy universities like Stanford could weather declines in federal funding for a few years, the broader threat to science remains. 

“It’s not like all of the country’s research is produced at a dozen schools. It’s produced by universities across the country, some [that] get a lot more money from the federal government,” White said.

Meanwhile, McFarland has not been dissuaded from a career uplifting tribal communities. This summer, he’ll work on a Stanford forest stewardship project in the Eastern Sierras — one with a focus on working with tribal nations. “Even though a door closed, the window opened,” he said. 

During his four months at the EPA, McFarland said he wished he had opportunities to work more closely with tribal communities. Now, he’s finally taking his chance.