[rck]

Not a lawyer, but the NSF clause covering clawbacks is pretty specific:

> NSF reserves the right to terminate financial assistance awards and recover all funds if recipients, during the term of this award, operate any program in violation of Federal antidiscriminatory laws or engage in a prohibited boycott.

A "prohibited boycott" is apparently a legal term aimed specifically at boycotting Israel/Israeli companies, so unless PSF intended to violate federal law or do an Israel boycott, they probably weren't at risk. They mention they talked to other nonprofits, but don't mention talking to their lawyers. I would hope they did consult counsel, because it would be a shame to turn down that much money solely on the basis of word of mouth from non-attorneys.

[dragonwriter]

I don't think you are misunderstanding the surface requirements, but I think you are mistaking “would eventually, with unlimited resources for litigation, prevail in litigation over NSF cancelling funds, assuming that the US justice system always eventually produces a correct result” with “not at risk”.

[rck]

I can imagine that a very risk averse lawyer would have pointed out the costs and uncertainties of litigation in cases like this. But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20. I'm not sure it's happened, which seems relevant to estimating the actual risk.

Interestingly, they may get more in donations than they would have from this grant, so maybe that needs to be including in the risk estimate as well...

[dragonwriter]

> But if I were in their shoes and I really cared about the money, I would have pressed that lawyer to show examples where the clawback clause had been invoked since Jan 20.

And the lawyer would be able to present hundreds of cases covering billions of dollars of federal grants, cancelled since Trump issued EO 14151 setting in black and white the Administration's broad crusade against funding anything with contact with DEI and declaring the DEI prohibition a policy for all federal grants and contracts, under different grant programs, many of which were originally awarded before Trump came back to office and which would not have had DEI terms in the original grant language. They'd also be able to point out that some of the cancellations had been litigated to the Supreme Court and allowed, other clawbacks had been struck down by lower courts and were still in appeals.

[rck]

Yeah it looks like about 1500 grants:

https://www.urban.org/urban-wire/nsf-has-canceled-more-1500-...

But if the concern is about the provision allowing NSF to claw back funds that have been spent by the organization then the question remains: has that happened? Right now if you search for terms related to NSF clawbacks, most of the top results refer to the PSF's statement or forum discussions about it (like this one). I can't find any instances of a federal clawback related to DEI. If that had happened I would assume that the response from the awardee would have been noisy.