While everyone is focusing on the so-called 'DEI' part, please note that per this article they are also targeting "environmentally friendly technologies". This is incredibly broad and could de-fund a broad array of fundamental research that has, as potential long-term impacts, reducing carbon emissions, PFAS remediation, desalination, etc. etc. Given that proposals were written years ago, researchers did not know that in the new regime certain words would become verboten and may have framed the eventual impact of their work in entirely reasonable ways that are now considered ideologically unacceptable.

If they do choose to issue stop work orders on already funded grants that will certainly cause chaos across engineering and science in this country. And frankly, it will cede leadership on many topics to China (which is already dominating fields like materials science).