Safety and scientific rigor were once the top priorities at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). But over time, Tom Grove, a 15-year veteran of the agency, said he saw something shift. He said that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) ideology crept in, undermining the institution’s mission and potentially violating federal law. 

When Grove started asking questions about these policies, he at first was met with silence. Then came censorship and retaliation. NIST officials even opened an investigation against him –– without his knowledge, he said. 

Ultimately, in September 2023, Grove was fired from the agency. Now, he is pulling back the curtain in an exclusive interview with IW Features about how identity politics infiltrated one of the country’s most critical scientific institutions –– and how questioning this agenda led to his cancellation.

Upon his hiring in 2008, Grove served as a health physicist and as the Radiation Safety Officer in Boulder, Colorado.

“When I got to NIST in 2008, you would hear it over and over and over: ‘NIST is an apolitical organization,’ and they were super proud of that,” Grove told IW Features.

But by 2020, he said he began to notice a shift. An undercurrent that at first only appeared in generic “Diversity is Our Strength”-style posters plastered on hallway walls soon escalated into something far more ideologically charged, Grove said. And after President Joe Biden took office in 2021, things snowballed.

In fact, shortly after Biden’s inauguration, NIST leadership went ahead with plans to hire its first Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion officer. According to Grove, the DEI officer’s first words to staff weren’t about scientific excellence or workplace safety, but about her identity.

“She got a few minutes to speak and very contextually told us that she was a black queer married woman,” Grove recalled. 

When some employees didn’t immediately react, she reportedly added: “It’s okay if you don’t know what that means—you’ll learn.”

The officer wasn’t just introducing herself, according to Grove. She was warning NIST employees that the agency could — and would — soon start pushing unlawfully discriminatory requirements, he explained. 

When Grove went to NIST’s ombudsman to raise concerns, he said the company intermediary didn’t think NIST’s acting director would respond to Grove’s inquiries, but that he was welcome to “continue raising concerns” about DEI.

So he did.

Grove said he attended a staff DEI meeting and noticed how the presenter was sitting with a Black Lives Matter poster right above her left shoulder.

During this virtual update, attendees were encouraged to ask questions in the stream chat. So, Grove asked questions like, “DEI is the practical implementation of CRT (“praxis); a Marxist principle. How is it lawful to undermine our Constitutional Republic with anti-American principles?” and “Despite [N]IST Leadership knowing my opposition to DEI, I was not asked to join any of the 50 groups looking [into] this issue. How is that inclusive?”

Grove said his questions went unanswered.

“Does ‘Racial Equity’ include protecting white males from discrimination? Does it stop favoring skin color and women and promote KSAs [Knowledge, Skills, Abilities]? If not, NIST ought to opt out of it,” he had asked months prior and later repeated to his colleagues on their internal communication channels.

By 2022, Grove said the NIST had become outright hostile to any criticism of DEI. After all, for FY2022, Grove was shocked to learn that the agency’s budget request asked for an additional $5 million for “Equity and Diversity in the Workforce.” 

His posts questioning DEI politics on NIST’s internal staff forum were deleted — and, he’d later discover, reported. 

But Grove stood his ground, refusing to even use the acronym DEI. Instead, Grove told them he preferred the acronym “DIE” over DEI “because it is the death of the rule of law, liberty, unity, equality under the law, the individual and unconditional inclusivity.” 

NIST later called this “inappropriate, alarming even, and cannot be tolerated,” according to communications reviewed by IW Features, completely missing Grove’s larger point that DEI results in the death of traditional equality and merit.

In one case, a NIST Director’s All-Hands Townhall Q&A thread discussing racial equity resulted in 78 employees “liking” a post calling Grove’s comments racist, he alleged. One employee even openly called Grove a white supremacist. Grove said he was “being ostracized.”

All the while, Grove said he continued to press NIST leadership on the merits of DEI policies, asking whether “racial equity” as defined in the agency’s DEI initiatives was constitutional, and whether intersectionality was just being used as a “sinister tool” for political purposes. When NIST organized a symposium about “Socially-Directed Science and Technology,” Grove said he raised reasonable questions to leadership about whether the speaker would preach “anti-racist” persuasive messaging, or if she would use “objective, rational, linear thinking.”

As DEI took priority in the agency, Grove said there was no indication that NIST was focused on safety. In June 2022, for example, NIST leadership announced that for the first time in its history the agency would fly the Pride flag on its main flagpoles to celebrate Pride Month. What was missing? Any focus on National Safety Month, which also takes place during the month of June, and is a holiday NIST had historically observed, according to Grove.

Just three months later, in September 2022, a NIST employee was killed in a workplace accident –– the first fatality in the agency’s history. While Grove doesn’t claim DEI was directly responsible for this tragedy, he believes the agency’s priorities had clearly shifted and led to mismanagement.

“They became lax,” he alleged. “They weren’t properly managing safety.”

Grove’s outspokenness in the agency made him a target long before he knew it. In July 2022, NIST launched an official investigation into Grove –– but no one told him. He said he didn’t find out until October, when he received a proposal for suspension.

The charge? “Conduct unbecoming a federal employee.” 

The evidence? A series of emails and staff forum posts questioning DEI policies and transgender ideology. 

One email NIST took issue with, according to documents reviewed by IW Features, was when Grove responded to an all-staff email titled, “Raising the Pride Flag, June 1, 2023.” He emailed back that the Pride flag now “represents the LGBTQIA+ agenda of sexualizing children as early as kindergarten… sexually confusing young children and those going through puberty… even supporting and enabling physical and chemical castration (mutilation) of minors. This is child abuse; probably criminal….”

Another email NIST used against him was when he had been prompted to provide suggestions during a safety summit and tried to suggest that “Gay Pride” should only be celebrated on one day, stating the LGBTQ+ agenda’s “sexual desires/gender delusions are neither important nor indispensible [syc] to meeting NIST’s mission….”

In their proposal to remove Grove, NIST made sweeping generalizations about those comments, writing, “Your insults, including referring to the LGBTQIA+ community as ‘delusional’ and accusing them of child abuse, go beyond expressing an opinion; they are disruptive and damaging to the workforce.” NIST wrote that Grove’s opinions made some staff members “express fear for their personal safety.” 

“The last I checked, the right to free speech trumps any safe space,” Grove told IW Features. “I was trying to prevent an ideology that I was thoroughly convinced was Marxist in nature.”

Most concerning of all, Grove alleged the people investigating him weren’t neutral. NIST allegedly removed the authority to investigate him from his direct supervisor –– who was quietly anti-DEI –– and instead assigned the case to three employees Grove said were active DEI advocates.

This was all part of a larger cultural pattern within NIST, Grove said — one in which employees operated under fear of speaking out and complied just to keep their jobs. 

“Even people that I know that are against DEI said, ‘Tom, I only have three years until I retire. I like to be the gray man,’” Grove recalled.

After NIST officials began working to suspend him, Grove was entitled to a written and oral response to his proposed removal and was given seven days to gather evidence to present his case “without interference.” But within those seven days, Grove said he was removed from the NIST intranet and was restricted from the physical campuses, so he could not access his evidence.

He said he felt “railroaded,” explaining he had to fight just to access an agency computer for 72 consecutive hours –– not work hours. After batch-downloading everything he thought would relate to his case, Grove compiled a 249-page PDF of emails, messages, screenshots, and thorough, logical explanations for why he had spoken out against DEI and the LGBTQ+ agenda in the agency. 

Grove then learned his oral response would be restricted to 15 slides within two hours –– initially only one hour –– regardless of whether or not he had been able to finish his thoughts. Grove said this was an“intentional deprivation of his right to due process.”

“It was just a show, just a ‘move through the process until you’re fired,’” Grove said, calling the investigative process NIST used as “authoritarian” and “tyrannical.”

Sure enough, just before the 4th of July in 2023, Grove received an email notifying him of his official termination proposal. 

“I found out the weekend before July 4th,” Grove said. “Here we are celebrating individual liberty, and I’m getting fired for exercising [the right to speak freely].”

Making matters worse, the process to appeal his firing, Grove said, is “actually set up to protect the organization,” as the bureaucratic, drawn-out timeline and associated costs with lawyers become unbearable for the average federal employee. 

“Let’s say the MSPB and the EEO appeals are done, and I get no satisfaction after that. The only thing I can go to is federal circuit court, which, of course, is another expenditure of time and money that the average person –– whether they’re working or not or whatever the circumstances are –– probably cannot afford to take on the federal government,” Grove said.

Shortly after President Donald Trump took office in January 2025 for his second term, he signed an anti-DEI executive order titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing and Initial Rescissions of Harmful Executive Orders and Actions.” 

While the order serves as a sign of relief from the very policies Grove opposed within the NIST and other government agencies, the damage done during the Biden administration to people like Grove cannot be forgotten.

And while Grove said he has hope for improvement at NIST in the short-term due to Trump’s policies, long-term change is “dependent upon U.S. citizens cherishing individual liberty as a civic duty,” and that people in power who deprive citizens of their God-given rights must still be held accountable.

IW Features reached out to NIST for comment, but has not received a response at the time of publication.

“A battle in the war against DEI has been won in the Federal Government –– and against those it has influence over such as recipients of federal tax dollars –– only due to a Presidential Executive Order; not legislation into law,” Grove warned. “It can be easily undone, resulting in a losing battle.”