The PSF applied for a $1.5M grant from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to make innovative improvements to packaging security—and we were recommended for funding! But as a condition of funding, we were asked to affirm that we wouldn’t undertake any diversity, equity, and inclusion work, whether or not we used the government funds to do so.

The PSF simply couldn’t agree to that statement, as facilitating “the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers” is written directly into our mission and core to our values, so we withdrew our application. In the end, it wasn’t a hard decision for the PSF to put our community and our values first, but it does mean we lost out on this large funding source.