Trump Fires All 22 Members of the National Science Board, the Body That Oversees the NSF

Details

On April 24, 2026, President Donald Trump's administration fired all 22 sitting members of the National Science Board (NSB), the governing body that oversees the National Science Foundation (NSF). Each member received an identical email from the Presidential Personnel Office shortly after 4 p.m. The message, as reported by Science, read in full: "On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service."

The White House did not announce the firings, which were first surfaced by science-news outlets and lawmakers, and it offered no rationale for several days. The move left NSF—the federal government's primary funder of basic research across nearly every scientific field—without a confirmed director and without its governing board at the same time.

What the National Science Board Is

The NSB is an unusual entity in the federal government. It was established by Congress in the National Science Foundation Act of 1950 and signed into law by President Harry Truman. It has two jobs: advising the president and Congress on national science and engineering policy, and setting policy for NSF itself, including approving the agency's budget submission, its strategic plan, and its largest expenditures.

The board's design reflects a deliberate choice made when NSF was created. As Science: The Endless Frontier author Vannevar Bush and Senator Harley Kilgore fought over for five years in the 1940s, the central question was whether American science should be governed by scientists or by politicians. The compromise that produced NSF gave the agency a board of presidentially appointed experts—typically eminent academics and industry leaders—serving staggered six-year terms, with one-third rotating off every two years. Members do not require Senate confirmation. The staggered terms were meant to insulate long-horizon research decisions from any single administration. As fired board member and former NIST director Willie May put it to Chemistry World: "That structure was intentional—science does not operate on four-year cycles."

By statute, the board can officially be dissolved only by Congress.

NSF's reach is broad: it funds roughly a quarter of all federally supported basic research in the United States and underwrites work at more than 1,800 institutions across all 50 states. NSF-funded research played a role in the development of the internet, CRISPR gene editing, Doppler radar, and the technologies behind Google and the LIGO gravitational-wave detector. The Federal Reserve has estimated that government-supported research from NSF and similar agencies has returned between $1.50 and $3 for every taxpayer dollar invested since 1950.

The Administration's Justification

When the White House finally responded to press inquiries, it offered a legal rather than a policy rationale. In a written statement, a spokesperson said the firing was in line with the 2021 Supreme Court decision United States v. Arthrex, which "raised constitutional questions about whether non-Senate confirmed appointees can exercise the authorities that Congress gave the National Science Board." The statement added: "We look forward to working with the Hill to update the statute and ensure the NSB can perform its duties as Congress intended. The National Science Foundation's work continues uninterrupted."

Arthrex concerned administrative patent judges—officials appointed by the Secretary of Commerce but not confirmed by the Senate—who held the power to make binding decisions in patent disputes. The Supreme Court held that officials wielding such "unreviewable" executive authority are typically principal officers who must be Senate-confirmed, and it fixed the problem by requiring that the patent office director (a Senate-confirmed official) be able to review their decisions.

House Science Committee chair Brian Babin (R-TX), a Republican, defended the broader prerogative if not the specific reasoning, telling NPR: "Every President expects advisors to serve in a manner consistent with executive and legislative priorities. I look forward to seeing whom President Trump selects to fill the NSB and refocus our science agencies on their core mission: pursuing science." And some scientists were unbothered. Cornell operations-research professor Gennady Samorodnitsky, a past NSF grantee, told NPR: "It is the task of the government to figure out what's best for society. The money comes from the government, so ultimately [the government] makes the decisions."

Legal Scholars and Lawmakers Question the Rationale

The Arthrex explanation drew skepticism from legal experts across the ideological spectrum, who noted both that the case does not obviously map onto the NSB and that firing the board would not even fix the problem the administration described.

Duke University law professor Jeff Powell, an authority on the Constitution's appointments clause, told NPR there was "a puzzling disconnect between firing the Board members and the [White House] statement," observing that if Arthrex applies, "eliminating the [NSB] members leaves it unaddressed"—because removing the members does nothing to create the Senate-confirmed reviewer the doctrine requires. Stanford law professor Anne Joseph O'Connell noted to E&E News that under Arthrex, "officials with binding authority are typically principal officers" subject to Senate approval—the opposite of removal.

There is also a factual dispute about whether the NSB even exercises the kind of binding power Arthrex targets. Fired board member Julia Phillips, formerly of Sandia National Laboratories, told the American Institute of Physics that the board had been aware of Arthrex for years and had deliberately framed its positions as recommendations to NSF rather than approvals or orders. An internal NSB guidance memo seen by Science confirmed this, stating that "in recent years, to align with a Supreme Court ruling … the Board and the agency have addressed award matters carefully." As Snopes summarized, unlike patent judges, NSB members "only advise Congress and the president" and do not adjudicate disputes.

House Science Committee ranking member Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) called the constitutional argument "dubious" and told C&EN: "If there was a legitimate concern on the part of the Trump Administration on a legal issue, the path forward is not to fire the entire NSB—one third of whom [Trump] appointed in the first place—but to work with Congress." On May 11, Lofgren led 31 House Democrats in a letter demanding the board's immediate reinstatement, writing that firing it was "essentially a middle finger to Congressional intent" that made the White House's pledge to "work with the Hill" "particularly ludicrous." A separate Senate letter asked the administration to provide the legal basis for the firings and to explain who would now perform the board's statutory functions, such as approving major NSF expenditures.

Whether the dismissals will be challenged in court remains unclear. There is a recent and relevant precedent: a federal judge ruled in early 2026 that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s removal of the CDC's entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices violated the law governing federal advisory boards.

A Question of Retaliation

Several fired members and former officials linked the timing of the firing to the board's defense of NSF's budget. In its FY2026 request, the administration proposed cutting NSF's roughly $9 billion budget by about 55%—a reduction that would have shrunk the agency to $3.9 billion, slashed research activities by more than 60%, and, by the White House's own request figures, reduced the number of people working on NSF-funded projects from 330,000 to 90,000. The board publicly criticized that proposal in May 2025, and Congress ultimately rejected the deep cuts, passing a budget that trimmed NSF by only about 3%.

Keivan Stassun, a Vanderbilt astrophysicist who chaired the board's committee on large research facilities until his termination, told Science the criticism likely antagonized the administration: "Maybe one way to say it from the administration's perspective is that this group of presidential appointees was advising the Congress to not follow the president's wishes." Fired board chair Victor McCrary, a physical chemist at the Catholic University of America, told Science more bluntly that the board was terminated because it had successfully convinced Congress to preserve NSF's budget and the White House Office of Management and Budget "did not want this success repeated."

Stassun also described a board that had already been sidelined before the firings. He pointed to the administration's request that Congress give NSF $900 million for a new Antarctic research icebreaker, saying OMB directed NSF's facilities chief to build a new vessel with no involvement from the board, which is required to authorize major infrastructure investments. When the board pushed back, Stassun said, the response was simply that "OMB was very clear in its directive." Asked whether NSF leadership was following board governance directives, Stassun said the effective answer from top officials had become: "We don't listen to you anymore."

The Broader Pattern

The NSB firing did not happen in isolation. It is the latest in a series of moves that have weakened or eliminated independent scientific advisory bodies across the federal government. Willie May described it as "the systematic dismantling of the scientific advisory infrastructure of this government," and the Union of Concerned Scientists called it "an attempt to silence independent scientists, shut down evidence-based decision making, and keep the public in the dark."

Across agencies, the administration has removed advisory committees at the EPA, reconstituted the CDC's vaccine advisory panel after Kennedy ousted its members, and moved to eliminate the FDA's long-standing practice of having outside experts review new drug applications. At NSF specifically, the firing came atop a year of upheaval: the agency has been without a permanent director since April 2025, when Sethuraman Panchanathan resigned amid the cuts; it has canceled or suspended nearly 1,400 grants, many tied to diversity-related or misinformation research the administration said did not align with its priorities; it closed its Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences directorate in April 2026; and it has issued far fewer new awards. The watchdog group Grant Witness calculated that through mid-June, NSF had awarded only about one-eighth as many new grants as it had by the same point in FY2025—despite a research budget only about $220 million smaller.

The Wider Purge of Science Advisory Committees

The NSB firing is the most prominent instance of a far larger campaign. These outside-expert panels are governed by the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA) of 1972, which is designed to ensure that when the government seeks advice from people outside its ranks, it does so through balanced, transparent bodies whose meetings and reports are generally open to the public. The administration has used a February 19, 2025 executive order aimed at shrinking federal bureaucracy—whose stated purpose was to "minimize Government waste and abuse, reduce inflation, and promote American freedom and innovation"—to dissolve these panels en masse across the government.

The scale is unprecedented. A Nature analysis, reproduced by Scientific American in May 2026, found that the administration terminated more than 100 advisory committees to science agencies in 2025 and reduced the transparency and independence of those that remained. A broader Bloomberg Law analysis of the General Services Administration's committee database, published in late October 2026, put the government-wide total even higher—about 160 expert advisory committees eliminated, roughly 15% of all federal advisory boards and nearly a third of them over the objections of the very agencies that oversee them. Bloomberg called it by far the biggest purge of nonpartisan advice in the nearly three decades that records have been kept; by comparison, six boards were shuttered during the final months of the Biden administration covered by the same fiscal year.

The cuts fell hardest on the Department of Health and Human Services. Nature found HHS disbanded 77 advisory boards—more than a quarter of all its committees—in 2025, against just two in fiscal 2024; since 1997, the full span of public FACA data, annual HHS terminations had exceeded ten only once. A Public Citizen report counted 75 HHS committees terminated under Kennedy—49 at NIH, nine at the CDC, and four at the FDA—amounting to about 27% of the department's 273 panels. Among the casualties were committees advising on organ transplantation, the dietary guidelines (new guidelines were issued in January 2026 without the panel's input), long COVID, Alzheimer's disease, newborn heritable disorders, health equity, and infection control. FDA advisory activity also collapsed, from 41 meeting days across 20 committees in 2024 to 15 days across nine committees in 2025—a 63% reduction. Across HHS, the number of committee meetings open to the public fell from a ten-year average of 255 to just 91 in 2025.

Other science agencies followed the same pattern. The NSF disbanded all of its non-statutory advisory committees—14 of its 52 panels, covering fields such as engineering, cybersecurity, geosciences, and mathematics and physical sciences—while keeping the statutorily required grant-review panels (and, at the time, the NSB). The DOE terminated six discipline-specific panels in high-energy physics, scientific computing, and biological and environmental research, folding them into a single Office of Science Advisory Committee whose first meeting, in March 2026, was tasked with prioritizing resources for AI and quantum science. The Department of Commerce eliminated the Census Scientific Advisory Committee, whose former members reconstituted themselves as an unofficial body. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Geological Survey dissolved their advisory committees citing the same executive order.

In percentage terms the deepest cuts came at NASA, which lost six of its 11 FACA committees—including five that fed advice into its science mission directorate on planetary science, astrophysics, and other fields—and held only 10 committee meetings in 2025 against a ten-year average of 35. The terminations came months after the administration proposed roughly halving NASA's science budget. Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, the Vanderbilt astrophysicist who chaired the disbanded astrophysics committee, said the panels were staffed by unpaid volunteers and were never bureaucracy: "We do it because we loved astrophysics and we loved NASA." Benjamin Greenhagen, who chairs a surviving non-FACA lunar advisory group whose NASA funding was nonetheless cut, asked simply, "Why would you want less information?" NASA's associate administrator for science, Nicola Fox, disputed that advice had fallen away, pointing to the National Academies' decadal surveys as an alternative input.

Beyond outright terminations, the administration changed the character of panels it kept. In some cases it sharply reduced open meetings and public reports, shifting deliberations behind closed doors. In others—most prominently the CDC's vaccine panel (ACIP) and the HHS Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, both reconstituted by Kennedy with members aligned to his views—it replaced experts wholesale, a practice a federal judge found likely violated FACA's requirement that panels be balanced in expertise and viewpoint. Carrie Wolinetz, former head of the NIH's science-policy office, said such bodies appeared "constituted to support particular predetermined points of view" and were being "used to certify policy actions the administration wants to take." The White House defended the effort: spokesperson Kush Desai said the government's "glut of redundant, taxpayer-funded advisory committees did little to meaningfully inform policymaking," and that the administration was "eliminating the bureaucratic bloat." Critics note that the purge sits awkwardly beside the administration's own May 23, 2025 executive order on "gold-standard science," which promised to improve transparency in federal science.

The board's removal also coincided with a consequential redirection of money that the NSB would normally have helped oversee. In June, Science reported that NSF was quietly cutting hundreds of traditional basic-science program budgets by 20% to 30% or more—even though its overall budget had fallen just 3%—apparently to free up more than $1 billion for a new $1.5 billion applied-technology initiative called X-Labs, focused on AI-driven sensing, quantum systems, and photonics. An internal memo instructed program managers to pull back award recommendations and to keep the cuts confidential: "Please do not communicate anything to PIs." Critics noted the move appeared to defy a congressional directive in the FY2026 appropriations bill barring any directorate from being cut more than 5% below its FY2024 level. Phillips, the former board member, called the shift evidence of "a total lack of understanding of how science is done."

What the Firing Does—and Doesn't—Change

The practical consequences of removing the board are genuinely contested, and that uncertainty matters to any honest assessment.

On one hand, the board's day-to-day authority is limited. Its functions are primarily advisory and oversight—approving budgets, strategic plans, and large awards, and issuing policy reports such as the biennial Science and Engineering Indicators. NSF's grantmaking machinery, peer review, and program staff operate largely independent of the board, and the agency stated its work "continues uninterrupted." Much of the damage to American science in 2025–2026—the grant cancellations, the staffing losses, the proposed budget cuts—stemmed from separate actions, not from the board's presence or absence. By that reading, the firing is partly symbolic.

On the other hand, the symbolism is the point, and the timing is not. The board exists precisely to provide independent, expert review of major decisions and to defend long-horizon research against short-term political pressure. Removing it at the exact moment NSF is reallocating more than $1 billion toward administration priorities, with no confirmed director and a nominee—venture capitalist Jim O'Neill, the only NSF nominee without scientific or engineering credentials—awaiting a Senate hearing, eliminates the one body positioned to scrutinize that shift. Fired member Roger Beachy told Chemistry World the agency is now "more rudderless than it ever was in the past," and warned the board could be reconstituted as a partisan body that takes "orders from the administration rather than being independent." His concern, which he stressed is not yet proven, is that basic research could give way to short-term applied goals favored by the White House, such as nuclear energy and quantum computing.

The harm is also difficult to reverse. The NSB's own nomination process takes roughly 12 months, and the eminent scientists who staffed the board served terms specifically structured to outlast any administration. Rebuilding that expertise and the institutional memory that came with it is slow and uncertain work.

The Competitiveness Argument

Much of the establishment criticism has centered not on partisanship but on national competitiveness. On May 1, thirteen former NSF directors and board chairs—who served under both Democratic and Republican presidents, with one director's service stretching back to 1976—wrote to underscore "the urgency of restoring full leadership and governance at the National Science Foundation during a period of intense international competition." They noted that "for the first time in our history, China is investing more in [research and development] than the U.S.," with Beijing's five-year plan targeting AI, semiconductors, biotechnology, quantum, and advanced manufacturing—the same fields where American leadership is most at stake. On May 11, roughly 1,500 members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine sent Congress an open letter calling the firings "an alarming attack on the ability of the U.S. to engage in basic and applied research."

Willie May framed the stakes the same way: "At a moment when the United States faces intensifying global competition in science and technology … we are systematically undermining the institutions and the people dedicated to keeping our country at the leading edge. That is not good for our country."

Public Support for Science

The dismantling of independent scientific oversight is occurring despite broad, bipartisan public support for science. A Pew Research Center survey released in January 2026 found that 77% of U.S. adults have at least "a fair amount" of confidence in scientists to act in the public's best interests—rating them roughly on par with the military and above journalists, business leaders, and elected officials. Confidence runs higher among Democrats (90%) than Republicans (65%), and Republican confidence fell about 22 percentage points during the pandemic (from April 2020 to December 2021) before stabilizing, but a clear majority of Republicans still express it. Support for public funding is similarly broad: 84% of Americans—including 76% of Republicans and 93% of Democrats—call government investment in scientific research worthwhile, though a slight majority of Republicans (54%) say private investment alone could ensure sufficient progress. The board's removal, in other words, ran against rather than with the grain of public opinion about the scientific enterprise.

Status

As of late June 2026, the National Science Board's seats remain unfilled, and the NSF's official membership page lists the board as "pending new appointments." The White House has not responded to questions about whether the president intends to appoint new members before Congress changes the statute, as its statement implied, or whether he will leave the board vacant indefinitely. NSF still has no Senate-confirmed director; chief of staff Brian Stone continues to perform the director's duties, and O'Neill's nomination remains pending. The agency has scheduled a board meeting for mid-July, though with no members seated, its character is unclear. No legal challenge to the firings has been filed, but Democratic lawmakers continue to demand reinstatement, and the recent ruling against the CDC vaccine-panel dismissals leaves the legal question open.