National Science Board a victim of the Trump administration’s cancel culture

On April 24, President Trump summarily dismissed all 22 members of the National Science Board. The terse email to Board members did not explain why the president terminated their appointments, but the move seems to follow the playbook outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. That is, if you don’t like the message conveyed by an advisory group, remove or replace that entire group of experts.

The National Science Board was formed 76 years ago when Congress created the National Science Foundation (NSF), which funds the science and technology research that helped catapult the US economy after World War II into an innovative engine that leads the world in biomedicine, space exploration, quantum computing, and AI. The Board is not merely advisory; it sets overall policy and priorities for the NSF in support of the best and brightest in this crucial sector of our economy. Led by experts in basic and applied research, administrators of science in universities and national laboratories, and business leaders in engineering and technology, it is congressionally mandated to provide a biennial report to the president and Congress on focused areas in science and engineering.

Presidents may disagree with, or even ignore, the Board’s recommendations. President Trump, however, doesn’t simply disagree with or ignore advice; he feels compelled to eliminate groups that don’t rubber-stamp his policies so he can appoint loyalists. In March, the president dismissed the entire membership of PCAST, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, replacing them with 11 CEOs of major tech companies (e.g., Oracle, Meta, Google) and a cryptocurrency CEO. This is a mistake: If there is one principle that should guide decision-making in any complex organization, it is the danger of failing to consider alternative perspectives—group think often leads to catastrophic errors.

The apparent rationale for dismissing the entire National Science Board is the triple-threat of issues that irritate the president and are the focus of many of his executive orders—namely, climate science, vaccine policy, and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. The political appointees inserted by the Trump administration into the NSF apparently search for offending words in grant proposals, such as ‘women,’ ‘diversity,’ and ‘misinformation’ to identify research projects to amend or terminate. These words were chosen by Senator Ted Cruz’s staff in late 2024 to identify $2 billion in what they saw as waste, fraud, and abuse in the then-$7-billion NSF budget. And that in turn led the President’s Office of Management and Budget to propose a 50 percent cut to the overall NSF budget for Fiscal Year 2026 and again for Fiscal Year 2027.

These indiscriminate and crude cuts reveal a profound misunderstanding of what enables American excellence. When President Trump touts the US military as the best in the world, where does he think its innovations came from? The military itself does very little basic research; it relies on scientists to develop the technology it engineers for defense applications. The AI boom came from computer models built on foundational work by scientists over many decades, much of it focused on how language is represented in complex human thoughts. The very first chatbot was created in the 1960s by an MIT scientist, Joseph Weizenbaum, whose program simulated a discussion between a psychiatrist and patient.

The proposed cuts to basic science threaten to cede our longstanding leadership to other countries, most notably China, which reverse-engineered our AI models in just a year and now leads the world in nearly half of the sub-areas of basic research, according to a report in the journal Nature. In fact, the National Science Board was just about to release a report that highlighted China’s rapid increase in science and technology investments and the prospect that they will attain worldwide leadership in the next few years if the US fails to invest more heavily.

Scientists have been under attack by the Trump administration since the president took office in January of 2025. These broadside attacks have damaged the entire US scientific enterprise. This all-or-none strategy is an overreaction driven by partisan, cherry-picked examples rather than a sober analysis of legitimate policy concerns. It is important to stress that our concerns are not about whether one grant or another gets funded, but instead about the independence of science, and the dangers of politicized advice.

Scientists are not passively accepting these actions by the Trump administration. A letter sent to the Senate Committee on Appropriations over a month ago has now been signed by over 3,300 supporters of science. This week, a new letter was sent to Congress decrying the dismissal of the National Science Board members and the proposed cuts to the NSF budget. In less than three days, it was signed by over 2,000 members of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine and other honorific societies, as well as numerous supporters of the scientific enterprise. It is also a statement of solidarity with the staff of the National Science Foundation and National Science Board, who alerted Congress as long ago as July 2025 about the threats to the mission of the National Science Foundation. The signatories include 37 Nobel Prize-winners, key advisers to past presidents, and former NSF directors, who recently sent their own letter to Congress.

Hopefully, members of the House and Senate appropriations committees that fund NSF will push back on the drastic cuts proposed by the Trump administration, as they did last year by largely retaining full support for Fiscal Year 2026 (despite efforts by the Office of Management and Budget to withhold or slow-walk those funds). Appropriators should also pass legislation, along with the Fiscal Year 2027 budget, that reinforces the statute requiring members of the NSB to be eminent scientists, engineers, educators, or public leaders known for distinguished service.

Failing such actions, the proposed cuts to NSF, the National Institutes of Health, and other federal agencies such as NASA, will inexorably lead to a slide into mediocrity as China and other countries, who are spending more on R&D than the United States, not only catch up but surpass our teetering leadership in science and technology.