Board Ouster Raises Further Concerns About NSF’s Future

The Trump administration’s decision to fire the entire board that oversees the National Science Foundation is another blow to American science that threatens the country’s global leadership, multiple higher ed and research advocacy groups warned, as did ousted board members.

They added that the move could further destabilize the agency, which is a major university research funding agency, and could give the White House more control over NSF.

The White House didn’t initially tell board members or the public why it gutted the board, but in an email Monday to Inside Higher Ed, the White House pointed to a 2021 Supreme Court decision. The court’s reasoning in U.S. v. Arthrex “raised constitutional questions about whether non-Senate confirmed appointees can exercise the authorities that Congress gave the National Science Board.” The board’s members—it has 25 at full capacity, and 22 were listed online at the time of the terminations—are appointed by the president, but not confirmed by the Senate.

“We look forward to working with the Hill to update the statute and ensure the NSB can perform its duties as Congress intended,” the email said. The White House didn’t respond to a follow-up question about whether this means it won’t appoint new NSB members until Congress changes the law.

The Trump administration had already upended NSF. After the inauguration, it quickly moved to cancel a slew of NSF and National Institutes of Health grants, including on transgender individuals’ health care, vaccine hesitancy, misinformation and diversity, equity and inclusion—but also on non–politically contentious topics, such as cancer research. In August, through executive order, the president ordered “senior appointees” to take charge of awarding, or denying, new federal grants.

In February, NSF’s chief management officer said the agency’s staff was down about 35 percent from the same time last year, and the agency was planning to “consolidate” solicitations for grant awards to half, or fewer, of the usual number of these funding opportunities.

Matt Owens, president of COGR—an organization that only goes by its acronym and advocates for researchers and universities on the federal level—said in an email that “NSF has been without a confirmed director for a year. Its budget has been cut and proposed cuts are on the table again. And now, NSF has been set further adrift with the arbitrary dismissal of NSB members.

“This is not only bad for NSF, it is bad for American scientific leadership as the U.S. is being challenged by China and other nations,” Owens said.

Keivan Stassun, who had served on the board since 2023, said the firings allow the Trump administration, through the White House Office of Management and Budget, to exert “direct control of the nation’s primary investment in basic scientific research and technology by, in effect, removing the governance layer.” The board sets the NSF’s policies and approves major expenditures.

“What will happen is that NSF will essentially become a pass-through for implementing things in the domain of sciences and technology that the administration just wants to do,” said Stassun, the Stevenson Professor of Astrophysics at Vanderbilt University. “OMB can essentially tell the remaining bureaucratic functionaries … what to fund, and what not to fund, and at what levels, and when.”

‘Systematic Dismantling’

NSF, which has a nearly $9 billion budget, now lacks board members, a permanent director and a deputy director. While the White House said in its email that the agency’s “work continues uninterrupted,” the Grant Witness research funding tracking site says NSF is significantly behind on grant making compared to previous years.

The agency has been without a director for a year—the White House said in February that Trump is nominating Jim O’Neill to lead it, but the Senate hasn’t confirmed him yet. Stassun noted the director is an automatic board member and—if the Senate confirms O’Neill without Trump appointing new board members—“you would have a kind of a one-person takeover of the directorship and the board.”

Stassun also speculated that the board terminations might have something to do with Congress’s rejection of Trump’s proposal to halve NSF’s funding for this fiscal year—after board members advocated for preserving funding. Trump has again proposed cutting more than half of NSF’s budget next fiscal year.

“It was clear that we were getting ready to once again offer that guidance to Congress, which in the past budget cycle they clearly listened to,” Stassun said. “So, perhaps the administration didn’t want us offering that statutorily mandated advice to Congress.”

Science does not operate on four-year cycles. The work of understanding our universe, solving complex problems and building the knowledge base for the technologies of tomorrow requires patient, sustained investment guided by rigorous scientific judgment—not political preference.”

—Willie May, a former NSF board member and vice president of research and economic development at Morgan State University.

The NSF declined to comment to Inside Higher Ed. A few of the other board members told Inside Higher Ed they hadn’t seen the boilerplate termination message as of Monday, much less heard a rationale for their ousters.

“This is a fait accompli at this point,” said Roger N. Beachy, an ousted board member and an emeritus professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis. He said he received the termination email after 4 p.m. Eastern Friday.

“We’re hoping that there’s an explanation coming, but there’s nothing that has come to us thus far,” he said, adding that he hopes the academic community responds. He said he also hopes any new board “has the same interest in the entirety” of the American research and education enterprise as the ousted members did.

“It should be more than quantum, more than AI,” Beachy said, mentioning some of the Trump administration’s priorities. “There should be biological sciences, engineering sciences, engineering technology, technology transfer.”

Willie E. May, another board member and the vice president of research and economic development at Morgan State University, sent Inside Higher Ed a statement saying he assumes he’s been terminated alongside other members who said “they received a boilerplate email.”

“I am deeply disappointed, though I cannot say I am entirely surprised,” May wrote in the statement. “I have watched the systematic dismantling of the scientific advisory infrastructure of this government with growing alarm, and the National Science Board is simply the latest casualty.”

An Erosion of Independence?

The National Science Board is more than advisory; the NSF website says the board establishes NSF policies and approves major NSF awards, alongside advising Congress and the president. Stassun said it’s “just like a big corporation’s board of directors,” approving everything from budgets to major capital expenditures to strategic direction.

Beachy said, “Any time there’s a very large project funded, we have to approve it.” He said the board has responsibilities under law, “so one wonders how those will be administered and overseen unless there’s a new board.”

Congress’s National Science Foundation Act of 1950 established the NSF as an “independent agency” and created the board.

Joanne Padrón Carney, chief government relations officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said the board’s creation reflected the national need for “an independent science and technology advisory body.”

Carney said the terminations mean that—if there is a board in the future—there could be implicit pressure on its members that saps their independence. She said she hopes it’s re-established “with a broad array of representatives of scientific and technology experts, both in academia and in the private sector, that will have a focus on advancing science and research.”

Board members are supposed to serve six-year terms, longer than a single presidential administration. May, of Morgan State, said in his statement that this was “precisely to ensure continuity and, to some extent, insulation from political winds.”

“Science does not operate on four-year cycles,” May said. “The work of understanding our universe, solving complex problems and building the knowledge base for the technologies of tomorrow requires patient, sustained investment guided by rigorous scientific judgment—not political preference.”

May added that he thinks recent Supreme Court decisions have “given this administration a broader sense of license to act unilaterally in ways that erode institutional independence across the federal government—and we are seeing the consequences play out in real time, not only at NSF but across the scientific advisory architecture of the United States.” He said he hopes Congress “will exercise its oversight responsibilities and challenge these dismissals,” adding that the board’s “mandate to advise Congress is established in law, and that mandate does not disappear simply because the Board’s members have been purged.”

California Rep. Zoe Lofgren, the top Democrat on the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, called the terminations “a real Bozo the Clown move.”

“It unfortunately is no surprise a president who has attacked NSF from day one would seek to destroy the board that helps guide the foundation,” Lofgren said. “Will the president fill the NSB with MAGA loyalists who won’t stand up to him as he hands over our leadership in science to our adversaries?”

The office of Rep. Brian Babin, the Texas Republican who chairs the committee, didn’t provide comment Monday.

Stassun, of Vanderbilt, said he thinks that, to “anyone who’s been watching or paying attention to what’s happened” with other parts of the government connected to research, “it would have been surprising if the National Science Board was the only such body left untouched.”

Association of Public and Land-grant Universities president Waded Cruzado said in a statement that she was “dismayed” by the terminations. She said the board “plays a critical role in informing U.S. national science policy as well as overseeing and supporting the National Science Foundation.”

“The nation should be grateful for the service of NSB members who have selflessly advanced science and our health, security, prosperity, and wellbeing,” Cruzado said. “As our global competitors such as China vie for scientific and innovation leadership, prioritizing and investing in the federal science enterprise is essential to continued U.S. innovation dominance.”

In its own statement, AAAS called the board terminations “the latest in a string of erratic decisions that are destabilizing not only the National Science Foundation, but all of American science. Whatever the reasons, this action sets a precedent and implies that scientific priorities and policies will swing with the political whims of every administration.

“In the absence of clear communication from government leaders, this move, combined with other seemingly indiscriminate yet consequential decisions, reinforces the following message: America is abdicating its position as the global leader in science, technology and discovery,” the AAAS added.