Trump just fired all 24 members of the National Science Board. Every single one. By email. No warning. No reason given. The board has existed since 1950.
The National Science Board is the independent body that oversees the National Science Foundation, the agency that distributes $9 billion in research grants every year.
Its members are scientists and engineers from universities and industry. They serve six-year staggered terms specifically so they cross presidential administrations and stay independent of whoever is in power.
On Friday, every single one of them got the same boilerplate email from Mary Sprowls of the Presidential Personnel Office: "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."
That's it. That's the whole letter. For 76 years of institutional independence.
The NSF funds the basic science behind MRIs. Cellphones. LASIK eye surgery. GPS. The internet itself. The Antarctic research stations. The deep-space telescopes. The research vessels mapping the ocean floor. Every breakthrough that made America the world's leader in science for the better part of a century traces back through grants this agency made and this board approved.
The board chair, Victor McCrary, was actively advising Congress on Trump's proposed 55% cut to NSF's budget. The board was helping fight back. So Trump fired the board.
Marvi Matos Rodriguez, one of the fired members, told reporters she had been reviewing an 80-page report as part of her board duties just days before being terminated.
Keivan Stassun, a physicist at Vanderbilt, said NSF's leadership had already stopped responding to board oversight requests months ago. "We would ask them, 'Are you following board governance directives?' And their answer would be, in effect, 'We don't listen to you anymore.'"
Now there's no board to answer to.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat on the House Science Committee, called it "the latest stupid move made by a president who continues to harm science and American innovation. 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?"
That's the actual question.
Because while Trump is firing American scientists, China is building research universities at a rate we cannot match. The CDC just buried a study showing vaccines work.
RFK Jr. runs HHS. The EPA is gutted. The Forest Service is being broken. Half of American children are breathing dangerous air. And now the people who decide what gets researched in the United States have all been fired by email on a Friday afternoon.
