On April 15, 2025, members of 11 advisory committees to the National Science Foundation (NSF) were informed that their panels had been discontinued. According to the emails, which were sent by senior agency officials, the panels were disbanded in response to President Trump’s February 19 executive order on “commencing the reduction of the federal bureaucracy.”
The committees advised seven of the eight NSF directorates, including biology, engineering, social sciences, and the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education directorate. Ecologist Diane Pataki, former NSA program officer and member of the environmental panel, said that “[i]t’s hard to see how NSF can continue” to be on the cutting edge of science without the expert input.