Here’s why that’s a needed reset.
Here’s why that’s a needed reset.
P resident Trump’s recent firing of all 24 members of the National Science Board (NSB), the presidentially appointed body that sets the strategic direction of National Science Foundation (NSF) and oversees its roughly $9 billion annual budget, is an excellent and targeted way to restrain the agency’s excessive bureaucracy. It is precisely the kind of clean reset needed to reclaim NSF from decades of ideological capture and restore its original mission of funding science on merit alone.
This action severs the self-perpetuating administrative layer that has steered the agency away from its original mission. It’s an important move against woke science and in the direction of prioritizing discovery over dogma.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the firings provoked near panic among Democrats and in academia, with Nature magazine quoting a congressional Democrat calling it “the latest stupid move made by a president” and an Obama NSB appointee woefully wondering, “Who will help with what is the future of science in this nation?”
Over the past several years, the woke mindset fueled agency growth that reached far beyond the bounds of science. More DEI mandates meant more administrative jobs, more workshops, more “equity” offices, and a larger grant-making apparatus that funneled money back into the same academic-political network. Trump’s dismissal of the entire board breaks that cycle in one decisive stroke by creating consequences for the same people who wore science as a skin suit to spread woke ideology.
The NSB is not a “job,” since its members are volunteers. They are appointed and receive no salary, except incidental travel expenses, because the positions are largely compensated by automatic grants and the opportunity to distribute large amounts of money to their allies and institutions. Roughly half its members are not practicing scientists at all; they are university administrators, grant officers, or career bureaucrats whose expertise lies in navigating federal compliance regimes rather than conducting original research. Expanding DEI initiatives has been high on their to-do list for decades.
Targeting the NSB is the perfect lever to defund woke science. The NSB doesn’t just advise; it approves NSF’s high-level priorities and large-scale initiatives, and it has spent decades and vast amounts of money approving DEI programs that turned “scientific merit” into a secondary consideration, as I’ve previously written. A clean slate lets new presidential appointees — chosen for scientific excellence rather than bureaucratic longevity — cycle in and reimpose merit-based standards. Without the old guard protecting pet projects, the career bureaucrats lose cover to keep funding low-merit, high-ideology work. NSF grants are allocated by scientists on temporary leave from their universities, a system that clearly generates corrupt incentives.
The move doesn’t dictate specific research outcomes; it restores the agency’s statutory charter to fund the best ideas on scientific merit alone. Decades of gradual mission creep are reversed in a single action — exactly the kind of high-leverage reform that’s needed.
Since the NSF plays an incredibly important role in young scientists’ careers, universities openly attempt to game its grant-funding system. Previously, concerns about obtaining NSF diversity grants were used as justification for absurd and blatantly illegal acts of racial discrimination. Harvard, for example, explicitly adopted racial quotas in hiring to increase the proportion of women and minorities in certain occupations to more than 90 percent in order to win NSF grants. This is both highly illegal and effectively affirmative for progressive opinions, fundamentally biasing the canon of scientific knowledge. As a direct result of these efforts, major scientific journals such as Nature and Scientific American now openly declare that research must align with progressive ideologies to be published. Scientific accuracy alone is, quite literally, not sufficient.
And the portion of the NSF that has been corrupted by this is vast. A 2024 investigative report by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation found that since 2021, between 10 and 25 percent of NSF grants were directly tied to left-wing shibboleths related to social justice, gender, race, or “environmental justice.” The cost of these initiatives totaled $2.05 billion across 3,483 grants. That’s big money, even by federal government standards.
Proposals now routinely require researchers to embed DEI metrics, anti-racism frameworks, or demographic quotas, even in hard-science fields where such criteria have no bearing on validity or discovery. The result: lower-quality science, duplicated effort on politically favored topics, and outright waste. This is despite the fact that U.S. law directly specifies that grants, awards, and fellowships should be awarded “solely on the basis of ability.”
The NSF is estimated to have spent $487.7 million explicitly on DEI grants to various nonprofits and universities, with another $1.97 billion in DEI-aligned grants, according to a search of tax records since 2013. One of these grants included over $1 million to teach children “the meaning of ‘genocide’ and ‘apartheid’” after Hamas’s attack against Israel.
As I previously wrote, the NSF spent $270 million on the NSF Advance program to introduce the intersectional framework of critical race theory into STEM by willfully biasing the canon of scientific knowledge via “the implementation of evidence-based systemic change strategies that promote equity for STEM faculty in academic workplaces and the academic profession.” The science agency openly states that “the NSF ADVANCE program provides grants to enhance the systemic factors that support equity and inclusion and to mitigate the systemic factors that create inequities in the academic profession and workplaces.”
Critics from the left will call this “politicization,” but that charge rings hollow, as clearly the real politicization happened years ago when the NSF began requiring researchers to affirm DEI dogmas or risk grant denial.
Firing the entire National Science Board removes the administrators who institutionalized that decline. It’s a textbook example of restraining bureaucracy: Identify the small, unaccountable body that captured the agency’s priorities, replace it wholesale, and let merit-based science return.
The NSF was founded in 1950 to ensure that “scientific merit was the main criterion.” For decades, it delivered breakthroughs in physics, computing, biology, and materials science with minimal political interference. It’s time to return to that, and President Trump saying “you’re fired” to the NSB is a good first step.