Trump fires every member of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s governing body

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By Jeffrey Mervis, Science. 

Excerpt: Dismissal of the National Science Board is widely seen as latest move to erase NSF’s independence. ...Keivan Stassun, one of the dismissed board members, says the mass firing is the latest indication the White House is ignoring the board’s authority and dictating policies at NSF, which has been without a permanent director since Sethuraman Panchanathan resigned exactly 1 year ago. Stassun, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University who was appointed to the board in 2022, thinks the board’s public criticism in May 2025 of Trump’s proposed 55% cut to NSF’s current budget—which Congress ultimately ignored—antagonized the administration. “Maybe one way to say it from the administration's perspective,” Stassun says, “is that this group of presidential appointees was advising the Congress to not follow the president's wishes.”... 

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