The National Science Board (NSB) oversees the operations of the National Science Foundation, which was established in 1950 to fund basic science in universities. It consists of 24 members appointed to six-year terms. On April 24 2026, President Trump terminated the appointments of all 24 members.

Cue the gnashing of teeth and the rending of cloths. The ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Science and Technology had this to say:

This is the latest stupid move made by a president who continues to harm science and American innovation. The NSB is apolitical. It advises the president on the future of NSF. 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. 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? A real bozo the clown move..

Among the Trump administration’s egregious assaults on science was pressuring the NSB to move forward on plans to construct a $900 million ice breaker for Antarctic research, something which, as recently as two weeks ago, had Antarctic researchers filled with optimism that Trump was filling a long-standing gap in their research efforts. Trump’s dispute with the NSB was over who gets to decide how to proceed. The NSB was insisting that the construction of the icebreaker was discretionary spending. The Trump administration was insisting it was mandatory spending. One is left wondering who had been leaving Antarctic researchers in the lurch?

The NSB was established to build a firewall to protect the intellectual independence of the academic researchers it funded. Mostly, it has failed. The destructive intrusion of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) ideology into basic science has mostly been an NSB project. The NSB sets the framework for research grants, which includes setting so-called Merit Review criteria. Among these is a requirement that grant applications include a Broader Impacts statement. Under the supervision of the NSB, the Broader Impacts statement has become a de facto DEI loyalty oath. Furthermore, the NSB has taken deliberate action to strengthen the Broader Impacts loyalty oath, not weaken it.

The NSB has also overseen the supply side of science funding, establishing new NSF directorates and programs that shovel grant funds to support DEI ideology in universities. It does so by providing grants to “researchers” to support studies in “decolonizing” science, or frankly racist “whiteness” studies in science. In light of this, it is hard to work up sympathy for lamentations that the Trump administration is “politicizing science” or undercutting the “independence” of the NSB. The fact is that the NSF has always been a political body: the real complaint is that the politics have changed.

The recent dust-up over the NSB is yet another indication that radical reform of science is necessary. Our modern edifice of science may have begun with a good intention: to promote basic research and discovery in universities. It was based, however, on a fundamental fallacy: that basic science should be a public good, to be managed, directed, and overseen by public boards of overseers to yield tangible public benefits. This has had a corrosive effect on the essential culture of intellectual independence that basic science needs to thrive. Politicized science is baked into the public good model. If we don’t want politicized science, we need to turn science away from the public good model and the financial and political infrastructure it entails.

As we have outlined in our study, Rescuing Science, the real path to reform will dismantle the infrastructure that sustains the public good model of basic science. This includes closing the NSF and shuttering the extramural grant programs of several federal agencies that fund academic research. This is not anti-science; it is a prompt to return academic science to a prior model that was more coherently aligned with the culture of basic science. Dissolving the membership of the NSB just might be, to paraphrase Dick the Butcher, a good start on that.

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