Dan Rather, the esteemed journalist, wrote on his blog Steady about the dreadful consequences of Trump’s defunding of science, medicine, and public health.
But on Friday night, when we weren’t looking for a controversial announcement, Trump fired every single member of the 24-person National Science Board. Why? The simplest answer is that the members of the board were not his sycophants. They allegiance is to science, not to the person of Donald J. Trump. He couldn’t control them. They had to go.
Dan Rather wrote:
We toss around terms like “American exceptionalism” far too easily. But there is little debate that, in areas of science and medicine, this country has long been the world leader. We have more top scientists, elite doctors, and preeminent researchers than anywhere else. Their work has meant people live longer, healthier lives.
It is also a cornerstone of American influence around the world.
Scientific and medical research requires significant funding. It has thrived because our elected officials have had the political will to provide a financial pipeline to the public and private sectors.
President Donald Trump is severing that lifeline.
As the mainstream media was renting tuxedos and getting manicures ahead of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Trump was busy pounding nails into the coffin of the American scientific research community.
Tucked away on Friday evening, in a terse, two-line email, the White House personnel office fired the entire National Science Board. “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I’m writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately,” the email read.
No reason was given in the email, and the White House has had no additional comment on the firings.
The independent, 24-person board is made up of top scientists and engineers who serve staggered, six-year terms, to ensure overlap between presidential administrations. They are chosen “solely on the basis of established records of distinguished service.”
The board advises the National Science Foundation (NSF), which supports a wide range of research, from Antarctic exploration to quantum computing. NSF-funded research helped develop the MRI machine, LASIK eye surgery, and Wi-Fi, among many other innovations. It distributes $9 billion in research grants annually.
“[I]t is not enough simply to keep abreast of the rest of the world in scientific matters. We must maintain our leadership,” President Harry Truman said in 1950, when he established the board.
Keivan Stassun, a physicist and astronomer at Vanderbilt University who was appointed to the board in 2022, called the Trump purge “a wholesale evisceration of American leadership in science and technology globally,” to the Los Angeles Times.
Although the president is often reluctant to explain why he does imprudent and detrimental things, if one looks hard enough, a reason can usually be found. In this case, there may be two.
Reason one: to save face. The board was set to meet in early May to work on the release of a new report. The report outlines how the U.S., once the world leader in scientific research, is losing ground to China. If there is no board, the report can’t be released.
Reason two: money. In its 2026 budget, the Trump administration recommended a 55% cut to the NSF. After lobbying by the National Science Board, Congress rejected the White House’s proposal and funded the NSF at 2025 levels.
To avoid the same fate for this year’s budget, which again recommends slashing the foundation’s funding, Trump did away with the board before its members could convince members of Congress.
Friday’s firings are just the latest in Trump’s long list of objectionable actions to cast doubt on scientific findings and thwart research.
The United States has been on the cutting edge of scientific and medical research since the end of World War II. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has been the world leader in funding biomedical research. A 2020 study found that NIH-funded research was associated with every new drug approved between 2010 and 2019.
But all of that is now changing. And Trump is to blame.
Science is “explicitly designed to counter human self-deception,” psychologist Steven Pinker told Chris Mooney in his book “The Republican War on Science.”
When deception is your modus operandi, you will naturally try to squash, discount, and demonize the truth. Being anti-science helps protect established special interests. Think climate change denialism and fossil fuel companies.
Trump called the climate crisis “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” at last year’s United Nations General Assembly. He said this even as the globe is in the midst of the warmest 10-year span on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The NSF’s board is not the first the Trump administration has hamstrung. In June of last year Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, fired the 17-person vaccine advisory board and replaced many with vaccine skeptics. Trump himself replaced leading scientists with tech billionaires on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
The administration significantly cut funding to the National Cancer Institute, once the gold standard for rigorous, evidence-based research. It no longer funds mRNA research, a revolutionary technology that has the potential to radically improve cancer care.
It canceled 22 separate mRNA contracts, including one working on a vaccine for brain cancer in children. Kennedy is an mRNA skeptic, claiming the vaccines aren’t safe while providing no evidence.
Pancreatic cancer is an incurable disease with a dismal survival rate. Fortunately for pancreatic cancer patients, research into an mRNA vaccine was far enough along that the cuts didn’t affect the very promising treatment.
BioNTech, a German biomedical research company, partnered with Moderna, an American company, to develop pancreatic cancer vaccines using mRNA technology.
The technology, already in development when the pandemic hit, was used to create the Covid vaccine. The Lancet estimated that mRNA vaccines prevented 14.4 to 19.8 million deaths just in the first year of use.
MRNA vaccine technology was in the pipeline thanks to billions of dollars in federal grants over decades. This allowed researchers to get Covid vaccines to market incredibly quickly. This technology is now helping people with pancreatic cancer live years longer than ever before.
Moderna is also using mRNA therapy in combination with other drugs to cut melanoma death rates by 49%. Applications for a variety of cancers are in the works.
Paul Darren Bieniasz, a British-American virologist, wrote in The Guardian, “If we continue the destructive course plotted by this administration, medicines that would otherwise have saved lives in future generations, will not be invented. Technologies that would have ensured future employment and prosperity in the U.S. will not be devised. Solutions that allow the generation of power while causing less damage to the environment, will never be developed. Clearly, if we decline to nurture science, the lives of future Americans will be shorter, sicker and poorer.”
While Donald Trump won’t be around to see that, millions of Americans will. Trump doesn’t like inconvenient truths. Science is a kaleidoscope of inconvenient truths. Rather than deal with them like the world leader he should be, he gaslights, he rages, he denies all.
And as with so much else in this administration, we the people pay the price.
