Trump fires all 22 members of the National Science Board overseeing the NSF

On Friday, April 24, 2026, the Trump White House emailed all 22 seated members of the National Science Board (NSB) to inform them that their positions were "terminated, effective immediately." The termination notices were sent by the Presidential Personnel Office and signed by Mary Sprowls. The NSB is not an at-will advisory panel: Congress created it in 1950 and gave it statutory authority over National Science Foundation policy, the submission of the agency's budget, and the approval of its programs and awards, structuring its membership as staggered six-year presidential appointments. Removing the entire board in a single morning, by emailed fiat and without congressional action or replacement appointments in hand, left the NSF's roughly $9 billion in research funding without the governing body Congress designed to oversee it.

The White House justified the dismissals by citing the 2021 Supreme Court decision in U.S. v. Arthrex, saying it "raised constitutional questions about whether non-Senate confirmed appointees can exercise the authorities that Congress gave the National Science Board." Legal scholars contacted by NPR called that rationale a "puzzling disconnect," noting that firing every member does not resolve the constitutional question Arthrex raises. Board members and others cited in the press believe the terminations were retaliation for the NSB's May 2025 public criticism of the administration's proposed deep cut to the NSF budget — a preliminary 2026 request that sought to cut roughly $4.7 billion, more than half of the agency's funding.

The mass firing fits a broader pattern of executive action against the NSF and federal science oversight more generally, including rescinded grants and advisory-board dismissals across agencies such as the EPA, CDC, and FDA over the preceding 18 months. The central act recorded here is the disabling of the National Science Board itself: an executive nullification of a congressionally-created oversight function carried out entirely outside the legislative process. House Democrats on the Committee on Science, Space and Technology condemned the terminations, and the move drew sustained criticism from the research community as an attack on the independence of federal science funding.