Defending Science From Partisanship

In “Who Should Decide How to Use Taxpayer Dollars to Fund Scientific Research?” (Issues, Summer 2026), M. Anthony Mills rightly questions the White House’s constitutional rationale for firing members of the National Science Board (NSB), which presides over the National Science Foundation. Mills and I agree that simply reinstating the board would be a mistake. But restoring Senate confirmation for board members, as he suggests, would entrench an unnecessary structure. Congress should instead permanently scrap the board.

As Mills recounts, Vannevar Bush wanted a board of scientists to appoint and oversee the NSF director, while Senator Harley Kilgore wanted a presidentially appointed director and advisory board. After much wrangling, Congress in 1950 let the president appoint the director and board, providing NSF with little insulation from the presidency.

That is why the board did not slow President Trump’s onslaught. This White House directed NSF to terminate grants, stall disbursements, and cancel statutorily established programs on ideological grounds. Announcing her resignation from NSB in May 2025, Alondra Nelson wrote that she listened to NSF staff say that the administration’s new Department of Government Efficiency “had by fiat the authority to give thumbs up or down to grant applications which had been systematically vetted by layers of subject matter experts.”

All this happened before Trump fired the board, showing how little it insulated NSF from political interference. When the president fired a National Labor Relations Board member, that agency was left without a quorum and therefore unable to act. There, the firing was the point. At NSF, the White House didn’t need to remove the board because it had little practical power. Senate confirmation for board members would change little because the administration’s attacks on science are indifferent to structure—and often to law.

It’s time to admit that NSB is unnecessary and that dropping it has few costs. Whatever accountability it could provide would go, but the remaining checks—congressional oversight, the courts, an inspector general (weakened but still around), whistleblowers, media criticism, and public protest—are where redress rests. This would put NSF on a par with other agencies.

Where NSB is structurally weak, the people it draws are strong. Any NSF director should welcome views from the nation’s leading scientists, engineers, and technologists. But the board structure tasks those experts primarily with organizational oversight rather than national science strategy. An NSF director who wants outside advice can just ask in formal channels or smaller meetings. NSB is also directed to advise the president and Congress. But the presidency has its own science and technology policy office and council of external advisers, and Congress has no dearth of experts willing to testify.

Trump’s firing of NSB members is a political attack on science dressed in constitutional clothing. Mills and I agree Congress should seize this moment, but we differ on what should come next. Restoring Senate confirmation might respond to the legal issues raised by the White House, but so would scrapping the board altogether. Defending NSF from partisan assaults is critical. Defending its bespoke structure is not.

M. Anthony Mills’s excellent essay is narrowly about the National Science Board, which oversees the National Science Foundation, but largely hinges on the question of the political accountability and future of NSF writ large. Science policy and the academy need this conversation, especially in light of the planned reauthorization of NSF next year (its authorization expires in fiscal year 2027 after being expanded in the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act).

In the formation of NSF, Vannevar Bush wanted to have abiding support for federal science but feared government overreach in light of the momentous actions of populist New Deal Democrats. Today’s populist Republican administration has rightly reacted to the overreach of a cultural and political project to shape the nation’s scientific and research institutions toward ideological priorities, including race-based hiring, a skewed science of “reproductive justice,” the denial of the biological sexual binary, and the silencing of conservative voices on campuses. But the answer to this overreach should not be doubling down on partisan control, merely from a different party, but on building safeguards against destructive control—whether by a government or university administration. Science must aim toward seeking the truth in its beauty and grandeur, safeguarded from being used to further the ends of a political agenda.

Additionally, Mills’s essay features an excellent closing argument for the role of Congress in leading the formation of a new and durable order for political accountability of science agencies. He does not examine, doubtless for matters of brevity, the long-term growth in the presidential power over the executive branch as well as the legislative branch.

This growth and the political theories behind it are, perhaps, the most relevant intellectual force in the development of the new Office of Management and Budget guidance and expanding political control over federal funding. Notably, funding for science, including research and development, is only a very small part of the areas impacted by the OMB’s new guidance, officially known as Part 200—Uniform Administrative Requirements, Cost Principles, and Audit Requirements for Federal Awards. The consolidation of power and control by the executive branch invites the reaction of Congress, and this is especially clear on science and science funding, which, despite criticism, enjoys a tremendous amount of bipartisan support.

A key factor in the durability of the bipartisan reform that Mills looks for will be the capacity of an expected Democratic majority to resist the temptation to accelerate partisan ressentiment or to ignore the true and convincing diagnoses of faults in the scientific enterprise in the interest of placating scientific institutions and universities. This new, bipartisan vision for federal science policy must look to build the future rather than merely reconstruct the past.

As M. Anthony Mills makes clear, the current crisis in science is both damaging to science and points to underlying problems with American science policy. Rather than trying to polish up the old systems, we need to rethink how to properly support science within our democracy. And this means grappling with the different kinds of science public funds support.

The United States has a robust pluralist system of science funding, as Mills notes. One can thus envision different funding systems for different agencies and purposes. With different systems come different decisionmaking structures, different kinds of political independence, and different forms of democratic accountability. We don’t have to solve this problem universally for all of US science. We can tailor solutions to different agencies with different structures and agendas.

The kind of political litmus tests proposed by the Office of Management and Budget this summer to guide federal grant awards is completely inapt for the curiosity-driven research of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. But also problematic is the peer review system and supposed meritocracy of their current funding decisions. Having peer review panels rank proposals feeds a runaway concentration of research funding at elitist institutions and fosters disciplinary groupthink. As Vannevar Bush feared, funding from NIH and NSF has indeed become a crucial subsidy for academia, with accompanying pressures to maintain the funding source—not good for science or for its relationship with the public.

To support curiosity-based research, we need a different system. Screened lotteries, without political litmus tests, are one way to use peer review to support a wider range of research agendas while keeping out obviously bad science. Geographic distributions of funding (e.g., allocated to states per capita) or baseline funding for any academic researcher who applies are also ways to flatten the hierarchies. These means of distribution can insulate funding from political manipulation and strengthen scientific independence.

For other kinds of research, we need other structures. Mission-directed research (e.g., at the Department of Defense or NASA) can be subject to congressional or presidential oversight. For such research, scientific attention is directed and managed, restricting academic freedom. Nevertheless, results should never be dictated—a pervasively important kind of independence in science. This approach could yield more democratically accountable research agendas, while still allowing the results of inquiry to surprise us.

And we need a distinct system for publicly engaged science done in collaboration with communities or groups. Scientists doing this kind of work need to allow the public to shape their research agenda, and they need the time to develop the necessary collaborations. The publics with which this work is done should be part of the evaluation of it. We don’t support this distinctive work well currently.

In sum, different kinds of science can be pursued with public funds; different modes of independence and accountability come with the different kinds. This underlying plurality, as I’ve explored in Issues previously, should inform our discussions of science policy.