President Donald Trump and his administration made historic cuts to America’s science workforce last year, cutting federal research agencies by tens of thousands of people and terminated thousands of research grants. But another round of cuts to the federal science sector has received less attention.
Within government, the administration has disbanded more than 100 independent advisory committees, comprised of university scientists and other outside experts who help guide national science priorities.
Reductions – motivated by Decree of February 2025 aimed at reducing federal bureaucracy – targeting the committees that agencies rely on to evaluate biomedical and environmental policies, providing advice on setting research priorities, and ensuring transparency in how the government makes science-based decisions.
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The scale of these committee layoffs is unprecedented, a Nature analysis results. For example, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the National Institutes of Health, disbanded 77 advisory councils—or more than a quarter of all its advisory committees—in 2025. In contrast, in fiscal year 2024, the agency disbanded only two committees.
A similar pattern of committee closures occurred at other agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE). At NASA, more than half of the advisory boards have been disbanded.
These groups, which are governed by the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), are generally composed of researchers and other experts from outside the government. Some of those that were closed in fiscal year 2025 advised on topics such as organ transplantation, HIV prevention, high-energy physics research and planetary science.
The stated goal of the February 2025 executive order was to “minimize government waste and abuse, reduce inflation, and promote American freedom and innovation.” And some scientists and agency staffers said there may be good reasons to streamline FACA’s committees by consolidating some or eliminating those that no longer serve a purpose. But many researchers say the scale of the administration’s efforts significantly reduces the quantity and quality of advice the government receives from the scientific and business community, as well as from organizations that represent people with conditions such as Alzheimer’s.
Researchers who spoke to Nature say that by eliminating so many scientific advisory committees and failing to replace the vast majority of them, the administration is cutting off federal agencies from independent outside expertise. At the same time, it limits the flow of information from the government to the scientific community and the public.
“That two-way street, I think, was invaluable,” says Juan Meza, an applied mathematician at the University of California, Merced, who previously served on two NSF and DOE panels that were disbanded. “We could act as ambassadors in both directions,” he says.
The layoffs aren’t the only changes to the advisory committees the administration established last year. Nature found that the U.S. government significantly reduced the number of open FACA meetings—by more than 50 percent for some agencies—in which the public could observe deliberations and provide input. Some agencies have significantly reduced the number of public reports they publish.
And in other cases – including the striking example of Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) which makes recommendations on vaccines – the federal government has radically changed the composition of the committees, removing people who disagree with its position and installing those who agree. Last week, the Trump administration abruptly fired all 22 board members which advises and supervises the NSF. To justify these dismissals, a White House spokesperson cited the 2021 Supreme Court case. UNITED STATES v. Arthrex, Inc.which he said “raised constitutional questions” about the composition of the board and the fact that its members are not confirmed by the Senate. The spokesperson said the White House wants to update the law so the board can “carry out its duties as Congress intended.”
Researchers say the removal of signs and other changes appear to contradict the Trump administration’s promise, outlined in a report. decree on “reference science” on May 23 of last year, to improve transparency in federally funded science and in science-related decisions made by federal agencies.
“The fewer advisory committees there are, it inherently decreases the transparency of the whole operation,” says Carrie Wolinetz, who previously administered several advisory committees as the former director of the NIH Office of Science Policy.
The White House has refuted these claims. Spokesman Kush Desai said that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government’s “glut of redundant, taxpayer-funded advisory committees has done little to meaningfully inform policymaking for the benefit of the American people.” “The Trump Administration is eliminating bureaucratic overload and taking a hands-on approach to ensuring policymaking is guided by gold standard science. »
Biomedicine behind closed doors
The 77 committee layoffs at HHS in 2025 represent a sharp departure from historical levels. Since 1997 – according to FACA’s public data set – annual layoffs have only exceeded ten once.
In 2025, the number of open HHS committee meetings also decreased, Nature find. In the ten years leading up to 2025, the average number of committee meetings open to the public was 255. But in 2025, there were only 91.
There are many more closed-door meetings at HHS each year because most FACA committees evaluate research grants, a process that remains confidential. But by 2025, the public-to-closed-door meeting ratio has fallen from an average of more than 9 percent over the previous ten years to 4 percent, representing a shift toward closed-door meetings even outside of the grant review process.
Among the disbanded groups was one tasked in 2023 with making recommendations on long COVID research and the treatment of millions of people with the disease in the United States. The committee was a unique bridge between patients, federal science agencies and policymakers, says Ian Simon, the former head of the HHS Office of Long COVID Research and Practice, which was eliminated amid government downsizing last year.
The committee was “designed to give patients a meaningful voice, equal to that of researchers and doctors,” Simon says, and its closure is a major blow to research. “It is very difficult to see how these actions will advance the work needed to understand long COVID and other chronic infectious diseases. »
Other panels eliminated by HHS include the Organ Transplantation Advisory Committee, which advised the agency on policies regarding organ donation, procurement, and equitable allocation, and the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, charged with reviewing current nutritional science to inform the federal government’s dietary recommendations. The federal government then released new dietary guidelines in January without the committee’s input, a move that sparked controversy among some nutrition experts who argued that some aspects of the revisions skirted scientific consensus.
The reduction in HHS advisory committees is more pronounced than the 2025 layoff numbers suggest: some FACA committees are also meeting less often than in typical years, or have not met at all since Trump took office.
For example, NIH leadership has historically relied on the Director’s Advisory Committee and the congressionally mandated Scientific Management Review Committee—which have not been formally disbanded—to handle major agency reorganizations or funding changes, Wolinetz says.
But NIH leadership convened none of these panels last year because the agency cut thousands of projects on disadvantaged topics and reduced the autonomy of each of its institutes by centralize peer review and other administrative functions.
Wolinetz says it makes sense to determine, on a semi-regular basis, whether each committee is still serving its purpose and justifying its cost to taxpayers; some signs may become obsolete “remnants,” she said.
But by dissolving so many committees and not consulting others, Wolinetz says the federal government is losing a crucial mechanism for ensuring its decision-making process is transparent and subject to scrutiny, including by the public. The advisory committees act as a “place for public engagement that federal agencies can’t do themselves” on issues facing the government, she said. The actions seem to contradict “radical transparency” at HHS it’s a stated policy goal of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., she said.
She also worries about cases in which the Trump administration has not disbanded the committees — but rather radically changed them.
For example, last June, Kennedy abruptly fired all 17 members of ACIP, the main vaccine advisory committee to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Claiming that the committee was rife with conflicts of interest and served as a “rubber stamp” for the pharmaceutical industry, Kennedy reconstituted the committee with appointees who he believed would bring outside scrutiny. However, scientists and medical organizations say some of the new members have a history of promoting vaccine skepticisma position long held by Kennedy.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) sued HHS over its changes to the ACIP. In March, a federal judge temporarily suspended the installation of Kennedy’s ACIP selections, ruling that the selections likely violated federal law requiring these panels to be fairly balanced in terms of expertise and points of view. HHS then You revised the ACIP charter to broaden its scope and focus on vaccine risks.
Kennedy also overhauled the HHS Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, firing its existing members and appointing a slate of new ones. The new list has drawn criticism from some autism researchers who say it includes people who align with Kennedy’s disproven claims that autism is a preventable disease. linked to vaccines And environmental toxins.
These reconstituted committees were not “formulated in the traditional, highly controlled manner” described in each panel’s charter, Wolinetz says. Instead, they appear to be “constituted to support particular predetermined viewpoints” and are “used to certify policy actions that the administration wishes to take,” she adds.
Emily Hilliard, an HHS spokesperson, said Nature that the agency’s actions were consistent with a White House order to end unnecessary advisory committees, adding that “these previous committees have allowed the United States to remain the sickest developed country despite spending $4.5 trillion annually on health care, leading to unsustainable debt and worsening health outcomes.” HHS will continue to convene committees as necessary, she added.
HHS did not respond to requests for comment on other issues, such as criticism of how the agency changed the makeup of the vaccine and autism panels.
Loss at NSF
The NSF, which is the largest U.S. funder of basic research in all areas of science and engineering, also sharply curtailed its advisory portfolio last year by disbanding 14 of its 52 advisory committees. These had provided the agency with advice in areas such as engineering, cybersecurity and geosciences. (All but one committee that reviews grant applications for the NSF remains active.)
Meza served on one of these disbanded bodies, the Advisory Committee for Mathematics and Physical Sciences, and was also responsible for the NSF program from 2018 until his departure in 2022. He says such committees can provide valuable information to agencies; for example, the committee he served on informed the NSF that the research community was concerned about the lack of support for mid-sized laboratories. Heeding this advice, NSF created the Medium-Scale Research Infrastructure Opportunity in 2016 to support what it called “a ‘sweet spot’ for science and engineering that has been difficult to fund through traditional NSF programs.”
The NSF declined to comment on criticism of changes to its advisory committees.
Consolidation at DOE
Last August, DOE terminated six FACA panels that provided advice in areas including high-energy physics, scientific computing, and biological and environmental research. The DOE has since consolidated these discipline-specific panels into a single overarching body called the Office of Science Advisory Committee (SCAC).
Meza, who served on the defunded Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee, worries about the loss of specific expertise. “How good is the advice coming from a committee of people who probably have only superficial knowledge of certain areas? » he asks.
Persis Drell, president of the SCAC and a physicist at Stanford University in California, acknowledges the concerns raised by the researchers. “In a time of turbulent change, I completely understand all of the community’s concerns,” she says. Drell adds that she hopes to reassure the scientific community that SCAC is listening and is serious about helping science at DOE. “I have two goals: One is to ensure that we have a strong basic science foundation and the other is that we are able to move forward on the strategic pillars put forward by the administration,” she says.
The SCAC held its first meeting in late March, during which it was tasked with studying resource prioritization for artificial intelligence and quantum science, as well as for DOE facilities.
In addition to eliminating FACA advisory committees, the DOE attempted to create at least one secret advisory body that a judge ruled violated federal law.
In April 2025, DOE Secretary Chris Wright selected five external researchers who challenged the scientific consensus on climate change to review the science on this topic. Wright created this body outside of the FACA process, the DOE did not announce the group’s formation, and the deliberations were not public. He produced a report that challenges the overwhelming scientific consensus and the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2009 findings that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare.
After the report’s release, mainstream climate scientists sharply criticized its findings. Two U.S. nonprofit advocacy groups, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists, sued the agency, alleging that DOE flouted FACA rules by creating the advisory committee outside of FACA. As part of the legal proceedings, the agency released emails showing that DOE’s internal reviewers found problems with the report before it was made public, calling its findings “misleading” and “factually incorrect.” In January, a court ruled in favor of the organizations suing the DOE.
FACA is “designed to prevent exactly what the administration has done here,” by requiring that scientific advice come from a transparent process, says Phil Duffy, an atmospheric physicist who worked in the Office of Science and Technology Policy under former U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration. As a counterexample, Duffy cites the process behind national climate assessments, which included authors representing all 50 U.S. states, multiple rounds of public comment, and multiple reviews by experts at federal agencies. This type of process, he says, provides “much more credibility” than the DOE climate report.
The DOE did not respond to Naturerequest for comment.
NASA abandons its committees
In percentage terms, changes at NASA dwarf those at other agencies. NASA lost 6 of its 11 FACA committees. And the agency held only 10 such committee meetings in 2025, compared with the annual average of 35 over the previous ten years.
Five of the committees that were disbanded provided advice to NASA’s Science Mission Directorate divisions. The committees previously met several times a year; the researchers said Nature that such meetings provided an important venue for scientists in the broader community to hear updates from NASA officials, and for committee members to take community feedback and refine it into advice for agency leaders.
For example, before its dissolution, the Planetary Science Committee recommended that NASA better pair its plans to send humans to Mars with robotic missions to bring back samples of Martian rocks, to align more closely with federal priorities to maintain global leadership in space. And amid heated battles over how to distribute limited funds for operational space telescopes, the Astrophysics Committee told NASA it should not preemptively cut the budget for missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope without broader consultation on alternatives.
Such information, communicated by experts serving on official committees at public meetings, is crucial for NASA to consider when making key decisions, says Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who chaired the disbanded astrophysics group.
She says she and others have served on these committees as volunteers. “I don’t see them as bureaucracy at all,” she says. “We do it because we love astrophysics and NASA, and we care very deeply about the science that NASA is able to do.”
In late March, NASA also began eliminating an advisory group one level above the five disciplinary committees, namely the NASA Advisory Council Science Committee. Several members of this group received letters from NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman saying that “the structure of NASA’s Federal Advisory Committees is being adjusted and your role will end at that time.”
Without such committees, there is a reduction in the amount of crucial scientific advice reaching the agency, Holley-Bockelmann and others say. “Why would you want less information?” asks Benjamin Greenhagen, a planetary scientist who chairs a non-FACA advisory group focused on the Moon, which still exists but whose funding from NASA has ended.
NASA officials dispute criticism that there has been a reduction in guidance to the agency. “I don’t think the opportunity to talk to the community and get advice has really been abandoned,” says Nicola Fox, NASA’s associate administrator for science at the agency’s headquarters in Washington, DC. “We get input from the community in different ways. » She cites advisory committees organized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, which produce “decadal surveys” of community priorities that help inform NASA’s decisions about which missions to pursue.
With the committees closing and the number of open meetings reducing, researchers from various disciplines have taken it upon themselves to form independent advisory committees to replace some of those that were disbanded and those whose members were replaced entirely by the Trump administration.
In the biomedical field, for example, groups of independent scientists are creating their own unofficial committees to compete with committees on vaccines and autism, which they say do not represent the weight of evidence in those areas — an accusation that was part of the AAP’s successful lawsuit against the ACIP.
Another example is the Census Scientific Advisory Committee (CSAC), which provided scientific advice on how to conduct the U.S. decennial census and other population surveys. After the Department of Commerce terminated this committee in March 2025, CSAC members established an independent version that resulted in consensus recommendations that they made public. The alternative group says its goal is to “ensure that the U.S. Census Bureau continues to benefit from the highest levels of scientific expertise, independent review, and constructive feedback.”
“I hope that in the future, in this administration or another, there will be a structure that allows these agencies to get external advice,” says Barbara Entwisle, former CSAC president and sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “That’s just how you get the best ideas.”
Data analysis by Richard Monastersky.
This article is reproduced with permission and has been published for the first time April 28, 2026.
