President Trump sent an email on April 24 informing all members of the National Science Board (NSB) that they had been “terminated effective immediately.” Among those terminated was Dr. Julia Phillips, who served on the NSB and now speaks as a private citizen.
According to the NSB’s “Science and Engineering Indicators” report, over half of the engineering and computer science PhDs awarded in the U.S. are earned by people born outside the country. About 70% of those graduates stay in the U.S. after earning their PhDs. “We’re gradually making it more and more difficult for those people to come and study here, and they tend to stay,” said Phillips.
Phillips added that K-12 education is part of the problem. Because STEM courses build on each other sequentially, poor education in earlier grades can easily close off a field for a student. “STEM is so hierarchical. You can’t do calculus unless you’ve had the other things that go before it. If you have a few fairly weak years of instruction, you’ve lost that population,” said Phillips.
“One of the challenges with K-12 education is that the responsibility for that rests with the states. And so the states vary a lot,” said Phillips. Students in higher-income areas often get outside help in weak areas, while students whose parents work long hours or lack formal education cannot receive the same level of help.
“It’s not that we’ve stood still. We have continued to increase our investment in R&D at a few percent a year, and China has been doing two or three times that. Over time, that changes the picture completely,” said Phillips.
The White House later pointed to the 2021 Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Arthrex, Inc. Phillips said the ruling applies to the board’s spending decisions, but not to its other role of advising the administration. “That second one has nothing to do with Arthrex, as I understand it,” said Phillips.
Trump has dismissed other boards in the past, but those were created by their departments and could be shut down administratively. The NSB was created by the National Science Foundation Act of 1950. “It takes an act of Congress to abolish the board,” said Phillips.
The NSB has many roles: It acts as the board of directors for the National Science Foundation (NSF), by approving major expenditures, directing policy, and advising the President and Congress on science and engineering issues. The NSF is the only federal agency that funds broad scientific research across every field except medicine. Overall, around 25% of federally supported basic research comes from the NSF, with some fields receiving more funding than others. The law still requires the existence of the NSB, but as of now, no replacement members have been named.
