Firing Science Advisors Will Leave the U.S. Senseless

Firing Science Advisors Will Leave the U.S. Senseless

In the Trump administration’s ongoing race to make the U.S. poorer, sicker, and dumber, one more stomp on the accelerator comes from cuts aimed against its federal advisory committees. Whether infectious diseases or space exploration, these panels of experts are the unpaid brains behind the brawn of the U.S. government.

With its signature disdain for anything smacking of smarts or competence, the Trump administration aims to destroy or neutralize them. In a February 19 executive order, Donald Trump directed his staff to compile a list of “Federal Advisory Committees that should be terminated on grounds that they are unnecessary.” The order directly terminated the HHS Advisory Committee on Long COVID (a syndrome afflicting 23 million people in the U.S. right now) and the Health Equity Advisory Committee, which sought to help underserved people access care like blood pressure medication or postpartum treatment, through Medicare and Medicaid. Since then, NOAA has closed several of its advisory panels, NSF closed a dozen, NASA has consolidated its wildly disparate astrophysics, biological and physical sciences, Earth science, heliophysics, and planetary sciences panels into one body, and the U.S. Geological Survey closed its new scientific integrity body, alongside five others at the Department of Interior that included a climate adaptation panel. “This means that you, the public, will be more at-risk of being harmed because the scientific integrity and misconduct issues that were prevalent before will continue to persist,” wrote integrity panel member Jacob Carter. He called the committee’s cancellation, “an indicator that this administration has no intention to uphold scientific evidence in its decisions.”

He’s right; contrary to the executive order, these committees matter. Cutting away advisory panels hurts everyone and leaves the U.S. government uninformed when making critical decisions that affect millions of lives, alongside a public left in the dark about what advice agencies do receive. These advisors, a “fifth arm of the government,” have long served as a thorn in the side of polluters and lobbyists, putting them under siege for decades, and doubtless in the gunsights of the giddily for-sale Trump administration. A 2021 Ecology Law Quarterly review found past end runs around advisory committees were linked to lead pollution, fracking contamination of drinking water, and worse air quality.

Federal advisory committees operate under a 1972 law, which governs the roughly 1,000 expert committees advising federal agencies on evidence-based practices on issues like boating safety or railroad retirement benefits at a yearly cost of $400 million. The panels are a bargain, providing by law “fairly balanced” expert advice that includes disclosures of financial conflicts of interest, and providing information openly to the public. The best-known examples from the pandemic were those FDA and CDC panels that voted on the safety and rollout of COVID vaccines to much attention.

History repeats when it comes to attacks on advisory panels. In 2019 Trump ordered a one-third cut in the number of them. The order took aim at science panels at NASA, the NSF, and the Energy Department, in particular. The first Trump administration’s sheer incompetence kept many of those kinds of closures at bay. His then EPA chief resorted to stuffing a clean air panel with industry stooges instead, and an antiabortion advocates panel lacking any scientific credibility was whipped up to eliminate fetal tissue research at NIH.

Now, however, the crush of executive orders and disregard for Congress seen in the first 100 days of the new regime make things look even more dire. The dangerous, unqualified HHS chief Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has forced out top FDA vaccine official Peter Marks, who oversaw the vaccine panel that held steadily to public health principles during the pandemic, refusing to bend to Trump’s demand for an “October Surprise” vaccine to save himself in the 2020 election. All Department of Homeland Security advisory committees members were fired in January, halting a probe into a massive Chinese breach of U.S. telecommunications infrastructure.

Perhaps the clearest sign of the scientific advice we can instead expect from the Trump administration comes from RFK, Jr., naming an unqualified antivaccine activist, one who in 2011 was disciplined for practicing medicine without a license, to head a phony study to make autism “preventable” by September. The cruelty of his dishonest sham, founded on disdain for the autistic community and aimed at parents of autistic children, defies decency. It seems squarely aimed at making kids sick by discouraging vaccination.

In the first Trump administration, his appointees also skirted the law requiring keeping advisory meetings open to the public. Such secrecy will be indubitably ubiquitous amid the new administration’s “completely insane” meetings held on Signal, and tariff decisions surrounded by suspected insider trading. In our unhinged current moment, it’s hard to recall that Trump campaign bankroller Elon Musk quit a Trump presidential advisory committee in 2017 over the withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. So much for the scruples that drove him then. Now he (wink-wink) doesn’t really run the run-amok DOGE staffers stealing data, jobs, and buildings in secrecy across the nation’s capital. In acting as an advisor but not an appointee, he is a one-man circumvention of openness.

One of the trials of the Trump era is that its malignancy comes packaged in a cloud of buffoonery: take your pick from Musk waving a chainsaw around on stage or an education secretary calling artificial intelligence “Ay-One” or any of Trump’s inane digressions that should have triggered the 25th Amendment in his first term.

But his administration’s steps, large and small, from attacking universities to immigrants to expert advisors, aimed at destroying competence and honesty as guiding principles for the U.S., will in the end yield only tears, not laughter. Wrecking the federal advisory committee system is just one more tread on a path to American ruin.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.