NSF eliminates external advisory committees

The US National Science Foundation announced last week that it has disbanded all 12 of its nonstatutory advisory committees, which had helped the agency determine what funding efforts to prioritize and how to best evaluate research proposals. Five committees required in statute are unaffected by this decision and will continue to meet.

An NSF spokesperson, Michelle M. Negrón, told C&EN over email that the agency dissolved these committees in response to a Feb. 19 executive order aiming to reduce the size of the federal government.

But Neal Lane, a senior fellow in science and technology policy at the Baker Institute and a former director of the agency, says that getting rid of the NSF advisory committees makes no sense, much like the “many other actions being taken by the administration that hurt US science.” According to Lane, the committees cost very little to maintain yet add considerable value to the agency.

Karen Goldberg, an inorganic chemist at the University of Pennsylvania who was a member of the now dissolved advisory committee for mathematical and physical sciences (MPS), says committee members acted as a conduit between the agency and the scientific community. Having this open line of communication with scientists allowed the NSF to better determine which areas of research it should focus on and what new funding programs might be worth creating in the future, she says.

The advisory committees also assessed how the NSF solicits, reviews, and recommends grant proposals to ensure the selection process was done in a fair manner and was consistent with the agency’s priorities, Goldberg adds.

“Without this advice, the agency will find it much more challenging . . . to be appropriately strategic in managing the valuable resources provided to it by taxpayers,” William B. Tolman, dean of the College of Arts and sciences at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota, and another member of the MPS committee, tells C&EN in an email. “In the end, all of the scientific enterprise will suffer.”

The NSF declined to answer C&EN’s questions about how eliminating the advisory committees will affect agency decisions moving forward, though the agency did add that it is “committed to maintaining transparency through this process.”

The NSF is the latest federal science agency to eliminate its nonstatutory advisory committees. FYI: Science Policy News reported that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the US Geological Survey did so back in March, citing the same Feb. 19 executive order. NASA, meanwhile, opted to consolidate a number of its committees rather than get rid of them entirely.