Trump fires NSF's oversight board
science.org
science.org
It's hard to imaging a more wasteful and destructive set of actions over the past year, except just shutting it all down. Money was still spent, less than usual, but in a way that ensured it was squandered, and that seeds that were planted could not grow.
However, it was apparently reauthorized on April 14, as my NIH newsletter this week linked to this April 21 announcement that SBIRs and STTRs are back!
https://grants.nih.gov/news-events/nih-extramural-nexus-news...
Who is going to stop a lawless Trump administration? Eventually the courts, at least at the lower levers. The Supreme Court is hyper political and continue making politically-driven rewriting of law, at least as much as the public lets them. Congress has completely abdicated their constitutionally mandated roles, such as being in charge of taxation and tariffs. The government has been completely taken over by a single party, and that party is burning the Constitution and its principles.
As for another example of gross mismanagment, of many many many more I could go on about, the National Cancer Institute's review board was completely disbanded, and put under the National Science Foundation where reviewers have less cancer experience, for example. To a pointy-haired-boss, that might sound like a cost savings measure but it's still the same cost, you just have less experienced people doing reviews.
All this is happening and getting reported on, but it doesn't get attention because every day is pure chaos filled with outrageous violations of what used to be normal activity in the government. And its all covered up by the most popular mainstream news sources, and there's a large body of the US population that has been completely brainwashed and literally refuses to accept any criticism of the Trump administration, outright rejected facts because it hurts their feelings.
I would say no. That doesn't mean it's not happening, just that the law was ignored.
This is not a gray area unless you're intentionally pretending to be an idiot to steal power.
Congress is the only branch allowed to declare war. Taking targeted military actions against another country repeatedly on their own soil with no provocation is not a "special military action" it's a fucking war.
It's not funny or coy or clever to pretend otherwise. The intent is abundantly clear and it is abundantly clear it is being violated.
The current setup has gone from "only Congress can declare war, requiring a majority of Congress" to "Congress has to pass a War Powers resolution to stop the president from going to war, with enough of a majority that they can override a presidential veto". That is a massively different standard, and was done without amending the Constitution.
So I agree with you. Just don't try to make this something special to Trump, because it's not.
Anyway, I agree with you fully. And I firmly believe the world would be a better place had we actually weighed each of those conflicts and voted to officially declare war or not. Those presidents knew what they were doing and should be tried for it.
Just like Trump should be today.
He's not special, but I'm not sure I can bring LBJ or Nixon back from the dead and stop the Vietnam War. Meanwhile this is an active conflict that can be stopped now.
Though I would argue that, yes, this time is different. At least those pretended to have a justification.
Even if this were how the system was designed, it is time to acknowledge that it is fundamentally broken and needs change. It is mind boggling that the response to these issues amounts to WONTFIX.
What happens if you refuse to be let go by someone that doesn't have authority?
"Why would anyone follow the mad, old king?"
And the answer is around the same:
"Because he will hurt you."
By who? and on what grounds?
The only people that have authority to fire are the people that are heads of that institution.
The president has no connection to this institution. He does not have any power in this context. His power stops at the federal level and even then his power is limited. Nobody has to abide by his orders. Yet, there are plenty of people doing so. Im not understanding why.
If he doesn't have authority to do what he is doing, nobody has to follow any of his actions. In fact I think there is an obligation not to follow the orders of a criminal.
The president does not have the power to declare war. We are at war with Iran.
The president does not have the power to unilaterally dissolve agencies or reproportion or refuse their funds or budgeting. Yet the department of education is being shuttered and numerous agencies are in ongoing lawsuits for DOGE.
It is illegal for the president to use the office for advertisement or personal gain. Yet he openly allows bribes to advertise products from the white House, creates cryptocurrencies, gives high-level positions to family.
The president is not allowed to direct an angry crowd to the capital with the express intent to stop the wheels of democracy and prevent the peaceful transfer of power. And yet.
The DOJ announced they will not prosecute the predators from Epstein's list after explicitly violating a law from Congress repeatedly for months on disclosing related files.
Congress is too afraid of his power to hurt their reelection. 33% of SCOTUS are his picks, with another 33% being aligned with the party, creating a supermajority. We've seen the majority of military leadership replaced this year. We've seen a plurality of agencies institute loyalty tests, most importantly the FBI. ICE has been repurposed to a private military / secret police.
You seem to believe there is some divine mandate that enforces the constitution. That the president must follow the rules.
There is not. He is not. He got away with it and continues to get away with it. We no longer live in a polite, rule-based society.
Because, fundamentally, might makes right. And the president of the United States has consolidated enough power that there is basically nothing to stop them but how far their cronies are willing to go.
So why can he do this? Because he can. And there's nothing you can do about it. And if you fight back there will be repercussions.
LOL. We'll see. You sound like you want this to happen and you dont care about the outcome. Good luck with that.
My alignment is to the common good. Im happy to work against a criminal that has no basis for these actions. We'll catch up, sooner rather than later.
You asked a question and I told you the actual answer.
If you're presented with the option to resist and force their hand so you can try to challenge it legally, please do, I respect that idea. But not everyone is willing to make personal sacrifices like that. Of course, everyone should still make sure to vote.
But at the end of the day, we only have representation because of the implied threat of violence if we didn't. And it very much seems like that threat being implied is not effective in this administration.
I dont see this as us forcing their hand.
I see this as them forcing our hand. We have all the power and they have none.
The longer we wait to get involved to make the world a better place, the worse it will get, for you and the people you love.
There really isn't a choice any more.
It’s not that hard.
To prevent it, someone in IT would have to actively prevent bosses from having those kind of admin privileges which in itself would be illegal.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/19/doge-institute-peac...
Or Musk "deputizing" his private security guards to be federal agents for his purposes:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
A new department head gets installed, DOGE selects people to fire, has complete access to IT etc.
What's not to understand? The government was completely in the control of Trump and DOGE. What type of "authority" do you think did not exist? This is the standard authoritarian playbook that's played out many times over the world over the past century, it's not hard to understand.
Edit: thanks for the links. You can tell they are operating without authority. I had been totally unaware of this
In the modern age there's no one set of things that people have seen, no common base of knowledge, and the process in this comment thread was super informative in the sense that if I had provided some links to start, a lot of confusion could have been avoided.
This is why they say lies go round the world before the truth gets its shoes on.
In the current environment - I would contact the TPOC - it could just be stuck in limbo.
“Maybe one way to say it from the administration's perspective,” Stassun says, “is that this group of presidential appointees was advising the Congress to not follow the president's wishes."
they're almost certainly going to replace all the board memebers with political loyalists. the board members served six year terms specifically so they'd span multiple administrations and stay independent.
firing them all at once lets you stack the entire board with people. it's not about making science better, it's about removing the people who'd say no.
If the pathology was entirely within his own privately-owned company that'd be one thing, but Americans are going to continue to get hurt because of it.
Federal research funding (NIH, NSF, etc) becomes economic power. I personally think the government should get a return on their research dollars but basically federally funded research has been given away to private companies since 1980 [1]. Interestingly, the Bayh-Dole Act was signed by president Jimmy Carter in a lame duck Congress after Ronald Reagan's election victory.
Federal research (via DARPA) is what gave the US so much control over the Internet. NIH funding into drugs gives US pharma companies a lot of power. mRNA technology was the product of decades of government-funded research. The US can (and does) wield that power to extract concessions from other countries.
In a little over a year American power on the world stage has been eroded, even destroyed, to a scale that I never would've predicted or thought could happen so quickly.
This is what I find so crazy: these moves are beyond performative politics. It's actually destructive to American power and corporate profits. Culture wars are meant to distract people while the government transfers money from government coffers to the wealthy. Culture wars aren't meant to be the goal. We're in a new era here.
And of course it's going to be China who fills the research void.
Well done, everybody, the system works.
The presumes that "Trump Administration" and "United States of America" are the same thing. The reality is that a Venn diagram of them would be two circles that barely touch. Is it really an "own goal" if you gravely injure your victim while you rob them?
Until the Trump Administration is replaced, the "Trump Administration" _is_ The United States of America.
It's certainly not what an increasing amount of the population want to be true, but facts can be sticky like that.
It's not just American right wingers turning off the world. The world sees how unexceptionally gen pop reacts in the US as our local politics destabilize everyone
America is a normal country now. All the WW2 heroes are dead and soldiers since were imperialist aggressors. We don't dare worship Vietnam vets or middle east vets as those conflicts were not so valorous. That we have to point back so far to feel good about our history says a lot about how long America has been falling apart.
For decades Academics been saying the decline of America started in the 1950s and has accelerated only as countries we bombed to hell to stay ahead normalized. I tend to agree.
America has really not been that great this whole time. But like every other nation, Americans been propagandized by each other to believe their American made bullshit don't stink.
In my career I have had endless obligations and expectations put on me by peers not out there protesting to cover my healthcare. IMO that's says it all about much Americans care about each other.
To billions of exploited sweatshop workers the average American is not much better than the billionaires.
Nor are the Europeans or East Asians.
> In my career I have had endless obligations and expectations put on me by peers not out there protesting to cover my healthcare. IMO that's says it all about much Americans care about each other.
What?
Then it's extremely important to prevent those sweatshop workers from immigrating to the US (legally or illegally), where they and their natural-born citizen descendants will vote against the interests of the average American.
What academics? Links please.
(Submitted title was "Trump fires all 24 members of the U.S. National Science Foundation", which was probably just an attempt to fit HN's 80 char limit that had collateral damage)
Thanks.
What could be the reason he’s doing it, how does he benefit from it, or thinks he benefits from it?
It A) gives business funding that would otherwise have to give up equity to VCS or sell to PE or whatever other forms of private, for-profit funding. And B) takes away money that could go to the military or ICE or other programs that could be used to concentrate Trumps power or aggrandizement.
> America has grandly benefitted hugely from their scientific community.
Has Trump and his friend benefited from this program? No? Then this doesn't matter.
the "benefit" from his perspective is the same playbook trump admin has been running across every federal agency, he wants to replace independent experts with loyalists, remove checks on executive power, and redirect spending toward admin priorities.
the board members served six year terms specifically to insulate science funding from political cycles. that's a feature to everyone else and a bug to this administration.
This is the American version of the cultural revolution. We’re pushing people to be plumbers instead of scientists.
Devil's advocate: Only productivity gains, not the entire economy, are built on scientific advancement. But wages haven't grown with productivity in half a century, so the loss of scientific advantage won't affect wage growth, therefore the economy will be fine.
(I know it's not convincing, but it's the best I can conjure.)
What?! Who's doing that? Plumbers and scientists are not interchangeable cogs. Big brain scientist won't make good plumbers and plumbers won't make good scientists.
And plus, so what if they would be doing it? Why do you make it sound like being a plumber is like being a leper somehow? The world needs plumbers too and they make a pretty penny. See that US warship that wasn't combat effective anymore because the shitters broke. You can't win a war with starbucks sipping scientists, you still need roughnecks willing to get their hands dirty, fight, build and fix things.
The copium offered is “go become a tradesman”. It’s just pandering nonsense offered to keep smug old people living in 1970 in line.
Yeah sure, because every american/westerner can become a 500k/year tech bro, no matter their IQ, and we don't need domestic skilled trained plumbers because democrats can replace them with a gorillion imported illegals.
2. Ausbildung
> Or that China manages its domestic variant of the NSF better
Prior to Trump probably yes. Post Trump almost certainly.
> and accepts people critical of the CCP ideology?
Obviously not. But why are you assuming that those removed from their posts were vocal critics of the CCP?
The article says 8 members are replaced every 2 years and the terms are 6 years long. Between 1/4 or 1/2 of them would have been replaced during this presidency, and whoever gets placed now will start to be replaced by the next administration.
As for China: They’re not known for having independent advisory committees overseeing government decisions. They’re definitely not known for inviting foreigners to come join their government to oversee their spending. So if you’re implying these people are at risk of going to China to serve the same role, that’s way off the mark.
So it's similar to working for the UN or IAEA where most jobs are fixed term.
They’re not. But I’m currently pessimistic about America’s ability to maintain technological leadership beyond the early 2030s and I’d like to see what the alternatives are. (I’ve been impressed by what India is doing, both in research and commercialization, as I have with Ukraine. I’ve been impressed by EU research.)
They have and do oversight, generally with scary commie sounding names but presumably the same day-to-day as the NSF.
But they also have a culture where lots of politicians have technical degrees, and they've gotten better results as far as government and science. You don't have the problem of "global warming isn't real for cultural reasons" in the first place.
Why would we think China is any different?
The US of 2026 has specific ideological pressure against scientists that is not nearly as bad as the cultural revolution but in the same direction.
It's not about which science would be good for Americans, or what would be the most effective directions to pursue, which way is best to minimize corruption while we invest in things that benefit everyone -- it's about the existence of particular scientific facts being politically incorrect therefore they must be suppressed, and additionally these scientists are effeminate elites and we hate them.
China does not have these attitudes in 2026. They have problems and are not perfect but they're probably better on "give scientists the ability to influence policy".
US ~537Gt
China ~312Gt
"A Senate bill was introduced in February 1947 to create the National Science Foundation (NSF) to replace the OSRD. This bill favored most of the features advocated by Bush, including the controversial administration by an autonomous scientific board. The bill passed the Senate and the House, but was pocket vetoed by Truman on August 6, on the grounds that the administrative officers were not properly responsible to either the president or Congress."
Also mentions the preceding organization OSRD (Office of Scientific Research & Development) and that they had tried to exempt it from conflict of interest regulations.
From what I've read it seems the administration is very anti-social sciences, and very pro nuclear, AI, quantum. Thought from what I can tell most of the funding already goes to the hard sciences [1]. There were cuts proposed over the last few months but they were shut down by congress [2]. I suppose by cutting off the head of the org it's an easier fight to cut funding FY2027?
[1]: https://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/all
[2]: https://www.aps.org/apsnews/2026/04/nsf-lags-trump-proposes-...
If you have not read Project 2025 in a while, I encourage you to revisit it[2]. In summary it's a point-by-point plan to take over the entire federal government in order to enforce a single political ideology and suppress dissent. You can track[3] it as it gets implemented.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_2025 [2] https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeade... [3] https://www.project2025.observer/en
Will a future administration have an opportunity to build something new and better from scratch which would not have been possible due to institutional resistance before it was all burnt down?
Destroying institutions is one heck of a lot easier than building new ones.
It's a harsher punishment that they live to see the rebuild of what they turned to ash.
I fear that the capture of American media and the DOJ is too far gone, and that following through with proper punishment for the naked corruption of this regime would be unpopular. “Let bygones be bygones.”
Oh, to live in an America where white-collar crimes and financial treason were actually punished…
Aside from the point, my support for judicial executions due to treason against the United States is not support for extrajudicial executions, like the ones that ICE has been carrying out. I think Italy and Romania are decent examples of countries becoming better off after executing their authoritarian figureheads, although I don’t think that there are grounds for that in the United States yet.
Execution != assassination, as the latter has a lot less success in creating real, long-lasting change than the former.
(Not that there aren't elements within the Trump administration who might contemplate a false flag operation, but it will be obvious if they try it because they aren't clever enough to pull it off.)
Furthermore, both Ceaucescu and Mussolini were extrajudicial executions.
Nixon is a better precedent for the USA because it demonstrates that we're already capable of ejecting a criminal president without bloodshed. It wasn't a perfect process (the Ford pardon was terrible) but in the end Nixon still lost power.
This is the cycle now. 180 degree turns in policy every 4 or 8 years. There's no long term planning.
China and Russia must be enjoying this.
Some amazing new administration can come up with tons of good ideas, but they will only become real institutions if they survive for decades to come. Institutions are not just government agencies, law or people. Tradition and longevity are probably even more important.
Do you want to build a company in a country where all the law, tax code and regulations are replaced with amazing but brand new one every 4 years? Probably not?
And changing rules are much worse for scientific research because most often it span decades or even generations of scientists. People will just choose to go live and work somewhere more stable.
Just another day of America getting exactly what they twice voted for.
But when you see people confidently stating unreasonable things in short posts, it's a common tip-off for a bot/shill/zealot/troll. When they assume a starting point that is two standard deviations out of most peoples' Overton Window, and they don't defend it, just kind of "Of course X is true", that's someone who is blasting propaganda, not having a reasonable discussion. They just want to say "X is true" enough times that people start to believe it.
As I said, that's not 100%. For any individual instance, you can look at their posting history. But for a comment section, when you start to see such posts taking over more and more of the discussion, you can say that the discussion has been taken over with very close to 100% certainty, even if you can't be certain about any one post.
Trump's goal is to destroy the United States of America at the behest of his foreign handlers.
You can deny it all you want, but it is the only thing that matches up with all his actions.
He gets blamed for being the cause because those who actually led us into the decline don’t want to own their role in the mess. The fact that he got reelected is proof the status quo had lost the plot.
Sure, he’s a scoundrel, but ultimately he’s a scapegoat.
Surely, he has made things uniquely worse, and in ways that would not have happened without him.
Put another way, in terms of the political status quo, what changed between his two term? Hint: not a damn thing. That ain’t his fault. Your bias has blinded you
People didn't vote for change, they voted for the same thing they had 4 years ago that changed absolutely nothing.
To quote Vaas from Far Cry 3: Do you know what the definition of insanity is?
And how did the system respond after the first win? It didn’t. It was same ol’ same ol’, and look what the led to.
Blaming Trump for the cluster fuck mess that gave him the opportunity to run and win… Sorry. Absolutely not his fault.
I don’t like the guy. But I’m not going to be foolish and blame him for winning. That’s not his fault.
You don't get the wildfire without all three, and anyone paying attention can observe the looming danger and the inevitability of ignition. Who lights the match matters. But is only a small part of the contributing circumstances.
The wealthy have been manufacturing these issues for decades now by buying up the entire media apparatus and gutting systems to the bone so that they can squeeze out a bit more blood to drink.
This is the stronger part of that statement to me. More than individual responsibility. Collective responsibility of the powerful. It seems to me that there's plenty of blame to spread around, which doesn't negate any of it. I even see ways democrats have contributed by, for example, conspiring to exclude Bernie Sanders who plays to the same feelings of dissatisfaction as Trump, but in a different way. More build it better than burn it down.
Though I think that's what Trump sees himself as doing as well. People don't have to agree - I appreciate some things he's done and recoil in horror at others. But similarly for democrats. I was very displeased with Obama for renewing the Patriot Act while appreciating the difficult compromise of the Affordable Care Act.
Historically, US politics has been quite volatile. The period between WWII and the 90s was unusually stable and prosperous. Which I tend to credit having bombed the rest of the world's manufacturing capacity to smithereens and the recovery period for, mostly. I think we're entering a more volatile period, but who knows?
The US has been on a downward spiral towards 'this' for a long time, but Trump literally self-selected to be the face of the intentional rapid acceleration of it.
Calling Trump a scapegoat is incredibly kind to his intentional destruction and, to still put it far too kindly, "vindictive nastiness in attempt to profit" (which, I think, also depressingly describes what has become of the US tech sector).
But rather than own their failure, they work - hard - the “OMG it’s all his fault” narrative (read: deflection and distraction) and it works. So well, they keep doing it.
But repetition of a lie doesn’t make it true. Concession to buy into a lie, also doesn’t make it true.
No doubt DJT has his flaws. But he’s still a scapegoat. Why? Because no one is asking “How did we get here?”
Essentially the US cannot improve it's current direction unless it can have an honest discussion about how it got so bad in the first place, with all administrations under the spotlight for failing to address the decline.
Ironically, it's accelerating away from honesty.
In Q4 2016 (upon Trump's first election), the bottom 50% owned just $1 trillion out of $90 trillion.
The system failed them. Trump is a populist.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distr...
What's completely incomprehensible is that the people suffering consequences of the Triffin Dilemma double down on the US dollar as the reserve currency. If they really wanted to bring back manufacturing, jobs, and compete with China, we'd give up the dollars special status. It's amazing how easily it is to misdirect blame to immigrants, libs, etc. Absolutely wild.
IIUC that was actually an explicit goal laid out in Ron Vara's book. It's obviously hard to tell where the line is between deliberate policy and mere narrative-chum for useful idiots to latch on to. But the impression I've gotten is that many of Grump's moves are in line with this goal, but fail to achieve it because the Dollar is so damn sticky (at least in the near term).
Also, the truth is that supporting manufacturing jobs to compete with China could always have been straightforwardly done by taking the surplus wealth gained by being the world reserve currency (ie being able to trade paper dollars for real goods), and directly spending it on subsidies for domestic manufacturing. But the policy over the past several decades has been instead to simply give away that wealth to Wall Street in the form of artificially low interest rates that create an asset bubble (ie the fake "fiscal responsibility" that the Republican party had been promoting)
Xi, we shall see.
This decapitation of education, military, cyber-defense, public news, the arts, disaster preparedness, climate science ... the list goes on ... is so systematic that it can only be described as a fifth column effort to destroy the U.S. from inside, which Putin can't do from outside.
There really is no moral defense of the US at this point, given the last few years of the genocide it is actively committing under both parties.
Looking forward to whoever replaces the US as the leaders of the free world. Iran? Cuba? China? Greenland?
Trump will have been an incredibly cheap victory for whichever new superpowers emerge.
I half expect the entire Trump family to move to Dubai in 2029.
Russia, maybe Israel. Not Dubai. Dubai will remain too closely tied to the next administration in the US without a major change in our energy supply. But yes I think it is highly likely that many of the criminals in this administration and the trump family will flee the country and take their pilfered millions with them once they are out of power.
If the US president has always been able to fire them, then they were never truly independent.
> With an annual budget of about $9.9 billion (fiscal year 2023), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities. In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing [...] Since the technology boom of the 1980s, the U.S. Congress has generally embraced the premise that government-funded basic research is essential for the nation's economic health and global competitiveness, and for national defense.
Tom over at the Explosions&Fire channel (and Extractions&Ire channel) just published a video[1] about his academic career. In it he noted that in Australia where he's located, the defense companies were an exception to that general rule, and did indeed sponsor a fair bit of basic research, including his PhD. I assume in areas they figured had potential, but still.
What kind of an agenda does studying Gendered impact of COVID-19 in the Arctic carry?
I had a job paid by the National Science Foundation, doing genomics research on children with extremely rare (sometimes unique) genetic diseases. We did publish papers, and Big Pharma can glean a little bit about how we handled the biomedical informatics of managing data across different highly specialized labs, maybe a researcher will incrementally improve GWAS across the field. But that research was important because actual human children were suffering and needed help.
I'm not even American and I've heard of it. The NSF's mission is to promote science and engineering in all 50 states.
Personal: Always saw them as contributing to PBS kids shows I watch growing up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Science_Foundation
EDIT: other folks beat me to it
But if I have a specific question regarding what some entity does, I can always look into it on my own time, rather than have a default stance on what they might do/not do.
We are each responsible for learning ourselves, and we live in a time where that is easier than ever. I find it odd your default position is to assume it is not important.
It's wild how efficient they are, sometimes.
> why not just let him do it and stop complaining?
Because I have to live on this planet for a few more decades. I feel like I'm being trolled?
There, I added an extra sentence to make it approximately 20% funnier.
I find in conversations like these, if I don't know something fundamental like the NSF's role in American science, it's pretty easy to do a short bit of research before commenting. It's not bad to ask questions, but I figure if the question has a basic factual answer in wikipedia, it's best to start there.
Basic science also increases our understanding of the world and universe, an admirable goal in its own right.
We are all failing morally for not revolting at this level of corruption.
He raped kids and the entire GOP is helping to cover that up.
He raped kids and the entire GOP is helping to cover that up.
You know how the US had people from all over the world trying to get into our schools, and how they regularly figured things out important economic healthcare and other discoveries by being ahead of the curve? This group is a huge reason why.
Here's a good link for just 9 things that came from nsf funded studies. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/16/science/federally-funded-... the first being GPS. There are way more and the obvious ripple down effect of having trained people who went into industry and innovated in the private sector.
A lot of people from all over the world are trying to get into US schools because it's a way to get a US visa, and legal residency in the US is valuable enough that people are willing to go to great lengths in order to obtain it.
This isn't just a hypothetical, a guy I know from Europe who is currently enrolled in a master's degree program in the US told me outright that the primary motivating factor for him to get a master's degree was because it was the most expedient way for him to get a visa to the US. I know other people who have deliberately enrolled or sought to enroll in higher education programs in other countries they wanted to spend time in, as a way of getting a visa, plus in some cases a stipend from the government of that country.
Certainly some people who attempt to immigrate to the US via the educational system are in fact doing valuable research work - but I think the vast majority of them are not, and I don't really trust the current leadership of the NSF to set up systems that accurately discern between research programs that genuinely benefit the country or the world; and research programs that are actually an excuse to get US visas to smart but ultimately mediocre people from other countries who would prefer to be in the US rather than their own country.
The NSF is an independent federal agency that funds roughly a quarter of all basic academic research in the US, laying the groundwork for technologies like the Internet backbone and MRIs. The NSB is its governing body, composed of top scientists who serve staggered six-year terms specifically so no single administration can wipe out the entire board at once. That continuity is designed to insulate scientific priority-setting from political pressure, ensuring American research funding is directed by objective merit rather than political patronage. Dismissing all members simultaneously removes the exact oversight mechanism built to prevent political offices from dictating scientific agendas.
From a political science perspective, this is an institutional move Robert Paxton described in his stages of fascist development. His framework identifies patterns where political actors weaken or bypass independent bodies designed to constrain executive power. In Paxton's fourth stage, the exercising of power, an executive consolidates control by actively dismantling these checks. Centralizing control over scientific governance by firing the board for opposing a budget cut is hollowing out an independent institution; it's a pathway Paxton documented whereby institutional checks are weakened in ways that accumulate over time.
https://election.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Pa...