President Donald Trump and his administration downsized US science by historic margins last year as it reduced the workforce at federal research agencies by tens of thousands of people and terminated thousands of research grants. But another set of cutbacks in federal science has drawn less attention.

Across the government, the administration terminated more than 100 independent advisory panels, comprising university scientists and other outside experts who help to guide national science priorities.

The cuts — driven by a February 2025 executive order aimed at shrinking federal bureaucracy — target committees that agencies rely on to assess biomedical and environmental policy, provide guidance on setting research priorities and ensure transparency in how the government makes science-based decisions.

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The scope of these committee terminations is unprecedented, a Nature analysis finds. For example, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the National Institutes of Health, disbanded 77 advisory boards — more than one-quarter of all its advisory committees — in 2025. By contrast, in fiscal year 2024, the agency terminated just two committees.

A similar pattern of committee closures played out 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 were disbanded.

These panels, which are governed by the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), are typically staffed by researchers and other experts from outside the government. Some of those that were closed in fiscal year 2025 had been advising on topics such as organ transplantation, HIV prevention, high-energy-physics research and planetary science.

The February 2025 executive order’s stated purpose was to “minimize Government waste and abuse, reduce inflation, and promote American freedom and innovation”. And some scientists and agency employees said there can be sound reasons to streamline FACA committees by combining some or eliminating ones that no longer serve a purpose. But many researchers say that the scale of the administration’s efforts greatly reduces the amount and quality of advice that the government receives from the scientific community and businesses, as well as organizations that represent people with diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

Researchers who spoke to Nature say that by terminating such a large number of scientific advisory committees and not replacing 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 formerly served on two panels at the NSF and the DOE that have been disbanded. “We could act as ambassadors in both directions,” he says.

The terminations aren’t the only changes to advisory committees that the administration rolled out last year. Nature found that the US government has sharply reduced the number of open FACA meetings — by more than 50% for some agencies — at which the public could observe deliberations and provide input. Some agencies substantially reduced the number of public reports they issued.

And in some other cases — including the prominent example of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) that makes recommendations on vaccines — the federal government has drastically changed the composition of the committees, removing people who disagree with its stance and installing ones who agree. Last week, the Trump administration abruptly fired all 22 members of the board that advises and oversees the NSF. As a rationale for the terminations, a White House spokesperson pointed to the 2021 Supreme Court case United States v. Arthrex, Inc., which it says “raised constitutional questions” about the board’s membership and the fact that its members are not confirmed by the Senate. The spokesperson said the White House aims to update the law so that the board can “perform its duties as Congress intended”.

Researchers say that the elimination of panels and other changes seemingly contradict the Trump administration’s promise, outlined in an executive order on ‘gold-standard science’ on 23 May last year, to improve transparency in federally funded science and in science-related decisions taken by federal agencies.

“The fewer of these advisory panels there are, it inherently diminishes the transparency of the entire operation,” says Carrie Wolinetz, who previously administered several advisory panels as the former head of the NIH’s science-policy office.

The White House rebutted these claims. Spokesperson Kush Desai says that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the “federal government’s glut of redundant, taxpayer-funded advisory committees did little to meaningfully inform policymaking for the benefit of the American people”. “The Trump Administration is eliminating the bureaucratic bloat and taking a hands-on approach to ensure that policymaking is driven by Gold Standard Science.”

Biomedicine behind closed doors

The 77 committee terminations at the HHS in 2025 represent a sharp departure from historical levels. Since 1997 — the full extent of publicly available FACA data — annual terminations have exceeded ten only once.

In 2025, the number of open HHS committee meetings also decreased, Nature found. In the ten years before 2025, the average number of committee meetings open to the public was 255. But in 2025, there were just 91.

There are many more closed meetings at the HHS in any given year because most of the FACA committees assess research grants, a process that is kept confidential. But in 2025, the ratio of open to closed meetings dropped from an average of over 9% for the previous ten years to 4%, representing a shift towards closed meetings even outside the grant-review process.

Among the disbanded groups was one charged in 2023 with making recommendations on research into long COVID and treatment for millions of people with the condition 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 the government downsizing last year.

The committee was “designed to give patients a significant voice equal to those of researchers and physicians”, Simon says, and its closure is a blow to research. “It is very hard to see how these actions will advance the work that’s needed to understand long COVID and other infectious chronic conditions.”

Other panels terminated by the HHS include the Advisory Committee on Organ Transplantation, which advised the agency on policies regarding organ donation, procurement and equitable allocation, and the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, tasked with reviewing current nutritional science to inform the federal government’s dietary recommendations. The federal government subsequently issued new dietary guidelines in January without the committee’s input, a move that sparked controversy among some nutrition experts who argued that aspects of the revisions bypassed the scientific consensus.

The downsizing of HHS advisory committees is starker than the 2025 termination numbers suggest: some of the FACA committees are also meeting less often than in typical years or have not met at all since Trump took office again.

For example, the NIH leadership has historically relied on the Advisory Committee to the Director and the congressionally mandated Scientific Management Review Board — both of which have not been officially terminated — to navigate major agency reorganizations or funding shifts, says Wolinetz.

But the NIH leadership did not convene either of these panels last year as the agency cut thousands of projects on disfavoured topics and reduced the autonomy of each of its institutes by centralizing peer review and other administrative functions.

Wolinetz says that it’s smart to consider, on a semi-regular basis, whether each committee is still serving its purpose and justifying its taxpayer cost; some panels can become obsolete “vestiges”, she says.

But by terminating so many committees and not consulting others, Wolinetz says the federal government loses a crucial mechanism for ensuring that its decision-making is transparent and subject to scrutiny, including by the public. Advisory committees act as a “locus of public engagement that federal agencies can’t do on their own” about issues the government is grappling with, she says. The actions seem at odds with the ‘radical transparency’ at HHS that is a stated policy goal of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, she says.

She also worries about cases in which the Trump administration has not terminated committees — but instead drastically changed them.

For example, last June, Kennedy abruptly fired all 17 members of ACIP, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s premier vaccine advisory panel. Claiming that the panel was plagued by conflicts of interest and acted as a “rubber stamp” for the pharmaceutical industry, Kennedy reconstituted the committee with appointees whom, he argued, would bring outsider scrutiny. However, scientists and medical organizations contend that some of the new members have a history of promoting vaccine scepticism, a position long held by Kennedy.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) sued the HHS over its changes to ACIP. In March, a federal judge temporary halted the installation of Kennedy’s picks for ACIP, ruling that the selections probably violated federal law requiring that such panels be fairly balanced in terms of expertise and viewpoints. The HHS later revised ACIP’s charter to broaden its scope and focus on the risks of vaccines.

Kennedy also overhauled the HHS’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, terminating its existing members and appointing a slate of new ones. The new slate has drawn criticism from some autism researchers who argue that it includes people who are aligned with Kennedy’s disproven claims that autism is a preventable condition linked to vaccines and environmental toxins.

These reconstituted committees were not “formulated in the traditional highly vetted manner” outlined in each panel’s charter, Wolinetz says. Instead, they seem to be “constituted to support particular predetermined points of view” and are being “used to certify policy actions the administration wants to take”, she adds.

Emily Hilliard, an HHS spokesperson, told Nature that the agency’s actions were in accordance with a White House order to terminate unnecessary advisory committees, adding that “these previous committees allowed the United States to remain the sickest developed nation despite spending $4.5 trillion annually on health care, driving unsustainable debt and worsening health outcomes.” The HHS will continue to convene committees as necessary, she added.

The HHS did not respond to requests for comment about other issues, such as criticisms of the way the agency changed the composition of the vaccine and autism panels.

Loss at the NSF

The NSF, which is the premier US funder of fundamental research across all areas of science and engineering, also sharply restricted its advice pipeline last year by terminating 14 of its 52 advisory committees. These had provided the agency with advice in areas such as engineering, cybersecurity and geosciences. (All but one of the panels that review grant applications for the NSF remain active.)

Meza served on one of these terminated bodies, the Advisory Committee for Mathematics and Physical Sciences, and was also an NSF programme officer from 2018 until he left in 2022. He says that such panels can provide valuable information to agencies; for example, the committee he served on informed the NSF that the research community had concerns about the lack of support for mid-sized laboratories. Heeding the advice, the NSF established the Mid-scale Research Infrastructure opportunity in 2016 to support what it called “a ‘sweet spot’ for science and engineering that has been challenging to fund through traditional NSF programs”.

The NSF declined to comment on the criticisms about the changes in its advisory committees.

Consolidation at DOE

Last August, the DOE terminated six FACA panels that provided advice in areas such as high-energy physics, scientific computing, and biological and environmental research. The DOE has since consolidated these discipline-specific panels into one overarching body called the Office of Science Advisory Committee (SCAC).

Meza, who served on the terminated Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee, worries about the loss of specific expertise. “How good is the advice coming from a committee of people that probably only have passing knowledge of some of the areas?” he asks.

Persis Drell, chair of the SCAC and a physicist at Stanford University in California, acknowledges the worries researchers have raised. “In a time of turbulent change, I totally understand all of the concerns that are in the community,” she says. Drell adds that she hopes to reassure the scientific community that the SCAC is listening and is serious about helping science at the DOE. “I have two goals: one of them is to ensure that we have a strong basic science foundation and the other is that we are able to make progress on the strategic pillars that the administration has put forward,” she says.

The SCAC held its first meeting at the end of March, at which it was tasked to study the prioritization of resources for artificial intelligence and quantum science, as well as for DOE facilities.

Along with cutting FACA advisory committees, the DOE has tried to set up at least one secret advisory body that a judge found to be in contravention of federal law.

In April 2025, DOE secretary Chris Wright hand-picked five external researchers who have challenged the scientific consensus on climate change to review the science on this topic. Wright set this body up outside of the FACA process, the DOE did not announce the group’s formation, and deliberations were not public. It produced a report that challenged the overwhelming scientific consensus, and a finding by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009, that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health and welfare.

After the report was released, mainstream climate scientists heavily critiqued its conclusions. Two US non-profit advocacy groups, the Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists, sued the agency, alleging that the DOE had flouted FACA rules by setting up this advisory committee outside the FACA framework. As part of the legal proceedings, the agency released e-mails showing that internal DOE reviewers had found problems with the report before it was made public, calling its findings “misleading” and “factually incorrect”. In January, a court ruled in favour of the organizations that sued the DOE.

FACA is “designed to prevent exactly what the administration did here”, by requiring that scientific advice be sourced through a transparent process, says Phil Duffy, an atmospheric physicist who worked in the Office of Science and Technology Policy during the administration of former US president Joe Biden. As a counterexample, Duffy points to the process behind National Climate Assessments, which had authors representing all 50 US states, multiple rounds of public input and multiple reviews by federal-agency experts. That kind of process, he says, provides “a lot more credibility” than the DOE’s climate report.

The DOE did not respond to Nature’s request for comment.

NASA drops committees

In percentage terms, the changes at NASA dwarf those at other agencies. NASA lost 6 of its 11 FACA committees. And the agency held only 10 meetings of such committees in 2025, whereas the annual average was 35 during the previous ten years.

Five of the committees that were terminated fed advice into the divisions of NASA’s science mission directorate. The committees previously met several times a year; researchers told Nature that such meetings were an important venue for scientists in the broader community to hear updates from NASA officials, and for committee members to take the community’s input and sharpen it into advice for agency leaders.

For example, before it was disbanded, the planetary science committee recommended that NASA better connect its plans to send humans to Mars with robotic missions to bring back Martian rock samples, to align more closely with federal priorities for maintaining global leadership in space. And in the middle of heated battles over how to divvy up limited funding for operational space telescopes, the astrophysics committee told NASA that it should not pre-emptively cut the budget of missions such as the Hubble Space Telescope, without broader consultation on the alternatives.

Such information, communicated by experts sitting on official committees in open meetings, is crucial for NASA to take on board when making key decisions, says Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, who chaired the disbanded astrophysics group.

She says that she and others served on these committees as volunteers. “I don’t see them as bureaucracy at all,” she says. “We do it because we loved astrophysics and we loved NASA, and we care very deeply about the science that NASA is able to do.”

In late March, NASA also began winding down an advisory group one level up from the five disciplinary committees, namely the science committee of the NASA Advisory Council. Several members of that group received letters from NASA administrator Jared Isaacman saying that “the structure of Federal Advisory Committees at NASA is being adjusted, and your role will conclude at this time”.

Without such committees, there is a reduction in the amount of crucial scientific advice flowing into the agency, Holley-Bockelmann and others say. “Why would you want less information?” asks Benjamin Greenhagen, a planetary scientist who chairs a Moon-focused, non-FACA advisory group that still exists but has had its NASA funding terminated.

NASA officials dispute the criticisms that there has been a reduction in advice to the agency. “I don’t think us being able to talk to the community and getting advice has really fallen by the wayside,” says Nicola Fox, NASA’s associate administrator for science at the agency’s headquarters in Washington DC. “We get our input from the community from a variety of different ways.” She points to advisory committees organized by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, which produce the ‘decadal surveys’ of community priorities that help to inform NASA decisions about what missions to pursue.

With the closure of committees and reduction in the number of open meetings, researchers in various disciplines have taken it on themselves to form independent advisory committees to replace some of the terminated ones and those whose members have been entirely replaced by the Trump administration.

In the biomedical area, for example, groups of independent scientists are setting up their own unofficial committees to rival the vaccine and autism committees, which they argue do not represent the weight of evidence in these areas — a charge that was part of the successful lawsuit brought by the AAP over ACIP.

Another example is the Census Scientific Advisory Committee (CSAC), which had provided scientific advice about how to conduct the decadal US census and other demographic surveys. After the Department of Commerce terminated that committee in March 2025, CSAC members set up an independent version that came up with consensus recommendations that they made public. The alternative panel 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 would hope that in the future, in this administration or some other, that there would be a structure that would enable these agencies to get external advice,” says Barbara Entwisle, former chair of the CSAC and a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. “It’s just the way you get the best ideas.”

Data analysis by Richard Monastersky.

This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on April 28, 2026.