On a sunny Friday in April, Julia Phillips got an unexpected call. “I was driving home from a trip to Washington, D.C.,” says Phillips, then a member of the National Science Board, so she pulled over on the side of the road and picked up the phone.
The call was from the chair of the board, Victor McCrary. “Have you read your email?” Philips recalls him asking.
That day, April 24, Phillips and McCrary — along with every other NSB member — received an email informing them that they had been fired, effective immediately. The message provided no reasoning for the dismissals.
The NSB was formed in 1950 to oversee the National Science Foundation, as well as to advise the executive and legislative branches on key science policy issues. Members are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve as nonpartisan stewards of U.S. research.
Since the mass firings in April, no new members have been appointed to the board, leaving it essentially non-functioning.
“Some functions of the board are the closest thing the U.S. has to a Department of Science,” noted Phillips, who chaired one of the Board’s science and engineering policy committees. “We monitored the country’s scientific progress so that we could maintain our standing as a global R&D leader.”
That standing, the board found in a report completed before the dismissals, is in jeopardy. China surpassed the United States in global R&D expenditures in 2024. It now produces more science and engineering Ph.D.s than America and holds significantly more market share in semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech industries.
At a recent Senate hearing on strategic research, Phillips testified about the importance of science to American foreign policy. “S&T is the new global currency of power,” she told the committee. “The threat to our future economic prosperity and national security is very real.”
But not all threats to American science are external, Phillips stressed. Oversight of the NSF, key to U.S. research, has been diminished without its board. Even when the Board was still active, she noted, they were sometimes blocked from accessing vital information, including agency budgets, facility operations updates, and NSF strategy development.
The dangers of an NSF without accountability have been well-documented. In 2024, a report from the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology found that the agency failed to address pervasive sexual harassment in the U.S. Antarctic Program.
“We told the NSF director and deputy director, ‘you cannot pretend this is not a problem,’” Phillips said about the findings. Thanks in part to the board’s intervention, the agency worked with Congress to implement new safeguards protecting harassment victims in agency-funded programs.
The NSF and other federal science agencies have faced repeated attacks under the current administration. Months before the NSB firings, the board helped inform Congress about the impacts of a Trump administration proposal that would cut 57% of the NSF’s budget for fiscal year 2026. But the Administration is now proposing a similarly large cut for fiscal year 2027, as well as cuts to agencies like NIST and NASA Science.
New immigration policies have compounded the damage done to federal science. Phillips’ own immigrant son-in-law traveled to his native India for a family emergency right when the startup company he worked for shut down. Despite his advanced degree and ties to the U.S., he was denied reentry into the country. Phillips’ daughter, a chemist, is now moving to the Netherlands to be with her husband. Phillips is losing proximity to her daughter. America is losing two skilled scientists — and thousands of others are in similar situations.
Today, Phillips continues to champion science as the chair of the AIP Foundation, a physics nonprofit, and as a member of Oregon State University’s board of trustees. “I think we still have the wherewithal to push back against these challenges, but we’ve got to get our act together quickly,” Phillips says. “Anything we tear down won’t be built back up, and we will be ceding our science leadership without a fight.”