National Science Board

Yet Donald Trump is trying to take us back decades.

Yesterday, President Trump fired all 24 members of the National Science Board.

The National Science Foundation is a federal agency that gives grants to all scientific research in America.

It's where the most foundational AI research happens at schools like Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Berkeley.

And the National Science Board is the body that's supposed to oversee it.

It has 24 scientists with six-year terms, so the agency stays non-political.

But yesterday afternoon, every board member got the same email from the White House.

And so one of the lots of R&D data end up in national reports on the state of the science.

And among those are biannual report from the National Science Board, which works very closely with NCSES for its data needs.

And in that report that was released just this last year, one of the things that we learned that as of 2024, which is the final year of the Biden-Harris administration, that China has overtaken the United States in terms of global R&D spending.

That data that's used in that report is more than two years old at this point, and so we should really be keeping an eye on upcoming releases of the underlying data from NCSCS to see how the R&D reform efforts that are currently happening from this administration are faring.

When people hear scientists, they think a doctor in a laboratory or the astronaut trying to work for NASA.

The National Science Board says that high school students without access to STEM courses are less likely to be interested in pursuing careers in STEM.

Former district representative and STEM committee chair Darrell Jones says he noticed that gap and wants to encourage more black men to be curious about sciences.

This weekend, Jones was able to connect with Chicago's young men directly, answering their questions in a low stakes environment.

Even the most benign forms of science denial poison public perception of science and polarize people against legitimate sources of information.

This fosters a public that is hostile towards science and votes for administrations that actively attack the scientific community, which is what we are seeing with Trump and Bobby Kennedy, slashing budgets for science in half, Trump firing the entire National Science Board, Bobby firing thousands of people at CDC and FDA, axing the entire ACIP vaccine panel, basically just purging the government of anyone who will not bow down to the state-sanctioned narrative that is determined by what is most profitable for the oligarchy that put them there, rather than scientific facts.

And of course, let's not forget the monsoon of anti-vaccine propaganda that is unlike anything in human history, which has caused a resurgence in child deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases, and quite likely the evaporation of measles eradication status.

People are dying, everyone is less safe, scientific progress is stifled, and these toxic frauds are to blame.