Why Trump (rightly) Fired the National Science Foundation Board

Introduction

President Trump’s recent firing of all 22 members of the National Science Foundation board ignited the sort of institutional panic one normally associates with medieval villagers spotting a comet.

It was run for your life and—even then, I think—blame Trump.

The corporate media was especially apoplectic. Their headlines were hysterical or hilarious, or both, depending on your point of view: “Trump’s Attack on Science Escalates.” “Trump’s purge of National Science Board condemned as a ‘real bozo the clown move.’” Reuters played the China card: “US scientists warn that termination of National Science Board (NSB) hurts ability to compete with China.” NPR screamed that “Scientists see Trump’s firing of the National Science Board as an attack on research.”

But what if it was something else? What if it were just a reasonable response to an overreaching bureaucracy that had ideologically captured the pipeline of scientific funding and research, and that was continuing to pump out its ideologically biased scientific assessments as government policy, no matter the outcome of the 2024 election and the nation’s desire for a different set of policies?

Which is exactly what it was. The press, of course, was not incapable of understanding this. On the contrary, they understood it all too well. Hence, the sky-is-falling headlines.

But don’t take my word for it.

An October 2024 minority staff report from the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation minority staff showed exactly how the National Science Foundation (NSF) has increasingly politicized the use of taxpayer dollars meant for scientific research. The report analyzed 32,198 Prime Award grants awarded by NSF to 2,443 different entities with project start dates between January 2021 and April 2024.

“Committee analysis found 3,483 grants, more than ten percent of all NSF grants and totaling over $2.05 billion in federal dollars, went to questionable projects that promoted diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) tenets or pushed onto science neo-Marxist perspectives about enduring class struggle,” the report stated. 

“…While only 0.29 percent of all grants with start-dates in 2021 centered on DEI initiatives, by 2024, more than a quarter (27 percent) of new grants pushed far-left perspectives.”

That wasn’t just a coincidence, the staff reported, because, beginning in 2021, the White House and NSF had created scientific integrity policies through a Task Force on Scientific Integrity to require that agencies “[i]ncorporate [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility] considerations into all aspects of science planning, execution, and communication.” The NSF subsequently sent more than $2 billion to projects the report described as advancing divisive social ideologies rather than investigating hard science.

“In 2022, NSF gave Columbia University $4.4 million for its Implementing Novel Solutions for Promoting Cultural Change in Geoscience Research & Education (INSPIRE) program to ‘decolonize geoscience,’" the report stated. 

“The following year, NSF awarded $5 million to Arizona State University and two other schools to build ‘an intersectional learning ecosystem toward gendered racial equity in artificial intelligence education.’”

Yikes.

These boots are made for booting

OK, so we see where this is going. And that’s part of the reason Trump booted the board—just as Kennedy gutted the CDCs vaccine advisory committee. The reality is, these institutions are no longer merely advising government; they have become governing institutions themselves, insulated from meaningful accountability and bound together through overlapping grants, boards, partnerships, and professional incentives. Once you see the system that way, nibbling around the edges no longer feels sufficient. You empty the cupboard, scrub the shelves, and begin again.

And so Trump did. Because the president did not merely cancel a handful of controversial grants, close a DEI office, or cut back on a climate initiative. He fired the governing board itself, the presidentially appointed body that oversees the strategic direction of the NSF and its nearly $9 billion annual budget and that was functioning as a kind of national institutional architect — directing the building of interconnected networks tying together universities, startup incubators, workforce systems, economic-development agencies, commercialization offices, and public-private regional planning systems.

In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with scientists building those kinds of networks; it is in fact what they have to do, and America has benefited enormously from collaborative research ecosystems. In many ways, that’s what the beehive of scientific inquiry is all about: the coursing of brilliant ideas from brilliant minds one to the other. It’s the kind of collaborative ecosystem that helped transform obscure university research networks into the foundation of the modern internet and is now advancing sophisticated artificial intelligence systems.

It’s not the form that is bad; it’s the function. The problem develops when scientific inquiry ceases to be challenging and daring and instead becomes lethargic and prescriptive—when research institutions begin embedding predetermined political or economic outcomes into the architecture of policy itself. When scientific inquiry is supplanted by ideology as the mission, that’s when the collaborative dynamic becomes an institutional silo, that is to say, totalitarian.

But that’s not even the worst of it, not by a long shot.

It’s all in the function

In fact, the DEI initiatives, while politically explosive, may actually obscure the larger structural transformation taking place. That transformation is the gradual migration of governing authority from legislatures to bureaucratic institutions. While funding and promoting DEI objectives and such things as intersectional decolonization as the touchstones of research is bad enough, what’s worse are the dollars flowing to boots-on-the-ground policy initiatives that increasingly assume the conclusions they later claim to “discover.”

Again, it’s not the form but the function. The machinery would work just fine if it weren’t being injected with brazen globalism.

Which brings us to Wisconsin and a quintessential case study in the nation’s transformation to bureaucratic collectivism.

The example centers on WiSys Technology Foundation, a technology-transfer organization tied to Universities of Wisconsin campuses outside Madison and Milwaukee. Ostensibly, WiSys exists to help commercialize university research by assisting with patents, startup creation, licensing, and entrepreneurial development. At first glance, that sounds entirely benign, and, in many respects, it is. As noted, America has long benefited from university-driven tech hubs. Silicon Valley itself grew partly from university-industry partnerships.

So there’s no whiff here of corruption or scandal. Rather, that’s the point. WiSys represents one cog in the machinery of a new kind of institutional power system, not the old bureaucratic caverns of cubicles and pencil-pushers but a high-tech corridor of experts, planners, and quasi-public authorities who steadily transfer power from elected officials to the apparatus itself. Where once elected officials made policy, and a consortium of government agencies, universities, and nonprofits implemented that policy within the parameters of traditional scientific inquiry, now the consortium makes and sets its own policies, not to mention its own standards of science, and, not incidentally, defines its own priorities.

The Legislature? It watches from afar, if at all.

So, then, back to WiSys. Financially, it’s deeply embedded in that ecosystem. For instance, we can’t tell simply by looking at WiSys’s IRS filings where all its money comes from—primarily the UW System and annual fees paid by member institutions, I suppose—but we do know that it was once a subsidiary of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, or WARF, one of the wealthiest university-affiliated research foundations in America, supported by patent royalties, investments, startup equity, and technology licensing income tied to university research. WARF still provides some financial support and back office services to WiSys.

In other words, they are still living together, and the result is a dense institutional web in which public universities, nonprofit foundations, federal grants, commercialization systems, startup incubators, economic development entities, and quasi-public partnerships effectively operate as a single managerial structure.

That web became dramatically more visible in 2023, when the NSF awarded a WiSys-led coalition a nearly $1 million NSF Engines Development Award to create what it called an “innovation engine” for sustainable agriculture. The coalition included the University of Wisconsin system, WARF, the Wisconsin Technology Council, the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation, the UW-Milwaukee Research Foundation, federal agencies, industry groups, and other institutional partners.

And the initial million-dollar grant was merely the beginning. The real prize was a potential Phase 2 NSF award worth up to $160 million over 10 years. Again, the format was entirely legitimate. The project aimed to support startup launches, build workforce coalitions, attract investment capital, expand entrepreneurial infrastructure, develop sustainability technologies, and even “inform policy recommendations that support sustainable practices.”

But that’s where the red-flag words that expose true intentions come into play. That’s where the function uses or abuses the format, and where the unelected “experts” begin to build their own agendas, far afield from any legislative input or oversight. For starters, the coalition proposed building what it called a ‘regional innovation engine’ that harnesses the region’s talent and intellectual capital to make Wisconsin a global leader in “sustainable agriculture.”

It’s important to know what they mean by sustainable agriculture. What they certainly do not mean is sustainable agriculture in the traditional sense, as when a Wisconsin farmer rotates crops to preserve topsoil. Their turn of phrase refers to large-scale climate policy pursuits that include methane-reduction mandates, carbon-intensity metrics, carbon sequestration, reduced fossil-fuel “dependence,” and internationally aligned emissions standards, aka regulations and caps.

The concern is not that researchers are studying those questions or that any of them are bad in and of themselves. It is that institutions increasingly move from studying policy alternatives to embedding preferred policy outcomes directly into funding, planning, and certification criteria. They seek not to undertake traditional scientific inquiry but to justify and implement a predetermined economic strategy through regional and international planning. The goal is control of agricultural production: Wisconsin farm policy won’t be set in Madison by elected lawmakers in collaboration with stakeholders in the field; it will be set in Davos and Brussels.

They say so in their own words. In announcing the initiative WiSys president Arjun Sanga laid out the project’s anticipated outcomes, among them “supporting the launch of sustainability tech startups and products,” i.e, directing funding toward enterprises that support the globalist mission; funding “audacious ideas” in the field of sustainable agriculture, meaning funding the most radical ideas; “identifying and preparing for future needs of the agricultural value chain, including workforce needs,” meaning transforming farmers from independent actors into merely one component of the larger administrative agricultural-industrial complex, aka the agricultural “value chain.”

Farmers? A thing of the past.

They will argue all this, and I suppose it could be arguable in the gobbledygook of administrative double talk, but of course WisSys cleared it all up with this kicker summarizing all the anticipated outcomes of its ultimate mission, as well as the genesis of its journey in the “collaborative work of the Wisconsin Bicentennial Innovation Challenges”:

“Through these efforts, sustainable agriculture and stewardship of natural resources emerged as a major challenge facing Wisconsin. This is also a topic of global significance and lies at the core of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

And there you have it. It took a long time for them to get there, but the bottom line is that this entire technology enterprise, organized and made possible by the NSF and NSB, is little more than a regurgitation of the UN’s Agenda 30, which used to be known as Agenda 21. The philosophical overlap between these sustainability initiatives and broader UN sustainable development frameworks is unmistakable, particularly in their emphasis on regional planning systems, climate metrics, stakeholder governance, and internationally coordinated agricultural targets.

Well, evil is evil by any other name, and so is totalitarianism.

Just briefly, the globalist agenda was laid out in Agenda 21, a call to action developed at the U.N.’s Earth Summit in 1992. Though modified over the years, it remains the model guidance plan for global governance, instructing governments on how to bring the various nations of the Earth into compliance with a unified agenda on virtually all matters in the 21st century, from climate change to the economy to culture. The mantra is ‘sustainable development,’ or sustainable technology, or sustainable agriculture, sustainable this, sustainable that, as if we humans had—before the United Nations arrived to save our souls—been unable to sustain ourselves.

Presumably for development or agriculture to be sustainable it must be directed from the top down, national resources must be redistributed so as to allocate wealth internationally and equally, cultural primacy must be limited to only those cultures not rooted in democratic expression, which automatically threatens the sustainable vision, and science must be seen not as some bourgeois and democratic institution in which verifiable facts are the foundation and testable hypotheses the method but as a relative and existential tool by which the prevailing global governance can be legitimized.

What all this means for “sustainable agriculture” was articulated in a 2025 UN Global Food Systems Transformation Report, in which the authors proclaimed that “the movement to reimagine food systems as engines of climate action, sustainable growth and shared prosperity has gained remarkable momentum and urgency. At the 2023 UN Food Systems Stocktake, a broad coalition of governments, stakeholders and institutions reaffirmed their commitment to the 2030 Agenda, creating a powerful platform for action.”

The report stated that across the globe, “governments are embedding the right to food into constitutions and legislation, and aligning their food systems strategies with national plans for climate and biodiversity.” In those places where the democratic policy might not be inclined to go along, the report continued, partnerships were being formed through coalitions of action and multi-stakeholder dialogues and—note the relevance here—by investing in science, technology, data systems, and artificial intelligence to guide decisions: “These steps demonstrate a shared recognition that transforming food systems requires both national commitment and international solidarity.”

Now let’s bring this down to the field level in Wisconsin and other places where elite networks of sustainability are being formed, seeded, propagandized, and launched. The goal of all this is, as researchers with Stanford’s Department of Global Ecology tell us, net zero carbon emissions, including imposing such things as the decarbonization of on-farm energy use, adopting nitrogen fertilizers management technologies, and feeding and breeding technologies for reducing methane, as well as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and enhanced rock weathering. The researchers also ell us, almost giddily when discussing these needs, that all those come with “a price premium over the status quo and have limited adoption.”

In other words, after austere regulations bankrupt the farming sector, incubated mass-agriculture complexes will replace all but a few family and independent farms. Remember just three years ago, when the Netherlands imposed a 30-percent reduction in cattle that threatened 50,000 farms, 4 million cows, and over half of the privately owned farmland in the country. The government there has backed off only a little—offering buy-outs instead of forced shutdowns—so just you wait in Wisconsin. The exciting push to sustainable agriculture that WiSys boasts about is a drive for nothing less than a controlled march to net zero, the destruction of independent and family farms, and a return to 19th-century living standards by way of a bankrupt economy from below and an imposed prohibition of technological progress from above.

The Bureaucratic Man

To be sure, WiSys president Arjun Sanga does not sound like a partisan ideologue. He may not even be one. He seems much more the highly competent institutional mechanic, a patent attorney and commercialization strategist moving comfortably through the interconnected worlds of university research and public-private partnership systems.

He would be a little bit boring, but for the fact that he describes the bureaucratic agricultural complex so openly, as if he really thinks it’s a good thing. So he is not really government, not totally corporate, somewhat outside academia, and yet he has his hands on the steering wheel of a massive enterprise involving all three.

He is the Bureaucratic Man of the technological age.

I watched him talk about the NSG $1 million grant on YouTube and how WiSys’s partners will achieve their goals. Naturally, it started out with collectivism:

Key takeaway: The key to technological progress and problem-solving is in the collective.

In Wisconsin, Sanga also said, agriculture is having a big impact, and the goal in the sustainable agriculture mission is to minimize that impact, and that’s where the NSF grant comes in: “We were fortunate enough to lead this sustainable agriculture engine, one of 44 Type 1 awards, which is for $1 million over two years. That allows us to start building those partnerships and coalitions and thinking about how do we compete for Phase 2.…”

Of course, there were a few strings attached, Sanga admitted: “They’re looking at one of the largest investments they’ve ever done in a collaborative-type program. They’re saying, if we agree with the way you’ve set yourself up, then we’re going to fund this thing for 10 years for $160 million.”

In other words, the NSF was saying, Don’t deviate from the narrative and you’ll be fine. No problems, Sanga assured: “the ecosystem approach to more sustainable agricultural practices is what we want to do.”

Sanga went on to say, perhaps in words meant to reassure, that you don’t start with a strategy and impose it on people. You do the legwork, he explained, you build deep, meaningful connections, using workshops, site visits, working groups, and visioning sessions with partners and stakeholders. That sounds almost democratic, but operationally it simply describes consensus formation inside curated institutional networks that distribute conclusions as predetermined talking points.

The scale of the project itself reveals how ambitious that governance model has become.

All this is why conservatives see these systems not as neutral scientific institutions but as autonomous governing boards insulated from democratic accountability. And once you understand that, Trump’s attack on the National Science Board suddenly looks very reasonable.

This was not simply an attempt to curb the proliferation of woke grants. It was an assault on bureaucratic collectivism itself.

Similar battles are unfolding across NIH, federal climate programs, DEI bureaucracies, university accreditation systems, and, more broadly, federally connected research ecosystems, and those battles—which so unhinge the corporate press—represent a much-needed attempt to dismantle a sprawling bureaucratic infrastructure sitting between elected officials and actual governance.

And that is ultimately why this fight matters. The central question is no longer whether government should fund science. It is who governs the governors when scientific institutions begin exercising power.