Researchers detail fallout from termination of over 100 federal science panels

Long COVID advisory committee dissolved before holding a single meeting

Netia McCray, a long COVID patient who runs a nonprofit helping high school students access opportunities in STEM, joined the federal advisory committee on long COVID in 2025 hoping to “channel her years of experience as a long-COVID patient into something that could benefit so many individuals like myself and my community.” Within months she received an email notice that the group was terminated, “effective immediately.” The committee never held a meeting.

The panel included Dr. Alexandra Yonts, a pediatrician at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., and one of the few specialists in the country focusing on long COVID in children. Twelve other experts from public health, pulmonology, and critical care had been assembled to address the disease. “We need new therapeutics,” Yonts told NPR.

The terminations extend well beyond that single panel. A news analysis in the journal Nature tallied more than 100 science-focused federal committees terminated under the second Trump administration. The Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group for researchers, counted 150 advisory committees at science agencies terminated in 2025 alone. Public Citizen, a separate advocacy group, reported that as of March, more than a quarter of the country’s healthcare-related committees had been shut down.

The Federal Advisory Committee Act, which Congress passed in 1972, formalized the U.S. system of drawing outside experts from a range of backgrounds to advise federal agencies on complex issues. The committees are composed primarily of volunteers and span topics from astrophysics to public health to biomedical research — advising on when and which vaccines children should receive, how often people should be screened for cancer, and how to prevent asteroids from hitting Earth.

“The beauty of FACA is that it brings brilliant minds together for issues of the day, and allows them to openly adjudicate and to prioritize with limited resources how to get to next steps,” Michael Abrams, a health researcher at Public Citizen, told NPR. He described the committees as “a kind of connective tissue that helps facilitate good government.”

Officials from the White House did not respond to requests to explain why specific committees were terminated. In a statement, they said the dissolved committees “were found to be redundant, unnecessary, or ineffective.”

Russ Paulsen, president and CEO of the science advocacy group Research!America, said the committees provide perspective no single agency can replicate. “What advisory committees can do is give a diversity of viewpoints and an independence of viewpoints that no one organization will ever have,” Paulsen told NPR.

Among the terminated panels: committees devoted to managing fisheries and sustaining U.S. seafood resources; planning future NASA space science and astrophysics missions; and reducing preventable infections in hospitals.

The Healthcare Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee, or HICPAC, advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention until it was terminated. Hilary Babcock, an infectious disease researcher who served on the panel, said its members helped agency staff translate research into operational guidance. “They don’t need help necessarily knowing what the literature shows,” Babcock told NPR. “But what they don’t do is work in hospitals and healthcare systems, so they don’t necessarily understand intuitively what it means to try to operationalize findings from literature into guidance.”

Babcock cited the drug-resistant fungus Candida auris as one issue the committee had been working on. The fungus can live on surfaces in healthcare facilities and cause deadly infections in humans, and cases have risen sharply in recent years. “There is some sort of interim guidance around Candida auris from the CDC, but we’re not getting updated guidance,” Babcock said.

Scott Roberts, an infectious disease doctor at Yale who has treated U.S. patients with Candida auris, said losing the federal advisory panel will leave doctors, especially those at smaller or rural facilities, with a patchwork of protocols. “Losing a federal advisory committee on this is only going to make the problem worse,” Roberts told NPR.

Carrie Wolinetz, who worked with advisory committees during her time as an official at the National Institutes of Health, said the panels offered an important check on agency thinking. “They would bring up real-world issues that I — from within government — would not necessarily have thought of,” Wolinetz told NPR.

Juan Meza, a professor of applied mathematics at the University of California, Merced, recalled a committee he served on that advised the Department of Energy against making a supercomputer investment. “The fact that we were supposed to be independent, I think gave us a certain amount of leeway to say, ‘No. We’ve gotta go with what we think is right,’” Meza told NPR.

Even when agency leadership did not adopt a committee’s recommendations, the panels created a public record of expert input, said Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, an astrophysics professor who until recently worked at Vanderbilt University and served on the now-terminated Astrophysics Advisory Committee. “There were a couple times where we offered expertise that was not listened to,” Holley-Bockelmann told NPR. “But nonetheless, we felt it was really important to get it down on record.”

In a statement, NASA officials called the termination of the astrophysics committee a “restructuring,” writing that they had merged several committees into one. The statement asserts that the agency “has remained committed to continuing to engage with the science community in a variety of ways.”

Amanda Hendrix, CEO of the Planetary Science Institute and a former member of the NASA Advisory Council, said the previous committee structure allowed the agency’s leaders to “hear almost directly from the community.” The advisory group historically helped set the agenda for NASA priorities and pushed the agency to explain its investments, she said.

“I felt like the interactions with NASA folks at the different committee levels was very useful and important for the community,” Hendrix told NPR. “So it’s really disappointing that that’s all gone now.”