The list is getting long: NIH, EPA, NASA, now the National Science Foundation. About 150 NSF employees have joined the growing group of science-adjacent federal workers shouting from the rooftops about what’s happening to their agencies.
This approach does differ from the other three; those were public dissents, addressed directly to the leadership of the agencies in question, demanding that they reverse course on the blatantly anti-science actions spewing forth on a daily basis. The NSF employees, under the auspices of their union the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3403, instead sent a letter to Democratic House Member Zoe Lofgren, the ranking member on the Science, Space, and Technology committee, that functions as a whistleblower complaint.
They write with “deep concern over a series of politically motivated and legally questionable actions” by the Trump administration. Those include unlawful terminations of hundreds of employees, grant review that was “covert and ideologically driven,” termination of existing research awards without any transparency or real justification, withholding of appropriated funds, and more. It also specifically mentions the unceremonious eviction of NSF from its Alexandria, Virginia, headquarters, to, for some reason, let the Department of Housing and Urban Development move in. Taken together, the actions “collectively amount to the systemic dismantling of a world-renowned scientific agency.”
The employees — 48 who signed their names, though redacted in the publicly available letter except for union president Jesus Soriano, and 101 who signed anonymously — called for whistleblower protections and for the Committee to end illegal impoundments of funding, defend the agency from “further interference in its peer review process,” clarify internal employment practices from OMB, DOGE, and NSF leadership, and reaffirm the agency’s overall scientific independence.
“NSF employees are committed to serving the American people through research, education, and innovation,” the letter reads. “But they cannot do so under fear, censorship, and institutional sabotage. Without immediate oversight and corrective action from Congress, one of our nation’s greatest engines for scientific and technological advancement faces irreversible long-term damage.”
All of these public declarations are essentially a primal scream as the scientific enterprise is dismantled, though all seem to have little hope of direct effect at the moment. The use of actual whistleblower statutes is at least an interesting wrinkle here, though asking the minority in Congress to make real waves under those protections is not likely to bear a ton of fruit either. But when the likely end result of Trump administration actions is, in a real sense, the demolition of the scientific edifice for a generation, it is worth throwing as much as the wall as possible to see if anything will stick.
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