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In the Trump administration’s ongoing race to make the U.S. poorer, sicker, and dumber, one more stomp on the accelerator comes from cuts aimed against its federal advisory committees. Whether on infectious diseases or space exploration, these panels of experts are the unpaid brains behind the brawn of the U.S. government.

With its signature disdain for anything smacking of smarts or competence, the Trump administration now aims to destroy or neutralize them. In a February 19 executive order, Donald Trump directed his staff to compile a list of “Federal Advisory Committees that should be terminated on grounds that they are unnecessary.” The order directly terminated the HHS Advisory Committee on Long COVID (a syndrome afflicting 23 million people in the U.S. right now) and the Health Equity Advisory Committee, which sought to help underserved people access care like blood pressure medication or postpartum treatment, through Medicare and Medicaid. Since then NOAA has closed several of its advisory panels, NSF closed a dozen, NASA has consolidated its wildly disparate astrophysics, biological and physical sciences, Earth science, heliophysics and planetary sciences panels into one body, and the U.S. Geological Survey closed its new scientific integrity body, alongside five others at the Department of Interior that included a climate adaptation panel. “This means that you, the public, will be more at-risk of being harmed because the scientific integrity and misconduct issues that were prevalent before will continue to persist,” wrote integrity panel member Jacob Carter. He called the committee’s cancellation, “an indicator that this administration has no intention to uphold scientific evidence in its decisions.”He’s right; contrary to the executive order, these committees matter. Cutting away advisory panels hurts everyone and leaves the U.S. government uninformed when making critical decisions that affect millions of lives, alongside a public left in the dark about what advice agencies do receive. These advisors, a “fifth arm of the government,” have long served as a thorn in the side of polluters and lobbyists, putting them under siege for decades, and doubtless in the gunsights of the giddily for-sale Trump administration. A 2021 Ecology Law Quarterly review found past end runs around advisory committees were linked to lead pollution, fracking contamination of drinking water, and worse air quality.

Federal advisory committees operate under a 1972 law, which governs the roughly 1,000 expert committees advising federal agencies on evidence-based practices on issues like boating safety or railroad retirement benefits at a yearly cost of $400 million. The panels are a bargain, providing by law “fairly balanced” expert advice that includes disclosing financial conflicts of interest and providing information openly to the public. The best-known examples from the pandemic were those FDA and CDC panels that voted on the safety and rollout of COVID-19 vaccines to much attention.

History repeats when it comes to attacks on advisory panels. In 2019, Trump ordered a one-third cut in the number of them. The order took aim at science panels at NASA, the NSF, and the Energy Department, in particular. The first Trump administration’s sheer incompetence kept many of those kinds of closures at bay. His then EPA chief resorted to stuffing a clean air panel with industry stooges instead, and an antiabortion advocates panel lacking any scientific credibility was whipped up to eliminate fetal tissue research at NIH.

Now, however, the crush of executive orders and disregard for Congress seen in the first 100 days of the new regime make things look even more dire. The dangerous, unqualified HHS chief Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has forced out top FDA vaccine official Peter Marks, who oversaw the vaccine panel that held steadily to public health principles during the pandemic, refusing to bend to Trump’s demand for an “October Surprise” vaccine to save himself in the 2020 election. All Department of Homeland Security advisory committees members were fired in January, halting a probe into a massive Chinese breach of U.S. telecommunications infrastructure.

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