FYI science policy news

Leadership turns over at NSF

NSF’s acting director, Brian Stone, will leave the agency at the end of the year. His departure follows that of the acting chief of staff, Rebecca Keiser, in October.

Agency leaders will be “working closely with the White House” to identify a new acting director if President Trump’s nominee is not confirmed by 1 January 2027, an internal memo says.

NSF’s last confirmed director, Sethuraman Panchanathan, resigned in April 2025 just as grant terminations began to pick up at the agency. Since then, Stone has helmed the agency through a particularly tumultuous period that has seen more than a thousand additional grant terminations, deep proposed budget cuts, eligibility changes to the Graduate Research Fellowship Program, a call to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the firing of the National Science Board, moves to implement the Office of Management and Budget’s controversial proposed rule on federal grant making, and new initiatives such as X-Labs and graduate fellowships in partnership with industry.

Agency observers have suggested that the absence of a Senate-confirmed director has made NSF more subject to the direction and priorities of the White House.

Stone’s departure could put pressure on the Senate to act on Trump’s nomination of Jim O’Neill to be NSF’s next director, which has been stalled since March. Democrats and scientific societies have urged the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions to hold a hearing to determine whether O’Neill is qualified to lead the agency.

“If confirmed, Mr. O’Neill would be the first Director in NSF’s 76-year history who is not a scientist or an engineer, as he lacks both a technical degree and any research experience,” Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), ranking member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, said in a letter to the chair of the Senate’s health committee.

Stone has been at the agency for 26 years and served as chief of staff for more than a decade. Keiser was the agency’s inaugural chief of research security strategy and policy. She held the position for nearly 6 of her 11 years at NSF.

DOE science committee draws concerns over limited expertise

Former scientific advisers to the Department of Energy fear that the agency’s pared-down advisory panel lacks the specialized expertise to effectively chart the future of physics fields.

Last year, the six field-specific advisory committees for the DOE Office of Science—including the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel—were replaced by a single overarching Office of Science Advisory Committee (SCAC).

A DOE spokesperson emphasized in an email the continued importance of long-range plans to achieving major scientific discoveries and said that the agency anticipates asking the committee to produce such plans, written by subcommittees with “topic-relevant subject matter experts.”

But former members of the field-specific committees, including Sam Barish, former federal manager for the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee, expressed concern that the SCAC does not have enough expertise to produce rigorous long-range plans. According to public rosters of past advisory committees, only 8 of the 22 SCAC members served on a previous committee, and none are from the fields of nuclear science or biological and environmental research.

The new committee recently issued a report for the Genesis Mission federal AI initiative and a shorter-term road map for quantum computing. Another report on scientific facilities is expected in December.

Recommendations from the committee shape the future of the 21 000 researchers at more than 300 institutions and 17 national laboratories supported by DOE’s Office of Science, which operates 28 scientific user facilities.

Previously, DOE’s decadal reports and other long-range plans each focused on one field within the Office of Science and were produced by the corresponding advisory committee. DOE would consider those reports in its spending decisions.

The foresight provided by those plans has been important for coordinating major projects in the fields that the Office of Science oversees, said Nadia Fomin, chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Nuclear Physics. (APS is a member society of the American Institute of Physics, publisher of Physics Today.)

For instance, the 2015 long-range plan for nuclear science named the Electron–Ion Collider a top priority; that project recently began construction and is expected to start operations in 2037, according to Fomin.