Opinion
Who’s on 1st?
In the scientific community, a citation acts as a foundational unit of academic currency. When one scientist cites another’s work in a peer-reviewed journal, it serves as an explicit acknowledgment that the cited paper contributed towards the findings in some way. A process referred to as “standing on the shoulders of giants,” upon which new discoveries are built. This process is central to the Science Citation Index (SCI) and the Journal Impact Factor (IF), which have historically quantified the significance of research. Citation counts generally indicate that a piece of research has “utility”—it is being used to validate new hypotheses, provide methodology, or justify interpretations.
For much of the 20th century, the United States maintained an incontrovertible leadership in scientific advancement, with American institutions and researchers dominating high-impact journals. This dominance was viewed as a proxy for national economic and military superiority. The “Matthew Effect” is a self-reinforcing cycle where highly cited journals attract the best research, leading to more citations and further cementing the prestige of specific Western institutions.
Solving a Puzzle
Recognizing that language and publication venue are barriers to international recognition, the Chinese government launched an intensive, multi-decade initiative to improve the global standing of its research. Beginning in 2000, China realized that for its scientists to be cited, their work had to be accessible to the global, largely English-speaking community, and launched dozens of domestic English-language academic journals, specifically aiming to enter the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and other major Western databases. For years, Chinese research evaluation systems were tied almost exclusively to SCI-indexed publications, incentivizing researchers to publish in Western journals to gain promotion and funding. To counter what was perceived as American “hegemony” in knowledge production, the Chinese state provided massive R&D investment and encouraged international collaboration. By the 2020s, China had overtaken the U.S. in the total number of scientific papers and, in some fields, in the number of top-1 % cited papers, signaling a shift in the global center of excellence.
The National Science Board (NSB) and the 2025-2026 Crisis
The NSB is the governing body of the National Science Foundation (NSF), and is Congressionally mandated to advise the President and Congress on the status of U.S. science. Recent events depict a period of unprecedented administrative friction that have culminated with the suppressed report on AI—whose title is believed to have been “Falling Behind.”
In late 2025 and early 2026, internal reviews—including those from the NSB and collaborative policy analyses—began to highlight that the US was lagging behind China in critical sectors. While the US leads in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) development through private entities like OpenAI and Anthropic, China has gained dominance in the implementation and commercial application of AI across society and industry internationally.
The Presidential emails of dismissal were reportedly sent from the White House on April 24th without any prior indication of issues. Historically, NSB members serve staggered six-year terms to ensure non-partisan stability. However, reports from July 2025 onwards indicate a “summary removal” of various scientific board members across federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, without stated cause. The summary dismissal of the entire NSB without explanation represents an alarming departure from the National Science Foundation Act of 1950, which was designed to insulate scientific inquiry from political volatility.
Musical Chairs
In the wake of the first Russian test of a nuclear weapon on August 29, 1949—then a key credential to status as a scientific superpower—the United States began a grassroots program to build a national infrastructure of scientific and technical education, together with research and development, and national laboratories unmatched anywhere in the world.
Thus began a competition whose pinnacle of technological achievement was perhaps best demonstrated by the Apollo 11 mission, which landed a man on the moon in April 1969. The space race ran in parallel with the buildup of Russian and American arsenals of strategic nuclear weapons. The relationship Eisenhower warned of as the “military-industrial complex.”
Seemingly oblivious to the link between sustained scientific investment and technological leadership, the White House has, since taking office, proposed draconian cuts to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and related agencies that support climate research, the biosciences, and other fields. This has taken place at the expense of a broad retrenchment in education, including the planned elimination of the Department of Education itself. Medical research and healthcare are among the many social safety-net cuts. However, the range and scope of weapons programs seem limitless.
A 250-Year Inflection Point
The U.S. defense landscape has undergone a radical transformation since the start of the current administration. Moving beyond traditional “wartime spikes,” the current fiscal trajectory represents a fundamental, hyper-militarized restructuring of the American economy.
By comparison to any conflict in the 250-year history of the country including peaks for World War II and the Cold War—the current scale of capital allocation for defense is approximately ten times that of any previous era.
The Historic Defense Budget
The budget requests for FY 2026 and FY 2027 have shattered all historical precedents in both nominal and inflation-adjusted terms. The FY 2027 Proposal at $1.5 trillion is the highest defense budget ever proposed in U.S. history. It surpasses the 1945 WWII peak (~$1.2 trillion in 2027 dollars). Defense spending now accounts for roughly 63% of all federal discretionary spending and 18% of total U.S. budget authority.
Amongst the weapons systems development programs are The Golden Dome, a space-based, layered missile defense system for the U.S. homeland, and a Golden Fleet—a newly mandated requirement for 18 new “Trump-class” battleships. There is a rebranding of DoD to the Department of War, including a 44% expansion of the department. The conflict with Iran, which escalated sharply in early 2026, has seen a rate of munitions expenditure and hardware loss that has fundamentally challenged US readiness. High-intensity combat has led to a “critically low” status for several key systems:
Interceptors: Nearly 50% of THAAD and Patriot air defense interceptors have been expended.
Tomahawk Cruise Missiles: Over 1,000 units have been fired, representing a massive portion of the pre-war inventory.
Precision Strike Missiles (PrSM): Approximately 45% of the inventory has been exhausted.
Weapon System Losses: U.S. hardware losses are estimated at $2.3-$2.8 billion, including an E-3 AWACS ($700M) at Prince Sultan Air Base, multiple F-15 fighter jets, and a THAAD missile defense radar unit.
The Nuclear Escalation: Warheads and Testing
Concurrent with the depletion of conventional munitions, the administration is simultaneously pursuing an unprecedented nuclear modernization that dwarfs even the Cold War-era acceleration. The W80-4 warhead program has driven demand for expanded plutonium pit production at Los Alamos and Savannah River—a capacity surge unseen since the 1980s. The Sentinel (Ground-Based Strategic Deterrent) ICBM, designed to replace the 1970s-era Minuteman III, has experienced catastrophic cost overruns that now exceed $130 billion and continue to climb, yet remains fully funded without Congressional resistance. Most provocatively, administration officials have signaled openness to resuming full-scale nuclear weapons testing, effectively abandoning the 30-year moratorium that has anchored U.S. nonproliferation credibility since 1992.
The irony is surgical: while the NSF is cut by 55%, the one science domain the administration unambiguously trusts—nuclear weapons development—receives unlimited resources. This is not anti-science. It is weaponized science. The same administration that fears China’s technological dominance has defunded the fundamental research infrastructure that historically made American technological superiority possible. Instead, it has chosen the one path guaranteed to isolate American science from the international collaboration that drives innovation: the resumption of nuclear testing, which would trigger a global arms race and a retreat into nationalist, compartmentalized weapons development.
The Replenishment Challenge & Strategy Shift
The unprecedented scale of spending is driven by the sheer complexity and unit cost of modern systems compared to previous eras (e.g., a $4M interceptor vs. WWII mass-produced shells).
Industrial Base Expansion: The DoD has moved from “exquisite” low-volume buying to high-volume production mandates, including 7-year agreements to scale Tomahawk production from 100 to 1,000 units per year.
Replenishment Lag: Despite record funding, industrial lead times mean that replenishing current “Winchester” level stockpiles to pre-2026 levels will take 2 to 3 years.
Quantity Over Exquisiteness: A shift toward “Affordable Munitions” and autonomous systems ($54B for drones) is being implemented to handle high-attrition scenarios without bankrupting the system.
To prioritize replenishment for the Iran theater and the US homeland, the administration has reportedly paused weapons deliveries to regional allies in Eastern Europe and the Indo-Pacific, creating a temporary strategic “window” of vulnerability as the industrial base attempts to catch up to the ten times demand.
The End of the Beginning
Since NSB was established by an act of Congress, the board can officially be dissolved only by Congress. Additionally, its members must be ‘eminent’ in scientific fields, according to the founding legislation.
The removal of the entire NSB comes amidst other turmoil at the NSF. The White House has proposed cutting the NSF budget by more than half for two consecutive years, but Congress blocked the cuts in the 2026 budget. NSF staff levels have been reduced by 30% since January 2025, and in December, it had to vacate its headquarters to relocate to lesser facilities. New grants for 2026 are being issued at a slower rate and in reduced numbers and amounts as the agency prepares major cuts across all its divisions.
The work of the NSF is familiar to everyone around the world every day—it developed and then transitioned to commercial service the Internet. In the 1990s, I was honored to be one of many Principal Investigators of this historic technological development. The work of the NSF, while seemingly esoteric, has been the foundational source of a wide array of technologies and scientific applications that we now take for granted as routine.
One of NSB’s key statutory roles is to approve NSF’s budget. But multiple NSB members say the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which oversees federal spending, has told NSF that it must not share details about the agency’s spending with board members. In interviews conducted by Nature and jointly published with Scientific American, the terminated chair of the NSB, Victor McCrary, stated: “We were told that those plans were solely going to be with NSF leadership, and NSF leadership was told not to share this with the NSB or anybody else.” McCrary, a physical chemist at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., has yet to be replaced. The former director of the NSF was removed without replacement, and the White House nominee for the position is biotech venture capitalist Jim O’Neill, described as unqualified, conflicted, and a threat to science.
That degree of political interference concerns the former board members for the future of NSF. “Will we turn into an agency that is directed by the White House, or will we have an agency directed and managed by science and scientists?” says Beachy. Some of the dismissed NSB members have theories about the board’s termination. Beachy suspects that they were ousted to make way for a new council of advisers for Jim O’Neill, a biotech investor nominated to be the next NSF director. Stassun says they might have been removed to prevent them from lobbying Congress to preserve NSF’s budget for fiscal year 2027.
On social media, scientists shared their concerns about the termination of NSB members, but some also criticized the board for not protesting more forcefully as the NSF was targeted by the Trump administration. McCrary points to the board’s work in lobbying for the NSF. “We went to Congress, we went to industry, went to every sector, and got people and rallied people around to support the foundation,” he says.
Marvi Matos Rodriguez, a terminated NSB member and chemical engineer in the fusion industry based in Seattle, Washington, says she respects her colleagues on NSB but agrees with the criticism. “I think that the scientific community and NSF employees and people who wanted the board to speak up were right,” she says. “We should have been speaking up all along.”
Inverse Sputnik
Shocked by the speed with which the Soviet Union was able to develop its own nuclear weapon, the US was further shaken by Soviet ballistic missile development and the demonstration of the world’s first orbiting satellite, Sputnik, in 1957. The reaction was resolute, and slowly but steadily, the US regained its preeminence, demonstrated at the time by its space program and subsequently with the human genome program. The present reaction to the assessment that its leadership in some sectors of AI seems perversely acquiescent in China’s scientific progress in key areas of science and technology for the 21st century, the inverse of its response to the launch of Sputnik.
The “Falling Behind” Report
The NSB was indeed preparing a major report for release on May 5, 2026. Members have stated that it was intended to highlight how the United St’ ceding scientific ground to China. On April 24, 2026, the Trump administration terminated all 22 members of the National Science Board via a brief email, providing no official explanation. Observers noted that the dismissal occurred just days before the scheduled report, prompting widespread speculation that the timing was intentional to block or bury the findings.
To date, the specific report scheduled for release on May 5, 2026, has not been leaked in full. The firings effectively blocked its planned publication. However, its key findings and extensive details have been disclosed through other channels, including interviews conducted by past members of the Board with Congressional staff and science journalists.
The Intended “Falling Behind” Report would have involved a vote to release the 2026 edition of the congressionally mandated “Science and Engineering Indicators”. Terminated board members confirmed it was set to warn that the US is ceding scientific and technological ground to China, highlighting a widening gap, as underlying R&D investment declined while China’s sustained growth continued. The “Science and Engineering Indicators” series is published by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES). Rather than a single document, it is typically released throughout the year as a series of thematic reports. Following the firings, the final quarterly meeting (May 5th) could not proceed because no members were present to conduct business.
No complete copy of the suppressed “Falling Behind” report has yet surfaced online. Nevertheless, fired NSB board members like Yolanda Gil and others have given detailed interviews about the report’s conclusions, including to Nature and Scientific American, effectively “leaking” its central warning.
The Nature Index: China surpassed the US in the 2023 Nature Index, which tracks high-quality research in the world’s most prestigious journals. China has now achieved a 17% advantage over the U.S. in the world’s most selective journals—the gatekeepers, like Nature and Science.
The Patent Gap: China filed approximately 1.8 million patents in 2024, compared to roughly 600,000 in the US.
The Verdict: A Venture Capitalist Without a Vision
The nominee to head the NSF is a venture capitalist—the first director in the agency’s 75-year history without scientific training. It is a symbolic break with the National Science Foundation Act of 1950. The vision embodied in this choice is unmistakable: America will no longer be the scientific beacon other nations seek to emulate. Instead, science becomes a speculative, profit-driven enterprise. Excellence gives way to the market’s logic. Mediocrity follows.
In 1950, Congress created the National Science Board to ensure that American scientific leadership remained insulated from political volatility and grounded in the wisdom of working scientists themselves. In 2026, that entire architecture has been dismantled—not rebuilt, not reformed, but gutted—in service of a different vision altogether. One in which the only science that matters is the science that kills. The rest is overhead.
The question that faces the nation now is whether we have the will to rebuild what has been broken, or whether we will accept the slow but steady retreat into irrelevance that this decision portends. Seventy-five years of institutional scaffolding, built by scientists and statesmen who understood that knowledge is power, has been torn down in an afternoon. The consequences will unfold for decades.
© 2026 Farooq Hussain
Farooq Hussain is a science writer, author, and podcaster. His background includes work in biophysics, nuclear arms control policy, and science journalism. He hosts the Icarus podcast and publishes Ariadne’s Dispatches on Substack. His books include The Last Treaty (on how innovation drives nuclear risk in the modern era) and The Darwin and Wallace Project. He served as a Principal Investigator during the NSFNET transition in the 1990s.
Sources & Further Reading
Nature & Scientific American: Joint interviews with NSB members on the firing and suppressed report (April-May 2026)
Science (AIP/FYI): “Administration Explains National Science Board Firing as Criticism Grows” (May 1, 2026)
Union of Concerned Scientists: “Trump’s Nominee to Run NSF is Unqualified, Conflicted, and a Threat to Science,” The Equation (March 17, 2026)
ScienceInsidev, In latest blow, National Science Foundation staff to be booted from their headquarters. Trump administration is giving building to housing department but has not said where science agency will go. ScienceInsider, Jeffrey Mervis, 25 June 2025.
OECD/ITIF Data: China has reached R&D spending parity with the U.S. (March 2026 reports)
Yolanda Gil Interviews: On the “Mendelian Gap” and the “unprecedented” nature of the dismissal (El País and Al Jazeera, April-May 2026)