Trump Axes Expert Panels at Historic Clip, Defying Agency Advice

The Trump administration this year has eliminated about 160 expert advisory committees across the federal government, almost a third of them over the recommendations of the agencies that oversee them, in by far the biggest purge of nonpartisan regulatory advice in the nearly three decades in which records have been kept.

The depth of the purge is detailed in a database maintained by the General Services Administration and analyzed by Bloomberg Law. About 15% of advisory boards across the government have been formally terminated through the most recent fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, according to preliminary data accessed on Oct. 29. The fiscal year includes about 3 1/2 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, during which time six boards were shuttered.

Though the Department of Health and Human Services is responsible for nearly half of the panels eliminated this year, the chopping spree has touched nearly every corner of the executive branch— on topics ranging from cybersecurity and economic statistics to table grape marketing and the dangers of lithium ion batteries on aircraft. At least 20 of the 53 agencies with advisory boards terminated one or more of them.

The number of terminations could have been higher except that more than 580 of these boards were created by Congress and many can’t be disbanded by agency action alone. But beyond the committees that have been officially dissolved, numerous others have stopped meeting or no longer have any members. The Department of Homeland Security, for example, axed all of the existing members on about a dozen expert boards, according to the database.

Expert panels provide the federal government with a range of insights, illuminating dense scientific topics and offering practical guidance on how industries actually operate. They serve as a critical link between regulators and the regulated, ensuring stakeholders are a part of the policymaking process from the beginning. Without that input, decisions on what and how to regulate may fall to political appointees lacking critical knowledge.

“Advisory committees are invaluable to the functioning of government agencies,” said David Michaels, who listened to advice from expert panels while he headed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, created a new council on whistleblower issues at that agency, and also served on them.

Not only do those committees bring expertise that’s not otherwise available within agencies, their guidance is “virtually free” in the scope of overall government outlays, said Michaels, a professor at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health. Agencies pay members of some advisory boards small stipends—typically $200 per day— when they meet a few times per year, while others only cover travel costs necessary when and if they gather in person.

Prior administrations regularly culled the herd of about 1,000 federal advisory committees across the government, but not nearly at the pace that the Trump White House has. On average 39 boards have been eliminated per fiscal year since 1997, according to the GSA data—but 47 new ones per year were created on average to address emerging issues. The Trump administration has rolled out six new committees this year.

Presidential Action

A month into his second term, Trump issued an executive order on reducing the size of the federal government that told agencies to disband committees that were “unnecessary.” He ordered a number of panels eliminated, including an HHS advisory group on long Covid.

That order also tasked assistants to the president for national security, economic policy, and domestic policy with identifying to Trump what advisory committees “should be terminated on grounds that they are unnecessary.”

But exactly who in the White House is making decisions to terminate particular boards and what constitutes being unnecessary, especially when agencies say otherwise, is unclear.

The Transportation Department sought to continue an advisory board that facilitated dialogue between companies that sell flammable lithium ion batteries and aircraft manufacturers, but it was axed in April.

The State Department said a public-private partnership with operators of overseas schools couldn’t be replicated. “Meetings the Council holds each year provide the Department with insights that would not be possible without this body,” the Office of Overseas Schools wrote. “We know of no other agency, group or committee, within the Department, that has such a vested interest in ensuring that the children attending an American overseas school receive the finest education possible.”

Fifty-eight years after it was originally established, the committee was disbanded in March.

The White House responded to detailed questions from Bloomberg Law by citing Trump’s Sept. 29 executive order reauthorizing nearly two dozen expert panels that were established directly by the president—and over which Trump exercises more direct control—in agencies such as the Office of Personnel Management, Department of Interior, and Environmental Protection Agency. But the order didn’t address Bloomberg Law’s questions about the administration’s vision for how agencies can get expert advice, what motivated slashing the panels, who directed the liquidation, and whether more are in the offing.

Project 2025

The eradication of advisory boards has been a goal of Trump’s since his first term, when he signed an executive order instructing agencies to wipe out about a third of the committees not required by law. At the time, White House officials said there were an excessive number of unaccountable committees dragging out the regulatory process.

Several panels were targeted for closure in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page ideological and governing blueprint for Trump’s second term. The plan alleged that Treasury Department’s Advisory Committee on Racial Equity was designed to “implement policies that deliberately favor some races or ethnicities over others” and the Census Bureau’s National Advisory Committee on Racial, Ethnic, and Other Populations was a “hotbed for left-wing activists intent upon injecting racial and social-justice theory into the governing philosophy of the Census Bureau.” The administration shuttered both panels.

“The casual acceptance and rapid spread of racist policymaking in the federal government must be forcefully opposed and reversed,” according to Project 2025.

Other expert boards that focused on diversity, equity, inclusion as well as gender identity and sexual orientation efforts have been terminated, including at HHS, Defense Department, and Federal Communications Commission, in line with Project 2025 proposals.

The Heritage Foundation’s blueprint also zeroed in on two Homeland Security Department advice boards. DHS went further, firing existing members on a broad swath of expert committees on Inauguration Day. The department has since formally terminated three panels and left about a dozen without any members.

DHS did restock the Homeland Security Advisory Council with a fresh set of advisers including Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and Trump ally who’s in legal trouble over his efforts to contest the 2020 presidential election results; Mark Levin, a conservative radio talk show host; and Chris Cox, a chainsaw artist who founded the political group Bikers for Trump. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen was removed from the committee when the Trump administration cleared house, then was reappointed as part of its new slate.

Shifting Criteria

While HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was public with his elimination of many of his advisory panels, claiming there were “conflicts of interest” on key panels and that it was necessary to restore public confidence in the medical community, the majority of advisory board terminations have taken place under the radar, with little or no information shared publicly or even with panel members.

This was the case when members of the Fruit and Vegetable Industry Advisory Committee stopped receiving information from the US Department of Agriculture.

James Benson had recently been reappointed to the panel. The prior year, it had made progress getting issues that matter to growers in front of important stakeholders in Washington on a range of topics, from H-2A agriculture workers to annual market reports, he said.

“We were getting somewhere,” said Benson, who is the national sales director for a California table grape supplier. “We knew they couldn’t address everything we had to say, but at least they were listening.”

That changed, he said, when he got a call from a USDA employee he had never met telling him his committee was being terminated. First the agency said it had decided to eliminate all federal advisory committees that weren’t required by law, before finally landing on financial constraints as a reason for eliminating the fruit and vegetable committee, Benson said.

The committee, one of seven the USDA cut on Feb. 20, spent $81,000 last fiscal year, the majority of which covered the costs of flying advisory members to and from Washington for meetings. Benson said the board had met virtually during the Covid-19 pandemic, as many others had, and was willing to go back to that approach if cost was the real issue.

BLS, NASA

When the Labor Department terminated the expert panel responsible for providing technical advice to the Bureau of Labor Statistics on collecting and analyzing data, it said the committee had completed its mission and was no longer necessary, according to Susan Houseman, who chaired the board when it was shuttered.

But BLS will always need guidance from outside experts because it must continually innovate to accurately measure employment-related data in a complicated, ever-changing economy even as it navigates significant resource constraints, said Houseman, a senior economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. For example, the advisory committee had been working on BLS’s ongoing effort to modernize its survey methodology, which is critical to maintaining data quality in the face of declining survey response rates, she said.

DOL axed the BLS Technical Advisory Committee in February. Trump fired the agency’s commissioner about five months later, alleging without evidence that she manipulated job numbers to make him look bad in revisions that showed a more dire view of the labor market than previously thought. But accurately estimating job growth becomes more difficult when surveys get fewer responses, driving more dramatic revisions.

“There has been lots of controversy about the accuracy of job numbers and allegations about BLS not having enough technical expertise, which flies in the face of discontinuing technical advisory committees,” Houseman said.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration formally terminated five science advisory committees in August, three months after the administration proposed slashing the agency’s science budget by half.

A funding shortfall of that magnitude would kill a slew of projects, including the efforts to study supernova explosions and other extreme astronomical events, and pull out of a multinational partnership to observe the merger of black holes, said Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, who led the now-shuttered Astrophysics Advisory Committee. The advisory panel had the credibility to draw attention to “some pretty terrible things going on within the Astrophysics Division” at NASA, she said.

“With the committee disbanded, the biggest thing we lose is transparency and accountability,” said Holley-Bockelmann, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University.

Aiding Conservative Presidents

Federal law requires expert boards’ work to be transparent to the public and their rosters to have viewpoint balance and subject-matter expertise, said Keith Rizzardi, a law professor at Nova Southeastern University. He formerly chaired an expert panel at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Eliminating advisory councils points to governing based on predetermined conclusions, uncomplicated by a public process geared towards developing consensus policies that can survive court challenges, Rizzardi said.

At HHS, which is home to about a quarter of all consultative boards, the dissolved expert panels include groups that provided specialized medical guidance on vaccines or experimental drug treatments, topics discredited by Trump and his advisers.

Boards of outside advisers have played a particularly valuable strategic role in the past for conservative presidents, who often staff them with experts more closely aligned with their views—a “shallow state” that can serve as a counterweight to the “deep state” of career agency staffers, said Brian Feinstein, a legal studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who’s written about expert panels.

“That makes the Trump administration’s elimination of advisory boards even more puzzling,” he said. “It suggests they’re not serious about crafting policy that will advance their political agenda.”

Daniel Schuman, executive director of the American Governance Institute, put the impact of the terminations more bluntly: “The Trump administration says it wants to cut red tape, but it’s stabbing itself in the back.”

Not So Simple

In some instances, the administration shifted the work of terminated advisory panels rather than abandoning it.

The National Institutes of Health dissolved more than two-dozen boards that reviewed grant applications for research, fellowships, and other matters. Much of that work has been farmed out to ad hoc panels managed by NIH’s Center for Scientific Review, according to former members of NIH advisory committees.

Cost considerations motivated that reorganization, which came at the expense of review quality, said Christoph Buettner, who chaired a now-defunct NIH advisory committee and now leads one of the new panels organized by CSR.

“From a strategic standpoint, this is a poor trade-off,” said Buettner, a professor at Rutgers University’s Robert Wood Johnson School of Medicine. “Decades of accumulated expertise and rigor have been lost, while any financial savings are more than offset by the diminished quality of evaluation.”

Another cost of the NIH reorganization seems to be the guarantee of transparency, balance, and expertise that’s required by federal law. Unlike the formally chartered advisory councils, the new CSR-managed boards aren’t subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act’s mandates.

Beyond setting standards for expert panels, that law also calls for an exacting process to create new ones, said Glen Staszewski, an administrative law professor at Michigan State University. The law’s requirements will likely be an obstacle if a future president wants to restore advisory committees that Trump ended.

“It’s not a simple as snapping your fingers,” Staszewski said. “Theoretically this system could be rebuilt, but it would require lots of time and effort.”