Julia Phillips, a former vice president at Sandia National Laboratories, said Trump administration firings threaten science education, workforce and innovation
At the end of April, the Trump administration fired the entire National Science Board, which oversees the U.S. National Science Foundation and advises Congress and the president on issues of science and technology.
One of the fired members, physicist Julia Phillips, spent 20 years at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, during which time she served as a manager of material sciences and oversaw research for the nuclear weapons science and technology program. She ended her career there as a vice president and chief technology officer.
Phillips began serving on the NSB in 2016 and was fired, along with the rest of the 22-member board, on April 27 via a one-line email from the Presidential Personnel Office.
In an interview with Source NM, Phillips, who retired from Sandia in 2015 and now lives in Gold Beach, Oregon, said the NSB firings will ripple through all levels of scientific research, from elementary school education to top research institutions.
“The very premise of science is that it needs open inquiry. Science needs to be able to go where, you know, the information and where curiosity takes you, and you have to expect criticism,” she said. “Having a reconstituted board of ‘yes people’ would be extremely concerning.”
Phillips said the dismantling of the board threatens the main source of funding for research and science across the country.
Last year, the Trump administration attempted to halve the foundation’s $9 billion budget, saying the NSF funded programs overly focused on “diversity, equity and inclusion.” Phillips, when asked about the issue, said “there’s a wide difference of opinion of how egregious the NSF issues were,” and noted that the “a lot of that [argument] was based on keyword searches.” In the case of a word such as “diversity,” that could “mean things like species diversity, which arguably has nothing much to do with the things that were so concerning to this administration.”
While Congress maintained the foundation’s funding, the administration has again proposed cutting the budget by more than half in the forthcoming year.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Source NM: How would you explain the National Science Board to anyone unfamiliar with its work?
JP: We speak for science and engineering in this country broadly, not just in overseeing the National Science Foundation, the only federal agency that is responsible for funding the research across the breadth of science and engineering.
There is no other body that is non-political that speaks for science and engineering. There’s no secretary of science, no cabinet level position. And all of the federal departments that have a lot of science and engineering, like the Department of Energy, have a mission of some kind. Science and engineering is a piece of it, but it’s not the end in itself.
How could the board’s firing impact New Mexico?
Depending on which field of science and engineering you choose, some of them receive the vast majority of their funding from NSF, others receive more from, say the Department of Energy, just to take an example that’s relevant to New Mexico.
The impact of cutting NSF funding on New Mexico occurs in a couple of areas. One that I can speak about is, of course, funding to universities’ research. So University of New Mexico, New Mexico State and New Mexico Tech, primarily — they would presumably be pretty well clobbered.
It’s going to have a fairly broad impact on a number of other spaces. The NSF funds a very high percentage of, for example, graduate education, in science and engineering, across fields. The other thing is that NSF has broad responsibilities for education in K-12, but also participates in education of the skilled technical workforce, which often happens in community colleges and other certification programs.
The Trump administration has called for increased nuclear weapons development. Does dismantling NSF and the governing board undermine that goal?
Public opinion and regulatory hurdles have kept New Mexico out of the game of next-generation nuclear fission reactors. Other countries are at least equal and possibly ahead of us in terms of modern technologies.
This is the first year that China outspent the U.S. in research and development. If you look at high-tech manufacturing, both the critical and emerging technologies that you hear this administration talk about, the U.S. was undeniably the lead in 2000. It is not the lead at this point. China is number one in manufacturing, including semiconductors.
There’s a real storm that is gathering, and we’re sitting here cutting programs. It is especially dangerous when you’re thinking about the world we’re in right now. Technological surprise is critically important. New Mexico has two national labs who live in technological surprise space. You have to be number one to be able to anticipate and create technical technological surprise instead of being surprised by it when it shows up on the battlefield or in the market.
I would prefer not to live in a country where we are number two or number three in the sciences, because that means we have a lot less control over our future. And we will probably suffer economically and maybe very well in the security space.
