AINEWS
More than 100 federal science advisory panels have been terminated. Researchers and patient advocates say the institutional cost goes beyond canceled meetings.
Netia McCray opened an email on a Tuesday morning in 2025 and read two words that ended her federal service before it began: "effective immediately." She had been appointed to a federal advisory committee on long COVID, one of 13 outside doctors, researchers, and a patient representative hand-picked over months. The committee was terminated before it ever held a meeting.
The long COVID panel was one of more than 100 science-focused federal advisory committees cut under the second Trump administration, according to a Nature news analysis cited by NPR. The terminations span departments and disciplines, from homeland security and agriculture to energy and commerce, and they are happening through ordinary Federal Register notices rather than a single sweeping announcement.
Federal advisory committees are the formal channel through which agencies have long pulled outside expertise into decisions: setting research priorities, reviewing grant programs, advising on regulatory standards, and giving patient communities a seat in agency rule-making. Members serve without pay. The value sits in the cross-functional network of experts a meeting assembles, and in the institutional memory that survives between administrations.
Executive Order 14217, signed in February 2025, authorized agencies to terminate discretionary federal advisory committees. The Federal Register documents the result. The Department of Homeland Security terminated committees in March 2025. The Department of Commerce followed with 14 committees in June. The Department of Agriculture cut seven in May. The Department of Energy, in November, terminated six panels while establishing one. EPA's science advisory committees lost members in a separate January 2025 purge, reported by NPR.
Public Citizen, the consumer advocacy group, found in March 2026 that more than a quarter of US healthcare-related federal advisory committees had been shut down. The health toll is the most legible part of the cuts. McCray runs a nonprofit expanding STEM access for students of color and wanted to bring that perspective to a federal panel that had no obvious substitute. Dr. Alexandra Yonts, a pediatric infectious-disease specialist at Children's National Hospital and one of the few US clinicians focused on pediatric long COVID, was also on the slate. Yonts treats children whose families drive across state lines because so few pediatric long COVID specialists exist.
"We need new therapeutics," Yonts told NPR. The statement carries the stakes. Advisory panels are where the case for new research directions gets made in a form agencies can act on. With the committee dissolved, that work does not pause. It moves, or it stops.
Researchers and patient advocates describe a parallel infrastructure now being assembled. State health departments are convening their own long COVID panels. Academic consortia, including several funded before the cuts, are coordinating the work federal committees used to direct. Patient-led groups are writing guidance documents that previously would have come from agencies. International bodies, including the World Health Organization, continue to track post-acute COVID outcomes and now shoulder more of the synthesis load.
The substitutions are real and partial. State panels lack the statutory weight of federal advisory committees in agency decisions. Academic consortia can recommend research but cannot convene the regulatory conversations a federal panel can. Patient groups can document lived experience but do not have the appointment power to put a community member in front of a regulator. For the narrow pool of pediatric long COVID specialists, there is no second bench. Yonts is one of a small number of clinicians nationwide who treat children with the condition, and a federal committee would have been one of the few forums where their collective judgment could be channeled into agency decisions.
The cumulative effect, researchers say, is not just a backlog of canceled agendas. It is the slow erosion of the cross-functional expert network that takes years to assemble and cannot be replaced by a single appointment. The next administration can reconvene panels. The conversations those panels were supposed to have this year will not happen.