Blistering resignation letter urges direct action against Trump: 'Answer lies in refusal'

 A leading academic announced her resignations from two federal advisory boards in protest of President Donald Trump's policies.

Alondra Nelson, the Harold F. Linder Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and a researcher, author, policy advisor and nonprofit administrator, published an op-ed Tuesday morning in Time Magazine announcing announcing that she was resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council.

"I have encountered increasing barriers to the exercise of honest counsel," Nelson wrote. "These repeated obstacles of procedural circumvention, particularly insidious to those of us who have long advocated for more democratic and inclusive knowledge systems, represent not just personal frustration, but institutional regression."

Nelson said she had offered guidance on both boards on how the executive and legislative branches could be stewards of knowledge and enable discovery and innovation, but she said those ideals had dissolved completely for the National Science Board, which had been established under federal law to provide oversight to the National Science Foundation.

"The meaning of oversight changed with the arrival of DOGE," she wrote. "That historical tension — between the promise of scientific freedom and the peril of political control — may now be resurfacing in troubling ways. Last month, when a National Science Board statement was released on occasion of the April 2025 resignation of Trump-appointed NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, it was done so without the participation or notice of all members of the Board."

"Last week, as the Board held its 494th meeting, I listened to NSF staff say that DOGE had by fiat the authority to give thumbs up or down to grant applications which had been systematically vetted by layers of subject matter experts," Nelson added.

Nelson singled out DOGE "consultant" Zachary Terrell, who she said "showed more interest in his water bottle and his cuticles" during a closed-door meeting and had blocked the dispersal of approved grants after accessing the NSF awards system.

"This episode reflects a deeper concern: the erosion of meaningful guidance," she wrote. "When grant applications are vetoed and whole organizations restructured, the freedom to speak becomes meaningless when disconnected from the possibility of being heard."

The White House last week summarily dismissed Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden over her alleged pursuit of diversity, equity and inclusion policies and for allowing children to access "inappropriate books," which Nelson stated was false and alarming.

"The ouster of Hayden is part of a broader pattern of political targeting of women and Black public servants across the federal government," wrote Nelson, who is Black. "Her dismissal signals more than a routine personnel shift — it reflects a deeper contest over who controls the curation and dissemination of knowledge in the digital age."

The administration two days later fired Shira Perlmutter as register of copyrights after her office issued a report highlighting the dangers of generative AI, and each of these moves is part of what Nelson described as "the creeping normalization of authoritarian approaches to knowledge management and academic freedom," and she refused to participate any longer.

"What then, is the responsible course of action?" she wrote. "For me, the answer now lies in refusal, the withdrawal of participation from systems that require dishonesty as the price of belonging. My resignation represents such a refusal, not a surrender of responsibility but an assertion of it."