Dr. Sethuraman Panchanathan
"I believe that I have done all I can to advance the mission of the agency and feel that it is time to pass the baton to new leadership," writes Dr. Sethuraman Panchanathan, a computer scientist who was nominated to lead NSF by then-President Donald Trump in December 2019 and was confirmed by the Senate in August 2020. "I am deeply grateful to the presidents for the opportunity to serve our nation."
Although Panchanathan, known as Panch, didn't give a reason for his sudden departure, orders from the White House to accept a 55% cut to the agency's $9 billion budget next year and fire half its 1700-person staff may have been the final straws in a series of directives Panchanathan felt he could no longer obey.
At the American Educational Research Association meeting in Denver this week, researchers expressed concern but not surprise by the departure. Many noted that the increasing pressure on science funding agencies and restrictions on diversity initiatives made Panchanathan's position increasingly untenable.
On April 14, staffers from billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) set up shop for the first time at NSF and triggered a series of events that appear to have culminated in Panchanathan's resignation. Two days later, NSF announced it was halting any new awards for grants that had been recommended for funding by program officers and were in the final stages of approval by agency officials.
NSF said pending proposals that appeared to violate any of Trump's executive orders—in particular those banning efforts to increase diversity in the scientific workforce, foster environmental justice, and study the spread of misinformation on social media sites—would be returned for "mitigation."
On April 18, NSF announced it was terminating what could be more than $1 billion in grants already awarded because they clashed with those directives and "were no longer priorities" for the agency.
That most recent disruption to NSF's well-regarded grantmaking system was done on orders from DOGE. The same day, DOGE told Panchanathan to prepare a plan for massive layoffs across the agency. Earlier in the month, the White House Office of Management and Budget had told him the president would be requesting only $4 billion for the agency in his upcoming spending request to Congress for the 2026 fiscal year that begins on October 1.
Panchanathan refers obliquely to that draconian reduction in his resignation letter.
"While NSF has always been an efficient agency," he writes, "we still took [on] the challenge of identifying other possible efficiencies and reducing our commitments to serve the scientific community even better."
Before leading NSF, Panchanathan spent 20 years as a faculty member and then senior research administrator at Arizona State University. When nominated he was also a member of the National Science Board, NSF's presidentially appointed oversight body.
It's not immediately clear who will be named acting director before Trump names a replacement.
