DOE Science Committee Draws Concerns Over Limited Expertise

Former Energy Department scientific advisors fear the agency’s pared-down advisory panel lacks the specialized expertise to effectively plan for the future of physics fields.

Last year, the six field-specific advisory committees for the Office of Science — ranging from the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel to the Biological and Environmental Research Advisory Committee — were replaced by one smaller, overarching “Office of Science Advisory Committee” (SCAC).

Former members of the field-specific committees expressed concern to FYI that the current panel does not have enough expertise to produce rigorous long-range plans. The current committee has 22 members, and its subcommittees that write the reports range from six to eight members each. Based on public lists of previous committee membership, only eight members on the current panel also served on the previous committees, with none from the nuclear science or biological and environmental research.

A DOE spokesperson emphasized the importance of long-range plans to achieving major scientific discoveries and said the agency anticipates asking the committee to produce such plans, written by subcommittees with “topic-relevant subject matter experts.”

The new committee recently issued a decadal report for the Genesis Mission federal AI initiative and a shorter-term roadmap for quantum computing. The committee will hold its next meeting on Nov. 12, and another decadal report on scientific facilities is expected in December.

The committee’s recommendations shape the future of the 21,000 researchers at over 300 institutions and 17 national laboratories supported by DOE’s Office of Science, which operates 27 scientific user facilities.

Previously, DOE’s decadals and other long-range plans each focused on one field within the Office of Science and produced by the corresponding committee. The research community contributed to planning, and DOE considered the reports in its spending decisions.

The foresight provided by those plans has been important for coordinating major projects within the fields that the Office of Science oversees, said Nadia Fomin, chair of the American Physical Society’s Division of Nuclear Physics. (APS is an AIP Member Society.) For instance, the 2015 long-range plan for nuclear physics named the Electron-Ion Collider a top priority; that project recently started construction and expects to start operations in 2037.

Fewer experts per field

The handful of fusion experts on the consolidated committee, for instance, “are all good people,” said Sam Barish, the former federal manager for the Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee (FESAC). “But to get the best advice, you need more people with a wider breadth of knowledge. Each person on these committees is an expert in the field, but the fields are so broad that three people do not give you enough expertise.”

The DOE spokesperson said that all Office of Science disciplines are represented by the “membership and work” of the committee. “The committee is a powerful voice on initiatives that are priorities for the entire office,” the spokesperson added.

Previously, the number of committee members for fusion alone ranged from 20 to more than 30, and other advisory committees have had close to 40, Barish said.

Fomin said it “would be great” to have a representative for nuclear physics on the committee to convey the importance of the field’s priority facilities. “All of our facilities, they serve a unique purpose. They’re not interchangeable, and they’re not multiple versions of the same thing. And most of them are one-of-a-kind in the world,” Fomin said.

In comparison, computing is well-represented on the new committee, said Martin Berzins, the former chair of the Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee. These members’ strong expertise in computing “would seem to be a reasonable compromise” given that the committee has fewer people overall, Berzins said. “These people all work at very high levels, but that’s inevitable given a much smaller committee and a much broader remit.”

Even for just one scientific field, the previous committees needed both depth and breadth to work effectively, former members said. Carlos Paz-Soldan, a former member of FESAC, said his committee benefited from having many members with deep, specific expertise that could collectively cover the field of fusion energy sciences.

He pointed out that the current committee must handle a much larger portfolio, because it spans the entire Office of Science. “I would be concerned that with a smaller group lacking key areas of expertise, it would be an imperfect coverage,” Paz-Soldan said.

Some noted that the current committee has many industry members and relatively few academics. “In the fusion area, there isn’t a single academic, which is a little strange,” Paz-Soldan said. “Fusion is one of the few [areas] where I would have said, ‘Yeah, it’s important to have a private sector voice in the room.’ For some of these other fields, that voice simply isn’t part of the picture.”

DOE’s advisory committees are most useful because, unlike most DOE staff, their members actively conduct or manage research in the field, Barish said. “Having the expertise from the research scientists is critically important,” he said. “It appears to me that the administration is trying to reduce the amount of advice coming from the field to the federal agencies.”

The facilities report

Scientists are watching closely for SCAC’s forthcoming facilities report, which some interviewees said will be the first big indicator of the committee’s vision for DOE-funded science. “I think the community is very interested to hear how that goes,” Fomin said.

The report charge from DOE Under Secretary of Science Darío Gil suggests considering the highest-priority facilities if the Office of Science had $2 billion, $4 billion, or $6 billion to divide among its portfolio of proposed projects, which totals more than $22 billion. The subcommittee’s process includes input from former committee chairs, Office of Science staff, lab directors, and town hall attendees.

Each of the six previous committees produced facilities reports in 2024, said Paz-Soldan, who served as vice chair of FESAC’s 2024 facilities report subcommittee. “They’ve been handed, effectively, six field-based prioritizations, which then somebody has to take the job of combining,” he said. “I think if they hadn’t had that prior activity, they’d be in a very difficult position.”

Many previous long-range plans solicited significant grassroots input from scientists in that discipline. For example, the nuclear physics long-range planning process in 2023 and 2024 included town halls organized by APS, 24 white papers from researchers, and more than 60 authors for the plan itself. Scientists could nominate members of the committee and speak directly with them at town halls, Fomin said. “There was a transparency and a feeling of partnership,” she said.

The exercise of choosing priorities as a community is “very important,” said Gail Dodge, former chair of the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee.

APS’s Division of Nuclear Physics hopes to continue working in partnership with DOE to produce long-range plans, but they have not been told what the agency’s plans are for that process, Fomin said. “I don’t think they know. If they know, that information has not been communicated to us,” she said.

The DOE spokesperson said the agency anticipates following “a model of community engagement similar to that used previously” for long-range strategic plans produced by SCAC.

Paz-Soldan said additional subcommittees focused on each discipline could help address the limitations of the current committee. “Many of the things at the community level are just too fine-grained. It would not really fit with the scope” of the broader committee, he said.

Field-specific committees also give those scientific communities a place to voice concerns, Dodge said. “At the time when these committees are canceled, we are grappling with the huge reductions in research funding,” she said. “And the question is, who’s talking about that? How can we talk about that? When can we talk to people about that? An NSAC meeting would have been an opportunity to ask questions about that. ... The fact that NSAC doesn’t exist is just another thing that makes things somehow more uncertain.”

Dodge compared the current committee to the National Science Foundation’s board, which Gil served on for five years and chaired for one. “He has experience in running a committee that was essentially covering all of NSF, and he must have thought that that was a very effective committee,” Dodge said. (The National Science Board was fired by President Donald Trump in April.)

“They were only making decisions about funding the highest-level things,” Dodge added. “I think he probably has good intentions in forming the SCAC, and I think there could be a lot of good in that. As I said, I just feel like it’s a concern that we don’t have the lower-level committees.”