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Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of the National Science Foundation, resigned Thursday after nearly five years at the helm. His resignation comes less than one week after he issued sweeping priority changes—including terminating funding for projects that focus on diversity, equity and inclusion or combating misinformation—at the independent agency that funds billions of dollars to nonmedical university research each year.
“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,” Panchanathan wrote in a resignation letter, first reported by Science. “I am deeply grateful to the presidents for the opportunity to serve our nation.”
Although it’s not immediately clear what prompted his resignation, Panchanathan is among the latest top federal officials who have resigned since President Trump started his second term in January. The administration has also fired thousands of other federal employees, including dozens at the NSF, and terminated many grants that don’t align with the agency’s new anti-DEI priorities. Additionally, Republican senator Ted Cruz of Texas has been targeting the agency for months, calling it a bastion of “a far-left ideology.”
According to Science, even more changes are coming to the NSF. The Department of Government Efficiency reportedly told Panchanathan earlier this month to plan to fire half the NSF’s 1,700-person staff; the Office of Management and Budget reportedly told him that Trump only plans to request 55 percent of the agency’s $9 billion budget for fiscal year 2026.
“While NSF has always been an efficient agency,” he wrote in his resignation letter, “we still took [on] the challenge of identifying other possible efficiencies and reducing our commitments to serve the scientific community even better.”
Trump picked Panchanathan, a computer scientist from India who previously worked as a top research administrator at Arizona State University, to run the agency during his first term in office. But soon after Panchanathan started his six-year term in 2020, voters rejected Trump’s bid for re-election, and most of Panchanathan’s work at the NSF happened under former president Joe Biden’s administration.
Under Panchanathan’s leadership, the NSF’s stated priorities have included increasing diversity in the STEM workforce, forming industry partnerships, job creation and broadening research opportunities for smaller universities and community colleges. In 2022, Panchanathan oversaw the creation of the NSF’s Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships, which is focused on “accelerating breakthrough technologies, transitioning these technologies to the market, and preparing Americans for better-quality, higher-wage jobs,” according to the NSF’s website.
Despite the second Trump administration’s quick and radical changes to some of those Biden-era policies, Panchanathan was seemingly adapting—up until his resignation Thursday—while many other scientists sound the alarm that Trump's policies will hurt research and innovation.
In his statement on the NSF’s reoriented priorities last Friday, he said that any NSF-funded activities in support of “broadening participation” in STEM “must aim to create opportunities for all Americans everywhere” and “not preference some groups at the expense of others, or directly/indirectly exclude individuals or groups.”
