WASHINGTON — The White House con­firmed Friday that it had dis­missed the en­tire National Science Board and re­placed the 24-member body over­see­ing the National Science Foundation with what of­fi­cials called “a sig­nif­i­cantly more ag­ile sci­en­tific gov­er­nance layer” con­ducted through a pri­vate Slack work­space pop­u­lated by ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists, pod­cast hosts, and one longevity founder cur­rently test­ing an un­reg­u­lated plasma reg­i­men on him­self.

Administration of­fi­cials said the change would help mod­ern­ize fed­eral re­search at a mo­ment when the NSF has al­ready been slowed by his­tor­i­cally low grant fund­ing rates and months-long de­lays.

“For decades, the board re­viewed bud­gets, set pri­or­i­ties, and ad­vised Congress on the long-term health of American sci­ence,” said one se­nior of­fi­cial. “That model sim­ply is­n’t built for to­day’s pace. If a ma­te­ri­als-sci­ence pro­posal can’t sur­vive six min­utes of real-time feed­back from peo­ple who use the phrase ‘first-principles thinker,’ tax­pay­ers de­serve to know that.”

Created in 1950, the National Science Board helps guide the NSF, which funds roughly a quar­ter of fed­er­ally sup­ported ba­sic re­search con­ducted at U.S. uni­ver­si­ties. The new Slack, of­fi­cials said, would pre­serve that mis­sion while re­duc­ing “legacy fric­tion around ex­per­tise.”

According to in­ter­nal doc­u­ments, the chan­nel in­cludes sev­eral ven­ture cap­i­tal part­ners, two AI founders, three pod­cast hosts who have “done episodes on quan­tum,” and an an­gel in­vestor best known for post­ing that room-tem­per­a­ture su­per­con­duc­tors were “now more of a dis­tri­b­u­tion chal­lenge.” NSF staff have re­port­edly been in­structed to up­load grant pro­pos­als di­rectly into the work­space, where they can be eval­u­ated us­ing a stan­dard­ized re­ac­tion sys­tem: ✅ for “disruptive,” 🔥 for “America needs this,” and 💀 for “insufficient path to en­ter­prise SaaS.”

Researchers seek­ing fed­eral fund­ing will now be asked to sub­mit a 90-second ver­ti­cal video ex­plain­ing how their work on crop re­silience, par­ti­cle physics, or an­tibi­otic re­sis­tance could “unlock new sub­scrip­tion rev­enue.” Proposals with­out a clear go-to-mar­ket strat­egy may still be con­sid­ered if they are de­scribed as de­fense-re­lated.

The chan­nel’s most ac­tive thread as of Friday was a dis­cus­sion about whether grav­i­ta­tional waves could be repo­si­tioned as a pre­mium sig­nal prod­uct for power users.