Opinion: How Congress can fix expert advisory committees

Oct. 30, 2026 Daval is a research specialist at the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and a former lawyer in the FDA’s Office of the Chief Counsel. Kesselheim is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, director of PORTAL, and a former member of the FDA’s Peripheral and Central Nervous System Advisory Committee. In September, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. fired the two vice chairs of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force. This move was both unsurprising and troubling. The task force is a critical advisory body to HHS, reviewing scientific evidence to provide recommendations on whether private health insurers should be required to cover services like cancer screenings at no cost to patients. Congress created the task force as part of the Affordable Care Act and require by law that it be staffed by people with “appropriate expertise,” and “to the extent practicable, not subject to political pressure.” These firings are the latest chapter in a vast project of eliminating, ignoring, and replacing scientific advisory committees. In 2025, the Trump administration terminated 151 advisory committees at scientific government agencies, including 75 in HHS. It has altered or ignored those that are left. In 2025, Kennedy fired the entire Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which provides public recommendations on vaccines. His replacements are, to varying degrees, sympathetic to his unscientific views, and a majority lack substantial expertise in vaccines and immunology. At the Food and Drug Administration, agency leadership has largely ignored the standing advisory committees that have historically weighed in on new drug approvals. The FDA convened a record low number of advisory committees in 2025. Instead, it hosted a handful of pseudo-scientific look-alike meetings called “expert panels.” Panelists were handpicked and invited for a single meeting to share their own data, analysis, and conclusions, unmoored from any semblance of collaborative consensus and, too often, scientific rigor. Expert advisory committees matter for two reasons. The first is obvious: Agency policymakers need high-quality, independent advice to improve the quality, credibility, and legitimacy of agency decision-making. Agencies can’t possibly have the internal expertise to handle every question. This is especially true after staffing cuts to agencies like the EPA, FDA, and CDC. The other reason is accountability: When a legitimate expert advisory committee makes a recommendation about what an agency should do, it leaves a public record that enables us to hold our government accountable if it declines to follow that advice. Over the past few decades, courts, Congress, and the public have come to rely on these public recommendations — in congressional oversight, judicial review, and science journalism — to better understand the choices expert agencies make. This is what happened when the FDA approved the Alzheimer’s drug aducanumab in 2021 despite the near-unanimous vote of the advisory committee (which included one of us) against approval. The committee noted conflicting evidence on the drug’s efficacy and clear safety risks, including brain bleeds, in large numbers of patients. The negative vote anchored the debate that followed. Critics pointed to it as evidence that the FDA had made a terrible mistake, and payors and hospital systems used it to justify not paying the outlandish price set by the manufacturer. Patients largely avoided drug, with the whole episode culminating in investigations by the media and Congress that demonstrated improper pressure by the manufacturer on the FDA leading to the approval decision. Advisory committees don’t just provide recommendations to agency policymakers. They enable us to literally hold the agency to account for its decision — to explain why it thinks its advisers were wrong. With no advisory committee to create a record, policymakers can more easily evade hard questions about unscientific or politically motivated decisions. The dismissals at the USPSTF follow a Supreme Court decision in 2025 stating that the secretary of HHS can remove members at will. The court reasoned that the secretary has the power to appoint them, and “no statute restricts [their] removal.” But Congress can, and should, change this. It has an array of tools at its disposal. Depending on the circumstance, it could enact for-cause statutory removal protections, staggered terms, formal expertise and qualification requirements, and enforceable conflict of interest rules. It could require that advisers be chosen more transparently and according to stricter criteria. It could even vest the power to choose advisers in another body entirely, akin to how independent redistricting commissions draw state electoral boundaries. These reforms would likely survive constitutional scrutiny because advisers do not actually make policy. Their advice is nonbinding. The Supreme Court’s recent decision striking down statutory removal protections for agency heads depended on the idea that the agency head was exercising executive authority that must ultimately be accountable to the president. But independent expert scientific advisers do not exercise authority; they merely speak authoritatively. And when they speak, they are heard by those of us — courts, Congress, the press, and through them, the public — to whom public policy must ultimately be accountable. This evisceration of scientific advice is untenable. If Congress is committed to the idea that evidence, science, and expertise should guide public policy, then it needs to act by insulating expert advice from arbitrary political control. C. Joseph Ross Daval is a research specialist at the Program On Regulation, Therapeutics, And Law (PORTAL) at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School and a former lawyer in the FDA’s Office of the Chief Counsel. Aaron S. Kesselheim is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, director of PORTAL, and a former member of the FDA’s Peripheral and Central Nervous System Advisory Committee.