Advisory Committee Analysis

Despite the high profile changes or dismantling of several federal advisory boards in the second Trump administration, no analysis existed of the broader impact on federal advisory committees. To quantify the changes, I built a web scraping pipeline that gathered details on all federal advisory committees from the FACA Database website. Because the website dynamically loads content only once opened in a browser, I used Playwright in Python to automate the process of visiting each page and downloading the necessary information.

My colleagues and I found that during the first eight-and-a-half months of the second Trump administration, more advisory committees were eliminated (nearly 160 committees) than during any other 12-month span going back nearly 30 years. The data I compiled allowed us to show how it wasn’t just high profile vaccine committees being eliminated. Almost no corner of the federal government was left untouched from a NASA scientific advisory committees offering insight on astrophysics to an advisory board providing safety recommendations for lithium ion batteries on airplanes.