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"I am afraid that there will be very nasty reactions," Rinke Smedinga, whose father was an NSB member and worked at Camp Westerbork, from which people were deported to concentration camps, told Dutch online publication DIT.

In their public statements, Kirshner and Shelton argue that NSF should fund both telescopes—even though the $1.6 ceiling approved by NSB is only enough to complete one.

Although Congress hasn’t appropriated any money for the projects, a directive in NSF’s final 2024 budget adopted earlier this year “strongly encourages the NSB to ensure that the US-ELT program includes a two-observatory footprint.”

An answer comes, indirectly, from the diary of Inge Jansen, the socialite wife of an NSB official: She didn’t mention the events at all, recording only her lunch engagements and other trivialities.

The remaining number of vacancies was larger than normal because two NSB members left in 2021 to join his administration: chemist Geraldine Richmond to become undersecretary for science at the Department of Energy, and planetary scientist Maria Zuber to be co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.