White House report calls for big changes to ‘calcified’ U.S. science system

Arguing that the pace of discovery in the United States has greatly slowed in recent decades, a new White House report calls for dramatic changes in how the federal government supports science. It would reduce funding to the nation’s leading universities, replace investigator-inspired research with much larger awards for teams working on a series of grand challenges, emphasize the physical sciences at the expense of other disciplines, and seek alternatives to peer review for choosing the best ideas to study. The report, released last night, asserts that those changes are a necessary correction to “an increasingly calcified system.” Critics, however, decry them as a wrong-headed plan that would compound the damage already wreaked by President Donald Trump’s administration. “We have become dependent on a narrow set of legacy institutions [and] our incentive structures reward conformity over bold inquiry,” writes Michael Kratsios, Trump’s science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in a 90-page report that promises a “new golden age” of science if its recommendations are carried out. The report, which Trump requested in April 2025 from the former business executive, is accompanied by a 20-page memorandum on the administration’s research priorities that anticipates the president’s next budget request to Congress. Kratsios discussed the report when he testified today on Trump’s current budget request for research during an appearance before the science committee of the House of Representatives. And Republicans unanimously applauded its vision. “Today’s hearing is about priorities,” said the committee’s chair, Representative Brian Babin (R–TX). “After years in which Washington too often measured success by dollars obligated rather than by results achieved, this administration has begun to refocus the federal research enterprise on excellence, accountability, and outcomes.” Democrats, however, complained that the report and the accompanying list of priorities would weaken scientific institutions and starve traditional basic research areas by narrowing the number of disciplines receiving federal support and spending more to commercialize technologies involving artificial intelligence, quantum information science, fusion, space, semiconductors, and robotics. They said it would worsen the damage the administration has done to research in the past 18 months by terminating grants, firing scientists, applying political criteria to grant decisions, and proposing deep cuts to agency budgets. “The topic of this hearing is Unleashing the Golden Age of Science,” said the top Democrat on the panel, Representative Zoe Lofgren (CA). “That title is stunningly ironic, as this administration is systematically destroying U.S. science, while our allies and adversaries alike look on astonished.” The initial response from a handful of policy experts was more measured but often negative. “The administration’s vision is all motherhood and apple pie—who could be against ‘discovery science?’” says Keivan Stassun, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University and member of the oversight body for the National Science Foundation (NSF) before Trump fired its 22 members this spring. “But under the hood it’s really a vision for faster technology development and commercialization while underinvesting in the fundamental research, expert peer review, and scientific workforce that make those advances possible. You don’t get more apple pie by cutting down the apple trees.” Neal Lane, who was former President Bill Clinton’s science adviser after leading NSF in the 1990s, calls the report “disappointing” and says the “wrong-headed policies” already implemented by the Trump administration make the report “a missed opportunity” for genuine reforms. The Golden Age report is intended as an update to Endless Frontier, a 1945 report by Vannevar Bush, science adviser to then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The latter laid the foundation for more than a half-century of U.S. preeminence in science through the federal government’s support of basic research. But Kratsios and Trump’s vision would abandon one of the key legacies of that earlier report: the central role of U.S. universities. Instead, Kratsios writes, science funding should “prioritize individual scientists over legacy institutions. … Too much of our research enterprise has come to serve itself rather than the scientists in it.” The new report’s recommendations fold in many of the executive orders, administration directives, and agency actions already being carried out. It also offers up several untested ideas for spurring innovation, including one championed by progressive groups. Known as “regranting,” it would allow federal grant recipients to redistribute some or all of the money to individuals or organizations who may have even more novel approaches but lack the infrastructure and savvy to obtain the original grant. But several Democrats on the committee felt that a pivoting away from universities doesn’t make sense. “You can’t ignore the universities where scientists work,” says Representative April McClain Delaney (D–MD). “They couldn’t do their jobs without the infrastructure available to them on campus.” She says the report ignores the fact that universities play a vital role in the nation’s research ecosystem and is trying to change too much, too quickly, before getting input from all sectors. Delaney is also worried about the potential negative impact of implementing the report’s recommendation for research agencies to “support a broader range of performers, including a new generation of mission-driven research organizations, to expand our scientific horizons.” She fears that approach could result in allocating federal research dollars based on a grantee’s connections to the administration rather than on the quality of the science. And other Democrats noted that a controversial proposed change by the White House budget office in how the government manages trillions of dollars in federal spending would codify such political intervention. Lane also sees a larger downside to adopting Kratsios’s vision. “I anticipate the report will be used as the rationale for making further cuts in the budgets and staffing of federal research agencies while limiting their authority and accountability to the American people,” he says.