‘It’s a form of apocalypticism applied to science policy’

Ari Schulman: Tony, I’ve spent the past year trying to make sense of what the Trump administration’s agenda is for science. It’s a tough job, because you hear two very different stories coming from the admin. One story is about restoring gold-standard science, restoring trust in science, solving the replication crisis, fueling cutting-edge research, and doing more to free scientists from needless grant paperwork and support them early in their careers. It’s a lofty story, practically a love letter to science. One of the narrators of this story writes in City Journal that “we should be working toward tapping the energy at the heart of the sun and hanging our achievements in the balance of the stars.” The other story is the crackdown. It’s a crackdown against anything that stinks of DEI. It’s a crackdown against elite universities that allowed antisemitism, but by way of cutting or threatening the vast funding the government gives them to do scientific research. It’s against entire categories of research funding like mRNA vaccines and pandemic preparedness, which the administration seems committed to undermining. And it’s a crackdown against the massive funding the government gives to science broadly, with the administration proposing 40 to 60 percent budget cuts to the NIH, NSF, and others. Let’s call these two stories Good Cop and Bap Cop. My question is: If you’re defending the administration, you have to say the two cops are on the same page, working a master strategy. Is anyone making that case? M. Anthony Mills: I think there is an internally coherent story that could be told along the lines you suggest, a kind of good cop / bad cop strategy for reforming the federal scientific establishment and the broader research enterprise in America, including the institutions of higher education. Setting aside for now whether anyone in the administration is making that argument, here is my best effort to “steel man” it: The American research enterprise is broken and in ways that not only hamper scientific progress but also harm the institutions that have grown dependent on the current system. The classic things to point to here would include the replication crisis as well as more general concerns about shoddy research practices, misuse of statistics, hype, and even outright fraud — problems that are more acute in some domains of research than others, including those, such as biomedical research, that directly impact the real world through drug development, clinical medicine, and public policy. These phenomena are interconnected with, and possibly explained by, a set of pathologies within the research ecosystem that have troubled science policy experts and science commentators for decades. Most notable are a set of incentives that encourage scientists and scientific institutions to value quantity over quality (publish or perish), positive over negative research findings (encouraging “p-hacking” and exacerbating the so-called “file drawer problem”), hyper-specialization over interdisciplinary collaboration, orthodoxy over heterodoxy (leading to group think and stifling of dissent), incremental progress over breakthrough discoveries, etc. Add to this a long-standing concern that scientific research is incentivized to be too “academic” or self-referential, disconnected from societal outcomes or commercially valuable innovations. Our friend Dan Sarewitz gave a diagnosis very much like this in the famous essay he wrote for you a decade ago called “Saving Science.” Since the appearance of Dan’s essay, another concern has arisen: that scientific progress itself is slowing down. This case was made in an influential 2018 essay for the Atlantic, “Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck,” by tech entrepreneur Patrick Collison and physicist Michael Nielsen. In a follow-up, Collison and economist Tyler Cowen called for a “new science of progress” to illuminate and address the conditions that have given rise to a slowdown in breakthrough science. Since then, we’ve also seen the continued growth of “metascience,” which aims to systematically study and improve the research enterprise by policy experimentation and realigning incentives. Chronologically speaking, that gets us roughly to 2024, Trump’s return to power. We’ve been talking mainly about the problems many see as impacting science. But these are interconnected with some deeper issues that go beyond the character of scientific research and implicate the whole system of government subsidization of academic research, and that illuminate how the issues plaguing science have always been intertwined with broader social and political dynamics surrounding higher education, populism, meritocracy, technocracy, and the technological power enabled by modern science. The system dates back to World War II, after which there was a political debate — with New Deal liberals led by President Truman and Senator Kilgore on one side and scientists such as Vannevar Bush and their conservative allies, on the other — about what role the government was going to have in science during peacetime. I’ve written about that story in your pages, so I won’t rehearse it here. But one thing I want to emphasize is that there was actually concern on both sides of that debate that a system of government support for science could devolve into a kind of subsidization machine for higher education, which they feared would lead to all kinds of problems for science, higher education, and society. Such concerns intensified as federal funding soared in the post-war decades and became central to the financial model of the research university. American physicist Alvin Weinberg, who ran Oakridge Lab, worried during this period about the baleful effects of what he called Big Science — that the profusion of government grants and contracts was bureaucratizing research, encouraging scientists to become “publicists,” and disproportionately rewarding entrenched institutions that knew how to play the game. Bush himself privately worried that the system was overextended and was subsidizing mediocre science. Many of these concerns foreshadowed those mentioned above. But then beginning in the 1960s, you also had the environmental, anti-nuclear, anti-war, and student movements, growing concerns about automation and the pace of technological change — a general sense that technology was outstripping human control. Science, insofar as it was seen as a mere handmaiden to technology, was no longer viewed as a source of progress but as a tool of domination, of war and imperialism. Lending credence to these perceptions were revelations about the U.S. biological weapons program and the Tuskegee syphilis experiments carried out by the U.S. Public Health Service. No longer the beacons of liberal democracy’s triumph over totalitarianism, scientists came to be viewed, in the words of physicist Ralph Lapp, as the “high priests in the Temple of Science.” Students called on scientists to divest from the “military-industrial complex”; the New Left urged more direct democratic control of science and technology. The 1970s economic crisis exacerbated all of this, and Congress began to rethink how and why it funneled so much money into science. Federal science funding stalled out. Limitations were placed on the Defense Department’s funding of academic science; regulations and ethical constraints were imposed on certain areas of scientific research; the biological weapons program was shuttered; new mechanisms of congressional oversight were imposed. Starting in 1980 or so, private industry began to eclipse government as the primary research funder. The so-called Golden Age of science was over. But federal funding has nevertheless continued to grow and remain vital to academic science. And many of the problems identified by Weinberg, though somewhat dormant for the last half-century, have persisted or worsened and lately reemerged with a vengeance. So if I were to sum up the argument, it would be: Over the last 80 years, we’ve built up a system in which scientists play a prominent role in determining policies that benefit science — or, more accurately put, that benefit a handful of elite academic institutions that gobble up a disproportionate share of taxpayers’ dollars — rather than the wider society. This not only hampers the quality of research but also creates a moral hazard within higher education, a cynicism among researchers, and a loss of trust among the broader public. It’s a betrayal of science’s social contract. So far, I’ve been sketching a fairly nonpartisan version of the “science is broken” narrative. That’s deliberate, to draw attention to the fact that the diagnosis is hardly unique to those on the right. But we’re talking about the Trump administration, and so the story isn’t complete without adding — and of course most on the right would lead with this — the charge that the current system enables, incentivizes, or fails to prevent gross politicization of science and the corruption of scientific research by “wokeism,” “radical environmentalism,” “reproductive justice,” or other ideological projects. These kinds of concerns are also longstanding but kicked into overdrive during the Great Awokening and the Covid-19 pandemic, when science was widely — and not without reason — seen by many on the right as becoming highly politicized. Okay, so that’s the diagnosis, and we can come back to whether this is the correct diagnosis or not. But let’s assume it is for now. Why think what the second Trump administration is doing is (or could reasonably be understood as being) the right medicine? Actually, the answer to that is pretty straightforward and suggested by the fact that these problems are not new but go back decades, being deeply intertwined with the entire postwar system. The argument is that while the problems are well-known and have been widely discussed for decades — and indeed many efforts have been made to try to address them — none has worked, or has worked only on the margins. In short, the governmental and academic institutions that make up the heart of the social contract for science are insensitive to serious reform because they have grown so dependent on the status quo. And so since politics as usual hasn’t worked, we need to try something more radical to drive real change. This is where “bad cop” comes in. And it’s also how to square the soaring rhetoric of the gold-standard science executive order you mentioned and other similar rhetoric coming out of the administration with the disruptive and destructive actions taken by the administration — the “crackdown,” as you called it. They are, so the argument goes, part of the same strategy of breaking the back of the status quo in order to usher in real change — forcing rather than asking these institutions to reform themselves. Schulman: And do you believe this story? Does it actually explain what the administration is doing? Mills: I think what you’re asking is whether this story is really the best way to make sense of what the administration is doing, regardless of whether it is correct as diagnosis. Is it really a part of the self-understanding of decision-makers currently in power? There’s also a question about whether the diagnosis itself is correct, and, if so, whether the administration is pursuing the right course of treatment. Maybe we can come back to that. As to the first question, the short answer is: It depends on what you mean by “the administration.” Many in the scientific community and higher education see the administration’s rhetoric about scientific progress, gold-standard science, a golden age of science, etc., as suspicious at best, subterfuge at worst — co-opting the language of reform for something much more nefarious. To them, the narrative I sketched probably looks like ex post facto rationalization for what are at bottom aggressive, seat-of-the-pants, and incoherent decisions motivated by revenge rather than a principled theory of the case. But it’s important to keep in mind that while the administration — and the GOP more broadly — is extremely unified around Donald Trump (although lately perhaps becoming less so), it is still a collection of internal factions with differing constituencies and interests. The longer answer to how these factions within the administration think about science and current efforts at reform takes some care to spell out, so bear with me. These groups are deeply divided, riven by disagreements about such fundamental questions as the proper scope of state intervention, the viability of free-market capitalism, the role of the United States in the world order, and the harms and benefits of science and technology. To some extent this is true of any administration or political coalition. What is different now is that rather than managing these internal conflicts and negotiating between rival factions within a broadly shared vision for the country — in the way that, say, FDR or Reagan did — the current GOP is united by the personality of Donald Trump, who tends not to have well-formulated or consistent views on complex policy topics. This leaves rival centers of power to vie for influence on their priorities. How does this play out in science policy? Well, these different factions have differing and sometimes conflicting views and instincts about science, some well-honed, many not. There are — think of these more like ideological tendencies than airtight descriptions of real demographic groups — populists, who are characteristically distrustful of scientific and medical experts; social conservatives, who tend to be concerned about ethical issues in biotechnology and medical science; and the MAHA crowd, motivated by distrust of the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries. Although important tensions run through these camps — for example, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s pro-choice history rankled many social conservatives when he was tapped to lead HHS — they do tend to share a skeptical posture toward the scientific and medical establishment and toward Big Tech. Then you have the Tech Right — people with an entirely different worldview, part of Big Tech. These are techno-optimists, some of them committed transhumanists, who disagree with the aforementioned factions on a range of policies, from immigration to trade to tech regulation. Like MAHA, the Tech Right is a recent addition to the GOP coalition. Its roots on the right and constituencies among Republican voters are shallower than the populists or social conservatives, but its influence in the administration is enormous — much greater than the social conservatives. The Tech Right is amply well-represented in the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology — PCAST, which a friend joked has now become “PCAT” — and was, for a time, also institutionalized in Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The Tech Right overlaps with yet another camp — the national conservatives, who, though they skew social conservative, view American technological capacity as vital to our national interest. (Illustrative here is the pro-AI speech in Paris last year by Vice President Vance, a nationalist social conservative.) Nationalists are much more open to state intervention in the market than your traditional “fusionist” conservatives, even if many of them favor a much lighter touch on AI regulation than the social conservatives or the populists or the MAHA crowd. Speaking of traditional conservatives: They aren’t especially well-represented in the current administration but still fairly prominent on the Hill and among the voting public. And at least historically, they have tended to be favorable toward federal science funding, albeit with a preference for “basic” over “applied” science. So these groups diverge ideologically, even sociologically, especially when it comes to science and technology. Different parts or versions of the “science is broken” narrative I sketched above — for instance, is the problem that science is being hampered by bureaucracy or that scientists are running amok? — would resonate more or less with different factions. Yet they all nevertheless converge on some key issues: a shared alienation from cultural progressivism, a disdain for major societal institutions, especially legacy media and elite universities, and antagonism toward the administrative state — all of which got supercharged during the Great Awokening and Covid. These shared grievances have played out in terms of science policy in ways that have moved the GOP — or at least this administration — into a very different place than where Republicans have been historically. It’s important to recognize that this is a change. It’s been a popular trope among Democrats going back to George W. Bush or even Ronald Reagan to say that Republicans hate science and therefore want to gut it. According to this view, Trump’s strategy is the same old GOP strategy taken to an extreme. But historically, the GOP has actually been a prominent champion of federal funding of academic science, starting with Vannevar Bush, who was a conservative Republican, which is why federal science funding has not only tended to increase over time but to do so in particular under Republicans, often even more so than under Democrats. Sure, there have always been fiscal conservatives who have questioned the public’s return on investment, or cranky libertarians who argued that the federal government should leave science funding completely to the private sector. It’s true that federal science funding stalled somewhat during the beginning of Reagan’s first term, when there was uncertainty about what an ideologically conservative administration would mean for science policy. Yet by Reagan’s second term, funding had resumed its upward trajectory. In the 1990s, when Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over,” Gingrich shuttered the Office of Technology Assessment and science policy experts were warning the scientific community that it could no longer take rising federal budgets for granted. And then what happened? Gingrich and the Democrats worked together to double the NIH budget! None of this is to deny that there have been many partisan controversies over federal science — concerning the size of budgets, social science funding at the NSF, funding of stem cell research, etc. These were important, but viewed from today’s vantage point, they look like skirmishes within a larger background consensus. (The stem cell debate occurred right in the middle of the NIH doubling.) But together, the Great Awokening and Covid appear to have shattered this consensus. Not completely shattered — Republicans on the Hill have quietly rebuffed the administration’s efforts to radically reduce the budgets of science agencies such as the NIH. But what we’re seeing from the administration is something different in degree and kind. I’d point to three important ways this is manifesting itself, besides downward pressure on budgets: a dramatic effort to exert political control over federal science policy, particularly how grants and contracts are allocated; a more significant challenge to the historical link between federal science and universities than we’ve seen since the 1970s; and a cratering of GOP support for the NIH, particularly amid the intense congressional scrutiny of Anthony Fauci. If this were the end of the story, then it might be tempting to conclude that your “crackdown” version is correct, and that all the talk about scientific progress is just subterfuge. But there is one more faction within the admin, too often overlooked, that we haven’t talked about yet but that is actually vital to science policy — and a bit more difficult to place within this ideological topography. Call them the science reformers. This is a diverse camp itself, and includes Silicon Valley adjacent figures, science skeptics, Covid warriors, and policy nerds interested in metascience. These are the people who are actually staffing and leading many of the relevant agencies, from the OSTP to NIH to DOE Science to the Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP) at the NSF, etc. Think of Jay Bhattacharya at NIH and Michael Kratsios at OSTP. Though he wasn’t tapped for this role by Trump, I’d also include Erwin Gianchandani, who leads the TIP directorate. In general, the science reformers share many of the fundamental assumptions and goals of their coalitional partners — they’re part of the administration, after all — especially the backlash to wokeism, Covid, administrative overreach, etc. But they have well-formulated views about science, what ails it, and what should be done. They buy the narrative that science is broken, but because scientific and technological progress is being undermined — by political ideology, bureaucracy, and entrenched interests — not because they fear these forces are outstripping human control. Unlike the populists, the social conservatives, and the MAHA crowd, then, the science reformers tend to share the pro-innovation and pro-AI optimism of Silicon Valley. They’re helping to implement the administration’s Genesis Mission. Their goal is to accelerate science and technology, not restrain it. They want to make agencies like the NIH more efficient, not abolish them. This is the Golden Age of Science part of the coalition. So if you’re asking “Why is the administration doing what it’s doing?” you have to also ask “Who in the administration? Who is saying what and who is actually making decisions and driving change?” The MAHA vaccine agenda is very different from the science reformers’ metascience agenda; is very different from the post-Covid push to shut down all gain-of-function research; is very different from the pro-AI Genesis Mission; is very different from OMB director Russell Vought’s radical views about executive control over the budget. And then there are all those factions that don’t really care about science policy at all but are motivated by other grievances — punishing elite universities, for instance. These folks are not libertarians with principled arguments for why federal funding distorts markets. For them, science policy — and federal science budgets in particular — is simply a weapon to be wielded in the culture war. The charitable theory of science reform under Trump II, which is supposed to link a lot of this together is: stick, then carrot. The first phase of the administration was destructive, punitive, purgative, followed by an effort to reconstruct the federal research enterprise under a new vision of scientific progress. To a certain extent, that theory matches reality — after the destructive and disorienting months that followed Trump’s inauguration, we now have a positive vision for science policy coming out of the administration. But at the same time, the destruction and disorientation continues — and a lot of the damage inflicted in those first few months has undermined the ability of the reformers to implement their agenda (as I predicted in a piece I wrote for you last summer). In other words, the destructive, punitive part of the strategy, if it really is or was a strategy, has undermined the constructive part. In my view, this isn’t happening because the reformers don’t genuinely believe in reform. They do, and they’ve got some good ideas. It’s happening because other centers of power are driving a lot of the changes that are affecting science policy. That is, decisions impacting science policy — including not just substantive policy but also agency budgets and staffing — were and still are being made elsewhere in the administration by actors with different views about science policy (for example, RFK) or completely different motivations and goals that have little to do with science policy per se (Vought, previously Musk). This — and not only the substantive disagreements among factions — is hampering the administration’s ability to implement a coherent and consistent science policy agenda. Schulman: I’m curious for your thoughts generally on how culture change in science happens. Science reformers talk constantly about Science — the Endless Frontier, Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report to the president, in something like the way the works of Bacon and Descartes are spoken of by modernity’s fans and critics alike as having helped inaugurate it. Zachary Pirtle offers an interesting distinction between the “high church” of science — which includes works like Bush’s report, as well as the new report Science: A New Golden Age by Michael Kratsios, who serves roughly the same role in the Trump admin that Bush served in FDR’s — and the “low church.” “Decisions made by mid-career GS-14 program officers and program managers across the federal government,” he writes — meaning the actions of the low church — “often do much to steer and shape the outcomes of science in a significant way. Many people working in the trenches often just ignore the high church proclamations; work often continues much as it always did, even though the need for thoughtful changes can be paramount.” I wonder if you agree or disagree with that statement. Obviously, a Kratsios or Bush can inaugurate major changes in policy frameworks. But can they inaugurate major changes in scientific culture, in beliefs about how science works, in the ways that the vast army of science’s boot soldiers reason and decide and understand themselves? What other sources does culture-shaping mainly come from if not these reports? Nova documentaries? Presidential speeches on putting a man on the Moon? Mills: That’s a great question and there’s a lot to say about it. I agree with Zach’s point, and he puts it nicely. But I’d add something to it that points in a different direction. I’m tempted to make an analogy here with Thomas Kuhn’s concept of “normal science” versus moments of revolutionary rupture. I think during ordinary conditions, which is to say most of the time, Zach is right and low church actually matters a lot more than high church. But what we also see throughout the history of science policy are moments of real transformation — paradigm shifts, if you like — when the assumptions underlying “normal science policy” are challenged and then overthrown and new ones take root; then suddenly things re-solidify and a new paradigm emerges and holds sway for a time. I think we’re living through one of those moments of transition right now, and 1945, when Science — The Endless Frontier was written, certainly was one too. And during these moments, you do find these prominent figures — they’re often heads of agencies or bureaus, so high church, in Zach’s lexicon — who are pivotal to ushering in change. But pivotal how? Here we need to be clear about what made Bush such an important figure. The Endless Frontier report was important, but not because it provided a blueprint for the machinery of federal science. Some of that machinery was already in place by 1945 and was later expanded and extended — especially after 1957, the Sputnik moment — according to a logic and in response to needs that had little to do with Bush’s argument. Aside from its sometimes exaggerated influence on the organizational structure of the National Science Foundation — frankly a small player in the vast federal research apparatus — Endless Frontier did not spur institution-building. (So I’m basically reiterating a version of Zach’s point.) But what that document did do was provide a conceptual framework and a language in which to understand the relationship between science and innovation, universities and government, and science and democratic society more broadly. We are still beholden to this language and this framework today. It’s not really how scientists talk among themselves. But it’s how they talk when they have to justify their work to external stakeholders — when they’re in self-advocacy mode. And it’s how heads of agencies and research divisions speak when they are representing their institutions to the public or to elected representatives. It’s the ecclesiastical Latin of the high church of science policy, to stick with Zach’s metaphor. But this was still cultural change, and enormously influential. Yet Bush was pivotal not only — or even primarily — because he wrote the Endless Frontier. And part of the reason why that document was able to have the influence it did in the first place turned on two other factors. First, Bush was an institution-builder of the first order at a time of remarkable institution-building. What he personally accomplished in this respect both before and during World War II was nothing short of astounding: He co-founded Raytheon, was the vice president of MIT, and headed up both the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (precursor to NASA) and the Carnegie Institute. During the war, he launched and led the Office of Scientific Research and Development, which oversaw the Manhattan Project, the Radiation Laboratory, which developed radar, and the mass production of penicillin — among other feats — while serving as the nation’s first presidential science advisor. When Bush spoke about science, innovation, and organization, he spoke from a genuine position of experience and authority. (He appeared on the cover of Time magazine a year before the report appeared.) Second, Bush spoke at a moment of profound optimism in science and technology, in no small part because of the role that science and technology played in the war effort. So his argument went very much with the grain of American culture at that time. The idea of giving scientists both public support and freedom to continue innovating was an easy sell. He provides a language to articulate what a lot of Americans were already feeling. In both respects, the contrast with the situation that Kratsios faces is striking, and through no fault of his own. We are in a moment not of institution-building but of institutional dysfunction, distrust, and even destruction. To some extent, the vision Kratsios outlines in his new report goes with the grain of contemporary culture, insofar as it advocates for some pretty dramatic changes to the status quo. But its optimistic vision of scientific and technological progress and Bushian emphasis on the importance of unburdening science from political controls comes at a moment when a lot of Americans are deeply disillusioned with science and technology and want to see more, not fewer restraints on the research enterprise. It’s a document written in the spirit of 1945 for a cultural moment that more closely resembles 1973. Schulman: It’s easy to look at the combination of failures and forces involved here and throw up your hands in futility. You can criticize the new scientific counter-establishment for being either too idealistic and naïve or else too focused on the past at the expense of the future — and I have done both — but then you also have to acknowledge that there is only so much power they have in their roles, which is what I was getting at with my last question. We could talk about the role of presidential leadership and the bully pulpit — my point about Kennedy’s man-on-the-Moon speech again — although I am at a loss as to how to offer any sort of “Mr. President, we believe you should exercise your presidential leadership to bring the country together once again around …” recommendation with a straight face right now. And in all these cases we can talk about how limited all actors are by the broad and deep disillusionment Americans are feeling with institutions generally. That is most true of all for ordinary Americans themselves, for whom there surely seems to be little they personally can do other than to read and get mad online. This last part is the most worrisome of all, because “I believe that society should improve” seems like the most unactionable conclusion imaginable no matter who you are. It feels very much like a recipe for all of us to engage in excuse-making about why we can’t do this or that until those people who are really responsible for this mess answer for what they have done, which of course is probably beyond my control to make happen — which is even further reason that what I am being asked to do right now is mainly to get even madder online. All of this is to say: I want you to try to look beyond the whole of the problem and identify one specific actor who is in this situation right now, who has a specific action they have the power to take that would help move us toward some new social consensus on the purpose of American science. They can be anywhere on the totem pole and the effect size can be small, as long as it is not zero and the spirit of it seems instructive. Who is that and what should he or she do? Mills: The answer is Congress. Let me say a few things and then come back to why. You mentioned Kennedy and his “we go to the Moon” speech. I don’t think it’s impossible in principle for a charismatic and talented politician with a clear and compelling vision for the country to assume political and moral leadership again — on science and technology or on any other issue. To be sure, Kennedy’s speech, though it occurred after and to some extent because of the shock of Sputnik, also took place at a very different cultural moment, one of high institutional trust and technological optimism, as we were discussing earlier. By contrast, ours is a moment of distrust and disillusionment. It’s easy to conclude that we’d be unmoved, or perhaps annoyed or even aggravated, by the very attempt, so polarized and cynical have we become. As evidence of our cultural intransigence, one could point to the fact that we have had any number of external shocks — our own Sputniks, you might say — from Covid to AI to China, and are certainly in a protracted competition with a rival communist power. But none of these shocks has had the same galvanizing effect. They only seem to pull us further apart. Is that just baked in — are we just irredeemably dysfunctional as a political culture now? The truth is, we don’t know. When was the last time we had a president with the kind of talent, willingness, and vision to rise above the current moment? It’s a daunting task. But look, in the 1970s, at the nadir of Nixon’s presidency, say, or the low point of Carter’s popularity, things looked pretty grim — corrupt, dysfunctional, impervious to change. Who could have imagined that the Berlin Wall would fall in little more than a decade? That’s about the span from 2016 to 2029, from Trump’s first election to the next presidential administration. Now to be clear, I’m not optimistic about some Kennedy- or Reagan-like figure (depending on your ideological preferences) rising from the ashes to save us. I’m just saying it’s not impossible for a serious and talented political figure who has at least the aspiration to take moral leadership to effectuate real change; and a lot can happen quickly. But something that preceded the political transformation of the 1980s that’s too often overlooked is that Congress took the initiative. In response to the general discontent in the late 60s and early 70s with the scientific and political establishments, concerns about technological risks, fear about the military’s influence on science, technology, higher education, and culture, anger at the Vietnam War, outrage at Nixon corruption and expansionary presidential powers, Congress reasserted its role in the constitutional order in a dramatic and enduring way. Indeed, many important laws, rules, procedures, and institutions that still inform how Congress functions and relates to the executive branch date to this period. Most notably, there was the War Powers Resolution (1973), limiting presidential use of military force, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (1977), restricting the president’s emergency power. More directly relevant to science and technology policy — I alluded to some of this earlier — Congress enacted the Mansfield Amendment (1969), which limited military funding of science; the Federal Advisory Committee Act (1972), which imposed regulations and transparency requirements on the advisory system in the executive branch; the Energy Reorganization Act (1974), which responded to widespread concerns about conflicts of interest by separating the government promotion of civilian nuclear energy and regulating nuclear safety into separate organizational units; and the National Research Act (1974), which established limits on human subjects research after revelations about the Tuskegee experiments and related concerns about patient autonomy. Congress and the president together also created the Environmental Protection Agency (1970) and ratified the Biological Weapons Convention (1972–75). But beyond substantive policy, Congress enacted a suite of reforms that empowered it to discharge its constitutional role more effectively, enabling it to make more informed decisions about policy and conducting more effective oversight of the executive branch. These included the Legislative Reorganization Act (1970), which, among other things, renamed and expanded the Congressional Research Service and, together with the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act (1974) — which sought to reclaim Congress’s power of the purse — further empowered the Governmental Accountability Office. Finally, there was the Technology Assessment Act (1972), which established OTA — a science policy favorite. We can debate the merits and long-term effects of these policies and reforms. But together, what they did was demonstrate a responsiveness on the part of Congress that is sorely missing today. They showed to the public that Congress sought to be and to some extent really was a democratically responsive mechanism for deliberation about complex areas of public policy with wide-ranging consequences. They also proved that Congress was a jealous guardian of its constitutional roles and responsibilities. I’m as scandalized as anyone by the extent to which Congress has not moved to reassert its power in the age of Trump. The problem actually long predates Trump, and so I haven’t been surprised, but I’m still exasperated. Even so, I’m cautiously hopeful — I don’t say optimistic — that something like what happened in the 1970s with Congress could happen again today, not because I hold the current occupants of political office on Capitol Hill in especially high esteem, but because there’s a certain amount of political gravity working in its favor. You can see glimmers of this in how Congress has pushed back on some of the administration’s overreaches, on NIH for instance, or the OMB rule (by no means on all of the admin’s overreaches and not as forcefully as one might wish — hence “glimmers”). On Congress’s underappreciated functioning, I refer you to my friend and colleague Kevin Kosar’s work on “toxic” versus “secret” Congress. However likely or not, I think a congressional renewal of this sort would in many ways be more important and enduring than another Kennedy or Reagan, although of course the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Congress is where enduring policy is forged through deliberation, compromise, and accommodation. It’s more representative than the presidency — much more so than executive-branch agencies — and incorporates a wider range of values and interests. It’s also the body that creates executive agencies like the NIH and oversees them, not to mention appropriates funding for them. This is true for science and technology policy or any other domain. Trump undid many of Obama’s executive orders, and the next Democratic president will surely undo Trump’s — this seesawing between administrations is nauseatingly familiar in executive-branch-led policy, whether its executive orders or regulatory policies, rules, and regulations. But the executive branch is still operating under the constraints imposed by Congress over half a century ago. A legislative-centric vision of reform frankly suits my own political sensibilities better. There’s something too Caesarist about the idea of a charismatic president arising from obscurity to deliver us from ordinary politics. We’ve had way too much of that way of thinking these past decades for my taste. It’s basically the same logic that underlies Trumpism. To be sure, if you think everything is so thoroughly corrupt and rotten, then legislative reform is pretty weak tea. And I’m not saying it’s a panacea or that by itself it’s sufficient. But this gets us back to the start: whether the diagnosis I sketched to begin with is itself persuasive. Your question is premised on the assumption that it is — or even that it doesn’t go far enough. Things are so bad and impervious to change that even the current administration’s willingness to break the mold isn’t working! I just don’t think that everything is that thoroughly rotten and corrupt. The main flaw in the diagnosis I sketched is not that it’s wrong about, say, entrenched interests, research quality, democratic accountability, or politicization. It’s that its indictment is way too thoroughgoing. It’s a form of apocalypticism applied to science policy that rationalizes what is ultimately a much easier but far less effective mode of wielding political power. Imagine an alternative universe in which a charismatic and talented Republican swept into office in 2024, amid all the discontent with the institutional status quo, but with a clear and compelling vision for the country and a strategy to implement constructive reform. Imagine what kind of positive change might have been possible at the NIH, say, under such a president, with a reform-minded director at the helm (such as the current one), an army of metascience nerds, and a legislative strategy to work with the majority in Congress, not to mention a friendly court. That sounds like a fairy tale when compared to reality, but it’s not actually a fairy tale — it has happened and could happen again.