A New Golden Age or a Brazen Power Grab? Inside the White House Plan to Overhaul American Science
On July 21, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, delivered a 90-page report to President Trump titled “Science: A New Golden Age.” It is not an incremental document. It explicitly positions itself as the first comprehensive rethinking of the U.S. science and technology enterprise since Vannevar Bush’s “Science: The Endless Frontier” in 1945, the landmark treatise that gave America the National Science Foundation, the university-based research system, and the basic science funding model that powered the postwar boom.
Eighty-one years later, Kratsios argues that the Bush model is broken.
“We have become dependent on a narrow set of legacy institutions,” the report states. “Our incentive structures reward conformity over bold inquiry.” The diagnosis is sweeping: the U.S. pace of discovery has slowed, peer review is too slow and too conservative, regulatory burdens have ballooned, and the country risks losing its scientific edge to China, which Kratsios explicitly names as America’s first peer-level competitor in research spending. The solution, as laid out across four pillars, amounts to a wholesale restructuring of how the federal government funds, organizes, and incentivizes science.
From Bush’s Endless Frontier to Kratsios’s Grand Challenges
Bush’s 1945 model was elegant in its simplicity. The federal government would fund basic research conducted by individual investigators at universities. Scientists would decide which questions to pursue through peer review. Industry would commercialize the results. The government stayed at arm’s length from the actual direction of research.
“Science: A New Golden Age” rejects that arm’s-length posture. Instead, the report calls for a dramatic shift away from investigator-initiated grants toward larger, mission-oriented team awards aimed at explicit “grand challenges.” The administration identifies flagship national missions: the Genesis Mission to double the productivity of American science through AI, a quantum computer for discovery science, commercial fusion power demonstration by the mid-2030s, crewed lunar return and a permanent lunar base, and next-generation semiconductor technologies.
Where Bush envisioned a bottom-up system driven by researcher curiosity, Kratsios envisions a top-down portfolio managed for strategic outcomes. The report advocates for a “portfolio approach” to federal science funding and recommends creating new institutional models including X-Labs (agile, time-bound teams of professional scientists) and expanded ARPA-like entities where individual program managers make bold bets.
What the Report Actually Proposes
The recommendations fall into several categories, each representing a break with the Bush-era consensus.
Funding reform is central. The report proposes moving money away from the traditional system where the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation distribute grants through consensus peer review panels. Instead, it calls for “golden tickets” that empower individual reviewers to champion ambitious proposals, fast grants for exploratory work, prize challenges, advanced market commitments, and regranting models that delegate funding authority to scientists in the field. The report notes that some federal grants now take nearly two years from submission to award, calling the timeline indefensible.
On the question of who gets funded, the report is blunt. It recommends reducing the share of federal research dollars flowing to leading research universities, which it characterizes as “legacy institutions” that have grown administratively bloated. It argues for redirecting support toward individual scientists rather than institutions, making funding more portable. Portable, multi-year fellowships would follow the researcher rather than being locked to a specific university, a change that could dramatically reshape the academic labor market.
Disciplinary priorities would also shift. The accompanying Fiscal Year 2028 R&D Priorities Memorandum, jointly issued by Kratsios and OMB Director Russ Vought, directs agencies to rebalance R&D portfolios toward foundational research and the physical sciences and engineering. The subtext is clear: less emphasis on social sciences, more on applied and physical sciences that align with national security and economic competitiveness.
Regulatory overhaul features prominently. The report calls for compressing review cycles, eliminating duplicative reporting requirements, and reining in indirect cost recovery that it says “supports administrative bloat.” It also proposes metascience units within federal agencies to institutionalize continuous improvement and study which funding practices actually produce the best research outcomes.
The crown jewel of the strategy is artificial intelligence. The Genesis Mission, launched in November 2025, would receive full funding to become the flagship national AI-for-science initiative. The vision involves linking supercomputers, scientific datasets, laboratory instruments, and AI models across the national laboratory system to enable autonomous hypothesis generation, experiment design, and analysis. The report ambitiously claims this could double American scientific productivity within a decade.
The Critics Respond
The response from the scientific establishment has been swift and sharply critical.
Nature and Science AAAS have both published warnings that the proposed system would concentrate unprecedented power in the hands of political appointees at the expense of investigator-driven, curiosity-based research. Critics argue that the shift from peer-reviewed investigator grants to centrally directed grand challenges would let political priorities override scientific judgment. The concern is not abstract: earlier this year, the administration proposed rules that would give political appointees control over individual grant decisions, a move the American Association for the Advancement of Science called a “brazen power grab.”
Sudip Parikh, CEO of AAAS, said the approach “will make future discoveries less likely.” The American Society for Cell Biology described the broader cluster of administration science policies as a “massive threat to American science.” Critics warn that reducing funding to leading universities and deemphasizing social sciences would hollow out the very institutions that produced America’s postwar scientific dominance.
Supporters counter that the status quo is the real threat. Alec Stapp of the Institute for Progress praised the report’s call for metascience units, portfolio-based funding, new institutional models like X-Labs, and reduced bureaucratic burden on researchers. “Scientists should spend more time doing science and less time writing and reporting on grant proposals,” he wrote.
What Comes Next
The report is advisory rather than legally binding, but its accompanying OMB memorandum carries real force. Federal agencies with at least $3 billion in fiscal 2026 R&D budget authority must submit implementation plans within 90 days. Those plans will incorporate the administration’s budget guidance into Fiscal Year 2028 submissions, meaning the changes could begin taking concrete fiscal shape within two budget cycles.
The debate over “Science: A New Golden Age” ultimately mirrors the debate over American science itself. Bush’s “Endless Frontier” assumed that the best way to produce useful discoveries was to leave scientists alone. Kratsios’s “New Golden Age” assumes that the challenges are too urgent, the competition too fierce, and the system too calcified for that luxury. Whether the answer is more central direction or less political interference is the question that will define U.S. science policy for the next decade.