The tech-broification of American science has

What happened

” At roughly the same time, Trump’s science adviser Michael Kratsios was on Capitol Hill selling lawmakers on an equally grandiose promise: “A New Golden Age” of American science, one that would prioritize artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuclear energy and downplay life sciences. Taken together, the two announcements offer the clearest picture yet of how Donald Trump wants to remake American science.

AI features heavily, both as a tool for scientists and as an engine for discovery itself, and Kratsios encouraged government funds to increasingly go to AI use and individual researchers, rather than universities, traditional hubs of scholarship and research. More broadly, the manifesto favors a goal-oriented and results-driven approach that resembles a Silicon Valley startup more than traditional scientific enterprise.

Venture capital and startup culture are built around identifying promising people, projects, and ideas, setting clear goals with measurable targets, and moving quickly, iterating constantly, and cutting work that seems unlikely to deliver results. Science operates differently. Basic research can take years or decades before its importance or practical implications become apparent and it requires a system capable of supporting work of uncertain, even seemingly dubious, value.

Its outcomes cannot always be predicted, and some of the most important discoveries emerge serendipitously from research pursuing entirely different questions. A science funding system needs to account for those differences, said Claes de Vreese, a professor of AI and society at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Why it matters

They mark the latest front in a wider war on the research establishment — one that has worked to suppress “woke” or DEI projects, threatened funding for universities, researchers, and projects on ideological grounds, curtailed the flow of international students and researchers, and handed unprecedented control over federal funding to political appointees.

The result has been the gradual, systemic dismantling of the long-established norms and institutions that, for all their flaws, helped turn the United States into the world’s scientific superpower. Researchers say the vision is ill-conceived, contradictory, and less a blueprint for scientific renewal than a politicized power grab that fundamentally misunderstands how science works.

It treats public research more like a Silicon Valley startup than a public good, privileging measurable returns and speed over the slow, uncertain, and unpredictable work that has produced some of history’s most consequential discoveries. Far from reviving US science, they warn, the agenda could prove disastrous for American research. The Genesis Mission grants span fields ranging from drug discovery and biomedical science to energy, advanced materials, and robotics.

The 278 projects, reportedly selected from over 5,000 applications, all share a common premise: leveraging AI to accelerate scientific discovery. ” Technology companies including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are also contributing millions of dollars in compute, AI credits, and other support to the initiative. Kratsios explicitly linked the program to the administration’s broader science agenda, calling Genesis Mission “the culmination of the reforms suggested in” its “Golden Age” manifesto.

Styled as a modern successor to Vannevar Bush’s 1945 policy report “Science, the Endless Frontier,” which shaped much of the postwar system of federal research funding, the lengthy document proposes shifting support away from institutions and toward individual scientists, while giving private companies a larger role in directing and conducting research, and political appointees more power to block grants they disagree with.

What to watch

” That model also stands in stark contrast to Bush’s championing of open-ended basic research pursued without an eye for immediate dividends, on the grounds that such work would ultimately yield applied breakthroughs. The scientific system built around that principle is what helped turn the United States into the world’s research superpower.

Even so, it is not the first time the Trump administration has invoked Bush’s legacy to sell policies that would dismantle the system he helped create. Some of its proposals have obvious appeal, including reducing the administrative burdens on scientists, speeding up grantmaking, and making the system more flexible.