GoKawiilMichael Kratsios, chief science adviser to US President Donald Trump, released a report this week that reimagines how science in the country is funded. Credit: Daniel Heuer/Bloomberg via Getty
Washington DC
It was a big week for science in the administration of US President Donald Trump. On Tuesday, the president’s chief science adviser, Michael Kratsios, release a report called Science: A New Golden Age that proposes substantial changes to federally funded research. The next day saw him help to unveil some of the first winners of research grants from the Genesis Mission, the administration’s flagship artificial-intelligence initiative.
For the past year and a half, the Republican-led administration has made headlines for attempting to cut funding for US science that it disfavours. This week’s events are notable because they move forward the science that it does favour — in particular, AI.
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Some 5,000 teams applied for funding from the Genesis Mission, which the administration billed as a programme “comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project” to accelerate US science with AI. At a summit on 22 July, officials announced about 280 winning projects in a first phase of the programme. Teams will apply AI to problems such as improving the US power grid and automating laboratories, and will receive a 9-month grant for between US$500,000 and $750,000. Researchers in these teams can also submit applications for a second phase: a three-year programme involving millions in annual funding.
“I was very, very, very happy” to be chosen “because it was incredibly competitive,” winner Jeremy Zucker told Nature at the summit. Zucker, a computational scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, is leading a project that will model algal growth in ponds to maximize biofuel production.
Kratsios’s report got a more mixed reception at a hearing in Washington DC that he attended on the same day. In the report, he calls for shifting US science funding away from “legacy institutions” such as universities. “Too much of our research enterprise has come to serve itself rather than the scientists within it,” he wrote. Under this new vision, individual scientists would be supported by programmes such as ‘golden tickets’, which give grant reviewers the ability to override the decisions of their colleagues to fund high-risk proposals. “We should be testing other ways to make breakthroughs than what we’ve been doing for so many years,” he said at the hearing of the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology. He argued that US science is stagnating and needs to be rethought.
Members of the US Congress, who decide what science to fund, had mixed reactions. Republicans on the committee broadly expressed support for Kratsios’s vision for US science; Democrats, however, criticized the Trump administration’s cuts to science budgets and agencies, as well as its push to take political control of grant awards. “You aren’t launching us into ‘the golden age of innovation’. You’re sending us back to the Stone Age,” said Gabe Amo, a Democrat representing Rhode Island.
Some scientists have been quick to criticize the report. Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, wrote on the social-media platform Bluesky that the administration seems determined to “destroy” US universities. (Trump and his Republican allies have accused US research institutions of being discriminatory towards conservative views, and the administration has withheld funding from some universities, citing antisemitism.)
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