August 24 2026
(from gemini)
Michael Kratsios – Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)
- The OSTP Mandate & "Science: A New Golden Age": The Office of Science and Technology Policy coordinates the fragmented U.S. science apparatus across the NSF, Department of Energy national labs, DARPA/Department of War, and the NIH. Kratsios rejects the notion that the administration is "anti-science," pointing to the flagship policy blueprint Science: A New Golden Age. The administration's goal is to double U.S. scientific output by empowering individual researchers, cutting bureaucratic red tape, and restoring empirical inquiry and the scientific method over institutional dogma.
- Politicization, Dogma, and Rebuilding Public Trust: Kratsios argues that the broader scientific community has suffered a severe loss of public trust over the last two decades, culminating during the COVID-19 pandemic. When public health leadership (such as Anthony Fauci) framed scientific opinion as absolute authority rather than an ongoing process of hypothesis testing and data collection—while endorsing contradictory public policies around school closures, masking, and mass protests—it severely damaged public confidence. Restoring scientific credibility requires returning to rigorous empiricism and welcoming dissent and debate.
- Reallocating Federal R&D & Eliminating DEI in Basic Research: The federal government spends approximately $200 billion annually on science and technology, but spending more money does not automatically translate to breakthroughs. As an example of misallocated capital, an analysis of the National Science Foundation (NSF) showed that roughly 25% of grant funding during the Biden administration (amounting to ~$2 billion annually, or $8 billion over four years) was diverted into DEI-related criteria rather than pure, merit-based scientific discovery. The administration has frozen and redirected these funds toward hard, fundamental research.
- Climate Science Realism & The Clean Energy Transition: The administration's energy and climate strategy focuses on technological abundance rather than economic restriction. While acknowledging human greenhouse gas emissions contribute to warming, Kratsios emphasizes that extreme, scientifically unsubstantiated catastrophe models (like RCP 8.5) were weaponized by media and policy makers before being pulled from recent assessments. The administration is prioritizing high-density, deployable clean energy—including an aggressive commercial nuclear push and a formal national target to achieve commercial nuclear fusion by 2035.
- Combating Scientific Stagnation & "Eroom’s Law" via Meta-Science: Despite NIH funding more than tripling from $14 billion in 1998 to $47 billion in 2024, scientific return per dollar has steadily decayed (exemplified by Eroom's Law, where drug discovery efficiency halves roughly every nine years). Because consensus-driven peer-review boards systematically favor safe, incremental research, OSTP is establishing "Meta-Science" experimental units at NSF and NIH. These units are testing new funding mechanisms, such as "Golden Tickets" (allowing individual reviewers to unilaterally fund high-risk, high-reward proposals without committee consensus), fast-track 6-month exploratory grants, and longer-dated 5-year awards.
- Updating the 1945 Vannevar Bush Paradigm: The post-WWII model (Science: The Endless Frontier) was established when the federal government funded 70% of all national R&D and universities executed the work. Today, the private sector drives 70% of R&D, alongside new vehicles like Focused Research Organizations (FROs) and private philanthropies. OSTP is shifting the federal focus away from university overhead toward pre-competitive, basic discovery science that the market will not fund, while funding researchers directly with portable fellowships regardless of whether they work in academia, private institutes, or independent labs.
- National Moonshots & The AI "Genesis Mission": Big, centralized federal missions remain crucial for marshaling national resources. Active milestones include landing American boots on the moon by 2028, deploying a nuclear reactor in space by 2028, establishing lunar base infrastructure by 2030, and delivering a scientifically relevant quantum computer via the Department of Energy by 2028. The administration's top flagship initiative is the "Genesis Mission," an all-of-government mandate applying artificial intelligence to accelerate discovery across materials science, chemistry, physics, and advanced mathematics.
- The Scientific Race with China & The Domestic STEM Talent Crisis: China has grown its R&D spending 19-fold since 2000, publishing 50% more scientific papers than the U.S. across almost every non-life-science discipline due to lower labor costs, massive automation, and heavy state subsidies. Rather than copying China's top-down command-and-control system, the U.S. must preserve its market-driven venture ecosystem while urgently addressing domestic talent vulnerabilities: 70% of U.S. computer science PhD recipients are currently foreign-born, the median age of an intramural NIH researcher has reached 71 years old, and domestic K-12 gifted STEM pipelines were degraded by ideological educational reforms. OSTP is rolling out industry-partnered 4-year PhD programs and reinvesting in high-performing youth STEM initiatives to rebuild America's scientific pipeline.
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