During most years, a report from the director of the OSTP — the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy — wouldn’t be a topic that made national news. Established by Congress in 1976, it’s simply an advisory position: where the appointed director, colloquially known as the science advisor to the President (previously an unofficial position), makes recommendations about science and technology, regarding both domestic and international matters. Normally, a scientist serves in that position, charting the most long-term beneficial course for science and society possible, and working alongside the administration to bring that vision to fruition. However, that hasn’t been the response at all from the scientific community to current OSTP director (a rare non-scientist to serve in this capacity) Michael Kratsios’s new report, Science: A New Golden Age. Instead, warnings have come down from: Christopher Flavelle and Sheryl Gay Stolberg of the New York Times, who assert that the proposal is “overhauling how the government funds research,” University of Michigan Professor Shobita Parthasarathy, who points out “there is no respect for basic research” and “that Kratsios/Trump wants to destroy universities,” University of Washington Professor Carl T. Bergstrom, who calls it a straightforward continuation of “the universities are the enemy” lines of thought, medicinal chemist Derek Lowe, who writes, “The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to,” and University of East Anglia Professor (and National Academy of Science member) Ben Santer, who summarizes the contents of the report as “Trump is trying to burn down the National Academy of Sciences.” Is this alarmism and exaggeration on the part of these scientists? Or is it simply an accurate portrayal of what’s inside Kratsios’s report itself? The only way to know is to look inside the report and find out. I did, so you don’t have to, but you can if you like right here. Here’s what I found. Humanity has long dreamed of establishing a robust and continuous presence on another world, such as the Moon or Mars. One of the keys to such a successful colony would be the continuous generation of power, with nuclear power plants remaining a prime, and arguably our best, option. However, mortgaging our present scientific expertise and our long-term scientific infrastructure in service of a lunar land grab is not a recipe for sustained world-class science. Credit: NASA; edited by E. Siegel The beginning: letters from Kratsios and Trump. Instead of beginning with the report itself, there are two letters of intent: one from Kratsios, and another from Trump. Kratsios’s letter begins with a callback to Vannevar Bush: the first presidential science advisor, who served Franklin D. Roosevelt. He talked about: establishing the government’s role in supporting basic science, founding the National Science Foundation, and our responsibility to renew those foundations. He claims the report “demands that we modernize our institutions to match the achievements of our past and the ambitions of our future.” He claims that the goal is that, in ten years time, researchers will look back and say, “The vital questions I could not pursue then, I am free to pursue now.” He prioritizes funding individual scientists of merit, changing how research dollars are allocated, with the Federal Government setting clear scientific goals, and preparing the research enterprise for the AI revolution. In Trump’s letter, he outlines three priorities that he tasks Kratsios with delivering. For the United States to secure its position as the unrivaled world leader in critical and emerging technologies (mentioning AI, quantum information science, and nuclear technology). To revitalize America’s science and technology enterprise: pursuing truth, reducing administrative burdens, and empowering researchers to achieve groundbreaking discoveries. And ensuring that scientific progress and technological innovation fuel economic growth and better the lives of all Americans. With all of this in mind, let’s see how the report attempts to outline a path to meet these goals. This 1958 photograph shows six scientists in the United States with a model of the Explorer-1 rocket. At far right, Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger is standing, next to Dr. Werner Von Braun (seated). Together, these two men were among the many former Nazis that were brought to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip: to secure their scientific knowledge and talents, and to use their expertise for the benefit of American science. Without a commitment to funding basic, fundamental science, as well as the scientists who conduct it, the success of the Apollo program in the late 1960s and early 1970s would never have been achievable. Credit: US Army Aviation and Missile Command Chapter 1: Introduction The report begins by hearkening back to the foundational case for federal support of basic research: where basic research provides the bedrock for applied science and then technology and industry to build upon. It then immediately contradicts itself, claiming that it’s industry and engineering that now plays a vital role in spurring even basic research. That isn’t true; while industry and engineering do fund research and development (R&D), it isn’t basic research in any sense of the term. Basic research is just that: basic, and curiosity-driven, focused on long-term goals rather than short-term rewards. The Federal Government (and, to a lesser extent, private philanthropy) funds that; private industry does not. Immediately, on the first page of the first chapter, Kratsios plants a seed of skepticism inside those who rely on basic science for their livelihoods: that not only their research, but all of basic research could be killed in service of whatever short-term gains can be gleaned by investing in applied research and technology development. Kratsios then continues by conflating funding for basic research with funding that goes into all R&D combined, where the truth is that very little of overall R&D funding goes into basic research. Kratsios follows that up by saying, “The AI revolution, meanwhile, is transforming the conduct of science, and legacy scientific institutions and infrastructure are not ready to take full advantage of this transformation.” If “legacy scientific institutions and infrastructure” refer to universities, national laboratories, and science facilities throughout the country, it sounds like those are exactly the institutions that will be deprioritized in favor of AI-driven investments. This up-to-date “Eagle plot” of the black holes and neutron stars detected through gravitational wave mergers (orange and blue) and through electromagnetic signals (yellow and red) show the present status of known black holes and neutron stars under 250 solar masses. Just 11 years ago, there were no known gravitational wave events, but today, in June of 2026, there are 390 confirmed events, representing 780 pre-merger and 390 post-merger objects. No increase in computational capabilities could ever substitute for this actual data. Credit: LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA / Aaron Geller / Northwestern This is, in fact, a direct challenge to the core concept of basic research in the United States. Science is both a body of knowledge and a way of thinking, together. It is the process of interrogating reality: gathering data through observation, measurement, and experiment, examining that data in the context of not only what is known or thought to be possible, but also what is presently beyond our current means to comprehend and fully understand, and to let the results derived from the full suite of relevant data be the guiding light towards our conclusions. All of these things, as reported by Dr. Sanmi Koyeji, the leader of the Stanford Trustworthy AI Research lab, are things that require human scientists, and are things that AI is not only incapable of doing at present, but that “frontier AI models” score worse on than simpler AI models. Kratsios then goes on by asserting that the President’s priorities include: laying the foundations for a new “Golden Age of American Innovation,” to secure US leadership in emerging technologies against foreign rivals, and to ensure that all of America’s citizens will benefit from new scientific breakthroughs. The following four chapters then lay out specifics for bringing those goals about. We’ll see how promising those recommendation are: for strengthening the foundations of basic research, for securing US leadership at the intersection of applied science and emerging technologies, and for democratizing the benefits of scientific breakthroughs, ensuring that all of America’s citizens reap the rewards. On December 25, 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope launched successfully into orbit from an Ariane 5 rocket. Rocketry has been the only way we’ve ever successfully propelled a spacecraft any substantial distances through space, and we’ve successfully used rockets to break the bonds of Earth’s gravity since the late 1950s. Today’s great scientific and technological advances are enabled by a sustained history of society investing in fundamental science and science education: the pipeline for creating and fostering the careers of future scientists. Credit: ESA-CNES-ArianeSpace/Optique Vidéo du CSG/NASA TV Chapter II: Revitalizing America’s Science and Technology Enterprise This section begins with promising talking points: discussing the need to “reverse stagnation” and “restore breakthrough momentum” while then criticizing American scientists on two fronts: for how they’re not free to do their best work, and for how federal funding in academia remains anchored to what they call “mid-century” assumptions. However, instead of incentivizing long-term, original research that could lead to foundational breakthroughs — like the kind of work that Peter Higgs engaged in when he formulated the mechanism that would lead us to the Higgs boson — they instead seek solutions outside of the academic (including the university) system entirely. Their proposed methods for doing so range from: using the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program to fund early-career researchers outside of the academic system (even though, last year, they changed the rules, restricting the award so that only undergraduates and first-year graduate students could apply for it), taking the choices for who gets prestigious NIH funding away from peer reviewed committee and instead putting it in the hands of political appointees, diverting funding away from the foundational research conducted academic labs, university departments, and instead towards tech initiatives like X-Labs, to “streamline bureaucracy” away from the careful peer review process to arbitrary awards from political appointees, such as “golden tickets” and what they refer to as “real scientific infrastructure,” suggesting that mainstream science is misleading us on controversial topics ranging from climate to vaccines to peptides and more, and to empower the director to grant and cut funding at their own discretion, including through the power to defund whatever fields they themselves don’t hold in high esteem. It is a set of initiatives that, in the hand of someone with ideological predispositions, could reshape the country’s scientific enterprise into one that not only completely ends bona fide basic scientific research, but that runs the risk of promoting pseudoscience in its place. A technician, wearing a suit to avoid contaminating the material inside the main chamber at the National Ignition Facility, is shown working on the experimental apparatus. In the interior of this chamber, 192 lasers converge to heat a small pellet made out of light isotopes of hydrogen and helium. The achievement of “breakeven” fusion after decades of progress represents the culmination of a tremendous scientific effort. Credit: National Ignition Facility/University of Chicago Chapter III: Securing US Dominance in Critical and Emerging Technologies The US became a dominant scientific power not by shutting out foreigners, but rather by becoming a welcoming place for them to join and contribute at the cutting edge. Science is a global enterprise; its fruits do not belong to any one country, but rather to the whole world. Information-sharing — and the ability to conduct free and open science with collaborators from all across the world — is one of the key hallmarks of scientific advancement all throughout history. In our globally connected world, this is more true than ever. This has been documented across many fields and institutions: among microbiologists, by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, by the National Science Board across all disciplines of science and engineering, by UNESCO, the United Nations, and more. Instead, the administration proposes: restoring what they call “permissionless innovation,” which seeks to remove health and safety barriers from nuclear research, drone deployment, and even pharmaceuticals, allowing the private sector, and disallowing academic researchers, from accessing NASA, DOE, DOD, and other traditional science-focused facilities, diverting Ph.D. and postdoctoral fellowships away from academic research and towards private industry, supporting industry-led consortia instead of the national and international academic collaborations that led to the Apollo Program and the Human Genome Project, and giving the Federal Government the authority to decide which states will and will not receive federal funding for laboratories. This last point is important, as it directly contradicts the government’s stated goal from the first chapter of ensuring “that all of America’s citizens will benefit from new scientific breakthroughs.” By allowing the Director and the President to play favorites, openly, with states, there are no safeguards against inequitable selections, where only residents of certain states reap whatever downstream benefits ensue. The text itself explicitly supports that the government “partner with the jurisdictions that move the fastest,” which is synonymous with the deregulation of health and safety measures, the abolition of worker rights and labor unions, and the elimination of environmental regulations. In this picture taken on April 29, 2020, an engineer shows an experimental vaccine for the COVID-19 coronavirus that was tested at the Quality Control Laboratory at the Sinovac Biotech facilities in Beijing. Many of the techniques used to develop vaccines, including vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 and its various strains, would be illegal under a proposed new bill in US congress in 2025: the Dangerous Viral Gain of Function Research Moratorium Act. Under the new rules proposed in the “Science: A New Golden Age” manifesto, such research would not even be federally funded. Credit: Nicolas Asfouri / AFP Chapter IV: Ensuring that Science and Technology Better the Lives of all Americans This chapter begins with the statement of a lofty goal: to “enrich every American’s life.” However, that enrichment appears to be limited in scope to: the creation of manufacturing (blue-collar) jobs, the development of consumer products, and expanding the link between science and “hands-on craft” (i.e., blue-collar jobs). If you’re an engineer, a medical professional, an academic, a basic research scientist — or someone who benefits from what basic science and a well-rounded education bring to society — you will not, in fact, reap any benefits from this “new direction” for science and technology. Instead, for every new focus, there are arenas that will be de-emphasized (and will have their funding cut) to elevate the new ones. There is a de-emphasis on academic education and achievement, and instead a new focus on practical technical training. There’s a de-emphasis, explicitly, of Ph.D. researchers and laboratory professionals, instead focusing on machinists, technicians, craftspeople, and even hobbyists and tinkerers. Funding will be diverted away from traditional science and technology fields and instead put it towards apprenticeships, where “pay-for-performance” funding models are explicitly lauded, even though they’ve been explicitly shown to further disadvantage those in already disadvantaged communities. University funding and university research will be eliminated in favor of industry sites and manufacturing centers. Manufacturing institutes and defense industrial base centers will be a new area of focus, where only researchers, engineers, and technicians that partner and integrate with those initiatives will be funded. Without the “engine” that drives society forward on a long-term basis — basic scientific research — this plan cannot meet the stated goal of “sustaining our technological leadership for generations to come.” It instead mortgages the foundation of our long-term future, hoping that the expected short-term benefits of AI investment continue to grow, without bound, over time. This image of the Very Large Array in the southwestern United States highlights the importance of arrays of radio dishes in measuring many different properties of our Universe, including searching for potential extraterrestrial signals that were created by an intelligent species. A next-generation facility, the ngVLA, is required to keep United States radio astronomy on the cutting edge, otherwise other international endeavors — China’s FAST telescopes, Europe’s ALMA, and the multinational Square Kilometer Array — will soon render our current capabilities obsolete. Credit: Alex Savello/NRAO Chapter V: A New Golden Age (The words “gold,” “golden,” and “gold-standard” appear a whopping 54 times in this document.) This section is the most declarative of all: completely removing the pretense of conducting fundamental, basic science at all. Instead, it promises to divert enormous amounts of resources to the oft-pilloried initiative of the Genesis Mission, which replaces funding our basic scientific infrastructure, including the country’s most valuable resource — the expertise-possessing human scientists we’ve produced — with AI-related initiatives. In the midst of the most significant brain drain that the United States has ever experienced, this will only accelerate the loss of talent and expertise even further. In particular, the highlights of this chapter are: To fully fund and expand the Genesis Mission as a national AI flagship, and to empower the AI to “transform the practice of science itself,” ostensibly by automating it and take it out of the hands of scientists entirely. To institutionalize what they call “Gold Standard Science,” which uses the definition provided in the Restoring Gold Standard Science Executive Order. That order explicitly rejects: scientifically established pandemic prevention measures, environmental protections, climate science, and equal opportunity for all American scientists. To hand over evaluations of what counts as “Gold Standard Science” to the Director of OSTP. To accelerate autonomous laboratories and industries: a direct contradiction of the earlier stated intent to increase manufacturing jobs. To invest in AI-enabled verification systems, and to reward those who question and “disprove influential scientific results,” with the expectation that those influential results include COVID’s natural origins and the fossil fuel emissions-caused effects on global warming. And, finally, to remove as many human scientists as possible from the Federal Government’s payroll, replacing them with what they call “AI-Native Scientific Institutions.” It is, in short, exactly what scientists have been warning about. While much of federal science funding is supposed to be explicitly reserved for the country’s foundation of basic research, the document instead seeks to divert funds towards AI-focused technology initiatives and whatever projects that political appointees — the OSTP Director, the OMB Director, and the President — deem to be worthy of funding. This graph shows whether problems are useful/not useful (x-axis) versus how difficult they are for classical computers to solve (y-axis). While random circuit sampling is the most difficult known task for a classical computer to achieve, it is also arguably the most useless application a quantum computer can be tasked with. While AI and quantum computers certainly hold potential as far as applications go, the actual utility of each of them is greatly exaggerated compared to their present capabilities and limitations. Credit: Hartmut Neven/Google At the end of the report, after end notes and a memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies (co-written by OSTP Director Kratsios and OMB Director Russ Vought), there is a section entitled FY 2028 R&D Priority Areas. After beginning by lauding the value of foundational research and basic inquiry across the sciences, they then identify the priority areas for the funding of American science. What’s most notable, as they go through the list, is what isn’t mentioned at all, which include the most fundamental basic research areas. Physical sciences: there is no mention of particle physics, gravitational wave physics, neutrino physics, or astrophysics of any type. Additionally, no new flagship science facilities, essential for advancement in the physical sciences, are mentioned at all. Chemistry and Materials science: there is no mention of the electrical grid, solar energy, wind energy, or any form of renewable energy. Climate science, Environmental science, and Earth science: all forms of these lines of research are omitted entirely. Biological sciences: there is no mention of public health, vaccines, clean air, clean water, safe-to-eat food, pandemic prevention, or disease control. Instead, the focuses are on AI, quantum computers, nuclear fusion, a return to the Moon, autonomous manufacturing, and materials (specifically, semiconductor) science. There is a mandate that every line of federally funded research align with the aforementioned Genesis Mission, including a mandate to integrate AI wherever possible: no matter whether its extraneous, unnecessary, or even detrimental to the scientific enterprise. While the final DUNE detectors will live in Illinois and South Dakota, the house-sized ProtoDUNE test detectors were assembled and tested at CERN in Europe. The two testbeds were constructed in the newly built neutrino platform and filled with hundreds of tons of liquid argon, and will eventually lead to the world’s most advanced and precise neutrino oscillation experiment ever performed. DUNE’s sensitivity to dark matter is an example of secondary science that will emerge from this endeavor. The entirety of the DUNE mission is just one science endeavor at one of the 17 national laboratories, all of which would be wholly reshaped by the enactment of the Genesis Mission. Credit: Jim Shultz/DOE/Fermilab/CERN For anyone who relies on federal science funding, the most immediate impact is revealed at the very end of the report: in the section titled Implementation of the FY 2028 R&D Priorities Memo. Within that section, it’s stated that: “within 90 days of this memorandum, the head of each agency with $3 billion or more in FY 2026 budget authority for R&D shall submit [to the OMB Director] an action plan describing how the agency intends to implement the program implementation guidance set forth in the “R&D Priority Practices” section of this memorandum.” Agencies that meet those criteria include: the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the USDA. This mandate undermines the authority of the US Congress to assign discretionary funding, and instead seeks to bring it under the direct control of the executive branch alone. It will likely have the effect, as was just reported by Pro Publica, of shutting US scientists out of the next Nobel-worthy discovery. But, as many science historians have already argued, that is the clear goal of the current administration, as Project 2025 and this latest Science: A Golden Age document both closely align with the policies enacted by Nazi Germany in 1933. It didn’t take long for the Nazis to destroy the crown jewel of Germany’s scientific and mathematical achievements, with David Hilbert remarking, when asked how mathematics at Göttingen was going in late 1933 after the initial purge of Jews, blacks, communists, trade unionists, those of Slavic descent, and others: “There is no mathematics in Göttingen anymore.” While all of science may prove harder to kill in the United States, the fundamental, basic research that provides the foundation for all applied science and all technology developed here is truly experiencing an existential crisis right now, as no one is sure that what components of our scientific infrastructure will survive the current year, much less the coming years and decades. Science: A Golden Age is not so much a visionary document for remaking American science as it is a recipe for burning the existing house down. If its architects succeed, fundamental science will still continue here on planet Earth, but it won’t be the United States that gets to reap the benefits. This article An honest look inside the “Science: A New Golden Age” report is featured on Big Think.