Summary of the Report
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
American scientific progress was the beating heart of the 20th century. It delivered victory on the battlefields of World War II, secured America’s triumph in the
Cold War, and produced the most prosperous nation in human history. We developed the alchemy that taught sand how to think, conjuring the digital world from
silicon chips. American science conquered polio, placed men on the Moon, and
gave humanity general-purpose artificial intelligence (AI). This leadership has
improved lives and defined the very structure of our modern world.
The foundation of these profound advancements was laid in the years
following World War II, thanks largely to the vision set out by Vannevar Bush, the
chief science advisor to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. In his canonical 1945
report, Science: The Endless Frontier, Bush made the prescient case for federal
support of basic research, laying the groundwork for the modern scientific enterprise. That enterprise, however, was predominantly built around what became
called the “linear model” of technical progress, flowing from basic research to
applied research to development of technology and industry. A simplification
even then, that model has grown increasingly inadequate as a description of
progress eighty-one years later. Discovery today is most often an iterative loop
between fundamental and applied work, with industry and engineering playing a
vital part in spurring even basic research.
Government funding of research and development, especially basic science
in the academy and national labs, has rightly grown in the eight decades since
Bush’s report. But private industry has become by far the largest source of research and development (R&D) funding in the United States, with its share nearly
doubling from the 1950s to today. American companies now deploy around $700
billion annually, more than triple the combined spending from government and
higher education. This evolution has made the pie bigger for everybody and
should be welcomed across the research ecosystem, but it demands a corresponding adjustment to the nature of the Federal Government’s contributions.
Summary of the Report
xi
New challenges have arisen in recent decades. Despite massive increases in
biomedical funding since the 1990s, the rate of significant breakthroughs appears
to have slowed and drug approvals have flatlined. Researchers today often spend
half their time on paperwork and administrative tasks, a burden worsened by
expanding federal and university bureaucracies that further reduce funding available for actual science. A smaller proportion of American citizens now fill
post-graduate spots in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
(STEM) fields. Our competitors are channeling unprecedented resources into science and engineering, taking a whole-of-society approach to seize the high
ground in strategic technologies. 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.
America has led the world in scientific progress because Americans have
refused to stand still. We have adapted to changing conditions before by boldly
reinventing how we structure science, and we must innovate again. Never has
scientific and technological development been more essential to our national and
economic security, and never has this progress been so deeply intertwined with
our diplomatic relationships worldwide.
President Trump has been very clear about his priorities, as he seeks to lay
the foundations for a new Golden Age of American Innovation. He has asked this
administration to revitalize the national science enterprise, to secure U.S. leadership in emerging technologies against foreign rivals, and to ensure that all of
America’s citizens will benefit from new scientific breakthroughs and technological transformations. The President understands the American story as one of
ambition, discovery, and invention, of pioneers who forever seek new frontiers
for exploration, particularly now in science and technology.
The following chapters provide recommendations, insights, and guidance to
the entire U.S. scientific enterprise, from the government to universities to the
private sector and philanthropy.
CHAPTER II
REVITALIZING AMERICA’S SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ENTERPRISE
To reverse stagnation and restore breakthrough momentum, the Federal Government must free American scientists to do their best work. Federal funding in academia remains anchored to mid-century assumptions, channeled through
traditional disciplines and overly focused on short, project-based grants. Review
panels often gatekeep proposals by consensus, disincentivizing transformative
Summary of the Report
xii
ideas. Agencies face little corrective pressure when portfolios underperform.
We must strip away unnecessary burdens, realign funding toward excellence and
risk-taking, and embed continuous, evidence-based improvement across an approximately $200 billion annual R&D portfolio.
- Refocus on the Individual Scientist: Put the working researcher back at
the center of America’s scientific enterprise. Free them from the growing
administrative burdens that now weigh them down for nearly half their
working hours. Bet on people, not just projects, by expanding portable
graduate fellowships like the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), backing early-career independence, and scaling long-horizon grants for the best and brightest modeled
on National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Pioneer Award. Open
alternative pathways beyond standard academia, and ensure that selection
rests purely on merit, not the political fashions of the day. - Diversify Funding Mechanisms: Move beyond consensus-driven peer
review by adopting a broader menu of selection mechanisms suited to different kinds of science. Examples include “golden tickets” that empower
individual reviewers to champion ambitious proposals, fast grants that
deliver rapid funding decisions, prize challenges and advanced market
commitments that pay for results, and regranting models that delegate
funding authority to scientists to draw on distributed expertise. - Create New Institutional Models: Many of today’s most important problems are too large for an academic lab, too cross-disciplinary for a single
department, and too hard to commercialize for a private corporation. Federal funding should support a wider range of performers. The recently
launched X-Labs can assemble agile, time-bound teams of professional
scientists and engineers to break specific bottlenecks. Advanced Research
Projects Agencies (ARPAs) can empower individual program managers to
make bold bets and curate researchers to execute them. Curiosity-driven
institutes can give our best minds the stability needed to pursue fundamental questions over long time horizons. - Reduce Bureaucratic Burdens: Requirements on federal grants have ballooned over the past decades. Some grants now take nearly two years from
submission to award, almost as long as it took to design and produce the
Summary of the Report
xiii
first Boeing 747. Compress review cycles, eliminate duplicative reporting,
and rein in indirect cost recovery that supports administrative bloat, redirecting that money to real scientific infrastructure. Advance reforms that
reduce grant-writing burdens, with relief directed specifically to earlycareer researchers. - Institutionalize Continuous Improvement: Funders should bring the
same critical attention to their own performance that they are supposed to
bring to the review of grant applications. Stand up an empowered metascience unit in federal science agencies, reporting directly to the director,
with authority to run controlled experiments on review and funding mechanisms and to drive change across the organization. Elevate the prestige of
program officers, grow their discretion in setting scientific direction, and
support them as the architects of the fields they help shape.
CHAPTER III
SECURING U.S. DOMINANCE IN CRITICAL AND
EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
America has the world’s most vibrant scientific enterprise and most dynamic
private sector, which routinely turns novel ideas into new industries. But scientific leadership alone does not guarantee national strength or economic vitality.
We must tightly couple our science and technology enterprises to ensure that
groundbreaking ideas invented in the United States are rapidly prototyped, tested,
manufactured, and scaled domestically. - Restore Permissionless Innovation: American regulators have grown
skilled at weighing the risks of action, but blind to the costs of inaction.
Developing good rules require real-world evidence, and building that evidence base only comes from letting innovators prototype and experiment.
Extend the President’s reforms in nuclear, pharmaceuticals, and drones
across other sectors. Weigh benefits alongside risks, streamline permitting,
and use regulatory sandboxes to test new technologies under controlled
conditions. - Open Federal Infrastructure to American Builders: The Federal Government has facilities and testbeds no startup can replicate on its own.
Broaden industry access to America’s laboratory research infrastructure,
Summary of the Report
xiv
including at Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories, National
Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) centers, and Department of
War (DOW) facilities. Consider innovative potential alongside scientific
merit in use approvals, streamline Cooperative Research and Development
Agreements (CRADAs) and licensing, further leverage Other Transaction
Authority (OTA) to enable private-sector engagement in co-designing
research directions, and expand partnerships with the private sector to
make joint investments into cutting-edge equipment. - Strengthen Public-Private Partnerships and Talent Flows: The university is no longer the only home of America’s most innovative scientific research. Expand agency-adjacent foundations, focus Small Business
Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer
(STTR) programs to build strategic capabilities, and support joint centers
among industry, academia, and federal facilities. Scale industry Ph.D. and
postdoc fellowships that move talent fluidly between sectors, drawing on
America’s private sector strengths to bring industry-scale resources to our
academic researchers. - Organize Pre-Competitive Consortia and Grand Challenges: The Apollo
Program and the Human Genome Project succeeded because the Federal
Government marshaled scientific effort at a scale no single institution
could match. Leverage grand challenges that pull breakthroughs forward,
and create moonshot-scale missions for issues of national importance.
Support industry consortia and use federal resources to break shared
engineering bottlenecks in foundational areas, as Extreme Ultraviolet Limited Liability Company (EUV LLC) did for semiconductor lithography. - Use Counties and States as Laboratories: Federalism is one of America’s
greatest assets. States can experiment with regulation, permitting, and economic incentives in ways the Federal Government cannot replicate. Support state-led experimentation, partner with the jurisdictions that move
the fastest, and let localities compete to support regional innovation.
Ensure that innovation strategies that work spread across the nation, advancing science and technology in every county and state.
Summary of the Report
xv
CHAPTER IV
ENSURING THAT SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY BETTER
THE LIVES OF ALL AMERICANS
America’s scientific creativity and entrepreneurial culture position us to translate
breakthroughs into technologies that enrich every American’s life. That enrichment should include the creation of manufacturing jobs, not just the development
of consumer products. By rebuilding the link between science and hands-on craft,
federal leadership can ensure that the economic returns of discovery, including
the jobs, supplier networks, and process knowledge encoded in the hands of
workers, accrue to Americans in every region of the country and every sector of
the economy, sustaining our technological leadership for generations to come. - Integrate Hands-On Training: Technology is encoded not just in papers
and patents, but in the tacit knowledge passed from mentor to mentee.
Require universities and community colleges to embed practical technical
training and externships into STEM curricula. Let hands-on experience
and industry credentials count toward degrees. Reform accreditation,
admissions, and tenure to reward real-world technical work alongside
academic publication. - Open Scientific Careers Beyond the Academic Ladder: Establish national
fellowships for skilled craftspeople, practitioner-in-residence programs
embedding machinists and technicians alongside Ph.D. researchers, and
portable industry-recognized credentials in advanced manufacturing and
lab techniques. Connect hobbyists and tinkerers in rural communities to
formal research opportunities, and open up universities to technical training for local residents. - Modernize Apprenticeships and Career Pathways: Extend registered
apprenticeships into science and technology fields. Adopt pay-forperformance funding models, scale Workforce Pell Grants, and back community colleges as regional hubs of scientific and technical talent. Integrate
these hubs with industry sites and federally funded innovation and manufacturing centers. - Build Dense, Local Innovation Clusters Across the Nation: Technological
leadership emerges from places where research and production sit close
together. Expand regional innovation hubs, manufacturing institutes, and
Summary of the Report
xvi
defense industrial base centers to anchor regional ecosystems. Drive coordinated efforts with local universities and national laboratories to build
specializations and workforce pipelines. Pair these efforts with the reshoring of advanced manufacturing, and restore the feedback loops between
researchers, engineers, and skilled technicians.
CHAPTER V
A NEW GOLDEN AGE
America stands at the cusp of a revolution in science, in which AI will accelerate
discovery, multiply human cognitive capabilities, and unlock solutions to some of
our greatest challenges. But “AI for science” will still find itself subject to the frictions and inefficiencies of human institutions. We can only fully harness AI and
its associated productivity uplift by boldly reforming our scientific institutions,
building national-scale infrastructure, and ensuring rigorous verification of the
knowledge base from which AI will learn. - Launch and Scale the Genesis Mission: Fully fund and expand the Genesis Mission as America’s flagship AI for science initiative, integrating supercomputers, AI models, scientific instruments, and datasets across
national laboratories to double the productivity and impact of U.S. science
within a decade. Direct it at cross-cutting problems where breakthroughs
unlock entire branches of downstream discovery and where AI can transform the practice of science itself. - Institutionalize Gold Standard Science: AI operating on a flawed knowledge base will only entrench bad science. Enforce reproducibility, transparency, data sharing, and falsifiability across all federally funded research
through the Restoring Gold Standard Science Executive Order, creating a
trusted foundation for AI-powered discovery. - Build Verification Infrastructure at Scale: While the cost of generation
has decreased exponentially, the cost of verification has not. Invest in AIenabled verification systems, open standards, and continuous replication
mechanisms. Set standards to enable the development of machineauditable replication packages, and reward those who replicate or disprove
influential scientific results.
Summary of the Report
xvii - Accelerate Autonomous Experimentation: Closed-loop autonomous laboratories can collapse discovery timelines by orders of magnitude and
enable science at a truly industrial scale. Focus investments in robotics
and automated laboratories, leveraging industry demand and federal R&D
to ensure our scientific equipment industrial base is built on the world’s
best hardware and software and leads the charge in the coming scientific
revolution. - Experiment With AI-Native Scientific Institutions: Today’s funding
structures, publication systems, and credit mechanisms were built for a
world of human-paced discovery. Begin the transition to AI-native institutions, including through faster and more open forms of scientific publication, more granular credit attribution, and new market mechanisms that
direct resources to problems where breakthroughs matter most.
Read Full Report Below:
Further Reading: