Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ of American science starts with dismantling it, while funneling billions into AI.

Trump’s science adviser Michael Kratsios has no science background.

| Image: Getty / The Verge

The tech-broification of American science has officially begun

Trump’s ‘Golden Age’ of American science starts with dismantling it, while funneling billions into AI.

The Trump administration unveiled the first “Genesis Mission” grants on Thursday, directing $5 billion toward hundreds of AI-driven science projects in an effort the White House has described as “comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project.” 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. 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.

“We may well end up in the situation where AI will have a few major insights buried under mountains of slop, and the number of people with the experience and knowledge to tell the two apart may rapidly dwindle.”

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. The Energy Department, which led this round of funding, said the project will unite national laboratories, industry, and academia to pursue “breakthroughs in energy dominance, discovery science, and national security.” 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. 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. “You cannot use venture capital to force breakthroughs while virtually already selling the patent.”

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.

“You cannot use venture capital to force breakthroughs while virtually already selling the patent.”

Some of its proposals have obvious appeal, including reducing the administrative burdens on scientists, speeding up grantmaking, and making the system more flexible. Jason Shepherd, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Utah, told The Verge that “there are certainly some aspirations in this agenda that most US scientists would agree with: we need more stability, faster peer review, and more incentives to do high risk science.”

But Shepherd said the document looks like it “was written by political appointees without any real consultation with scientists” and warned that its assumptions science functions like a business were misplaced. “Academic science is different to VC funded startups or tech companies.”

It’s an important distinction to make considering Kratsios’ background. Unlike most White House science advisers, Kratsios is not a scientist in any sense of the word, and has no scientific credentials. He has a background in tech policy and finance, spending part of his working life at a fund run by Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel.

Researchers say the report is permeated by this Silicon Valley mindset, as well as a profound lack of scientific understanding. “The report has no vision for how science works,” said Harvard professor Jeffrey Flier, former dean of the university’s medical school, adding that it “seems blissfully unaware” of the academic environment scientific research needs in order to flourish. “This is completely insane as an approach to reforming US science funding and operations,” he said, branding the report’s proposals a “major threat” and an effort to politicize and control science.

Other researchers I spoke to feel similarly. The government’s entire approach seems to be built on the “misguided belief that scientific breakthroughs in the future will come from the tech sector,” Andreas Karch, a physics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Verge. “While American tech is also leading in their field, tech and science aren’t the same,” he said, adding that today’s scientific leadership will secure tomorrow’s tech leadership. “There is little evidence that our big tech companies, despite their stunning successes, can do both.”

Not that the proposals make that much sense, either. “The agenda is rife with contradictions,” Shepherd said, pointing to a proposal that suggests radically reducing government support for “life sciences,” while increasing support for “foundational research in the biological sciences,” two categories that have substantial overlap. Neither the report nor the White House defines those terms or explains which fields would gain or lose funding.

“This plan undercuts much of that role, and will have disastrous effects that will ricochet throughout the US economy in years to come.”

The narrow focus on AI is also “misguided,” Karch said. While there’s certainly a chance it will accelerate progress, he said “right now the problem is that most science done by AI is absolute slop.” Supervision by humans seems “absolutely key,” he said, but those humans are primarily trained by the universities having their funding slashed. “We may well end up in the situation where AI will have a few major insights buried under mountains of slop, and the number of people with the experience and knowledge to tell the two apart may rapidly dwindle,” he said, adding that the government’s actions are actually hindering scientists’ abilities to make use of these powerful new technologies.

The funding and document arrive amid sweeping cuts, grant cancellations, and institutional upheaval across the entire federal funding system, rocking universities, research centers, and government agencies nationwide. Researchers say that reality is difficult to reconcile with the administration’s promise of a new “golden age” for American science.

“As an outsider to the US system, this seems to be a further attempt at dismantling the US research universities,” said de Vreese. He called Kratsios’ vision “a fundamental departure from a very successful US science model” that looks like another attempt to “upend the US research university model.”

That departure could spell disaster. Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, told The Verge the plan fundamentally misunderstands and misrepresents the role US funding agencies play in the scientific endeavor. While they do in part promote technological discoveries and medical breakthroughs — key priorities in the report — they are also designed to “develop and perpetuate a vibrant STEM ecosystem in the US,” Bergstrom said. “This plan undercuts much of that role, and will have disastrous effects that will ricochet throughout the US economy in years to come.”

That narrow view of science, focused on outcomes, applications, and measurable returns, is precisely what this new model gets wrong. It treats science like a business, which makes sense given Trump has said he runs the country like one.

Most researchers who spoke to The Verge were deeply skeptical this plan would usher in the promised golden age of American science, with many warning it could cause lasting damage. For other groups, notably those closest to power, the future could look brighter. “This looks like a golden age for specific groups and likely for tech and venture capitalists,” de Vreese said.

Shepherd said “academic science cannot be replaced by a business model.” Most research scientists seem to agree with that sentiment, but the Trump administration seems determined to try anyway.