The Trump administration unveiled the first “Genesis Mission” grants on Thursday, directing $5 billion to hundreds of AI-powered science projects in an effort the White House described as “comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project.” At about the same time, Trump’s science adviser Michael Kratsios was on Capitol Hill selling lawmakers on an equally grand promise: a “New Golden Age” of American science, which would prioritize artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuclear power and undermine the life sciences.
Taken together, these two announcements paint the clearest picture yet of how Donald Trump wants to remake American science. They mark the latest front in a broader war on the research establishment – which has served to suppress “emerging” or DEI projects, threatened funding for universities, researchers, and projects for ideological reasons, limited international student and researcher mobility, and given unprecedented control of federal funding to political appointees. The result has been the gradual, systematic dismantling of long-established practices and institutions, which, for all their faults, helped transform the United States into the world’s greatest scientific power.
Researchers say the idea is ill-conceived, contradictory, and less a blueprint for scientific renewal than a political takeover that doesn’t understand how science works. It treats public research as a Silicon Valley startup rather than a public good, a profit with measurable benefits and speed in a slow, uncertain, and unpredictable work that has produced some of the most important discoveries in history. Far from reviving US science, they warn, the agenda could be disastrous for American research.
“We may end up in a situation where AI will have a few big ideas buried under mountains of slop, and the number of people with the knowledge and experience to tell the two apart could dwindle rapidly.”
The Genesis Mission offers timely fields 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: using AI to accelerate scientific discovery. The Department of Energy, which led the funding round, said the project will bring together national laboratories, industry, and academia to pursue “breakthroughs in energy management, discovery science and national security.” Tech companies including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are also contributing millions of dollars in computing, AI credits, and other support to the program.
Kratsios clearly linked the program to the broader management science program, calling the Genesis Mission “the culmination of the reforms proposed” in its “Golden Age” manifesto. As a modern replacement for Vannevar Bush’s 1945 policy report “Science, The Endless Frontier,” which formed a large part of the postwar federal research funding program, the lengthy document proposed removing support from institutions and individual scientists, while giving private companies a greater role in directing and conducting research, and political appointees more power to veto grants. AI is gaining ground, both as a tool for scientists and as an engine of discovery itself, and Kratsios encouraged government funding to go more and more toward the use of AI and individual researchers, rather than universities, the traditional centers of learning and research.
Broadly, the manifesto favors a goal-oriented and results-driven approach similar to Silicon Valley startups over traditional scientific enterprise. Startup capital and startup culture are built by identifying promising people, projects, and ideas, setting clear goals with measurable objectives, and moving quickly, iterating constantly, and cutting edge work that doesn’t seem to bring results. Science works differently. Basic research can take years or decades before its value or practical implications become apparent and requires a system that can support work of uncertain, or seemingly dubious, value. Its results are not always predictable, and some of the most important findings come inadvertently from research that pursues entirely different questions.
The 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 can’t use venture capital to force success while you’re already selling a patent.”
That model is also very different from Bush’s promotion of open basic research that is conducted without regard to immediate benefits, on the grounds that such work will ultimately bring practical success. The science program built on that system is what helped transform the United States into a major research power in the world. Still, this isn’t the first time the Trump administration has used Bush’s legacy to sell policies that will dismantle the system he helped create.
“You can’t use venture capital to force success while you’re already selling a patent.”
Some of its proposals have obvious appeal, including reducing administrative burdens on scientists, speeding up grant awards, and streamlining the system. Jason Shepherd, professor of neurobiology at the University of Utah, said The Verge that “there are certainly some aspirations in this agenda that many US scientists can agree with: we need more stability, faster peer review, and more incentives to do high-risk science.”
But Shepherd said the document appeared to be “written by political appointees without consulting scientists” and warned that its assumptions about science working as a business were wrong. “Academic science is different than VC-funded startups or tech companies.”
It’s an important distinction to consider in Kratsios’ background. Unlike many White House science advisers, Kratsios is not a scientist in any sense of the word, and he has no scientific credentials. He has a background in technology and financial policy, spending part of his working life at a fund run by Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel.
Researchers say the report is full of this Silicon Valley mentality, and a serious lack of scientific understanding. “This report has no idea of how science works,” said Harvard professor Jeffrey Flier, former dean of the university’s medical school, adding that “it seems you know nothing” about the learning environment that scientific research needs to flourish. “This is absolutely insane as a way to change US science funding and operations,” he said, branding the report’s proposals “a serious threat” and an attempt to politicize and control science.
Other researchers I spoke with felt the same way. The entire government approach seems to be built on the “false belief that future scientific breakthroughs will come from the technology sector,” said Andreas Karch, a physics professor at the University of Texas at Austin. The Verge. “While American technology is at the forefront of its field, technology and science are not the same,” he said, adding that today’s scientific leadership will secure tomorrow’s technological leadership. “There is little evidence that our big tech companies, despite their incredible success, can do both.”
Not that the suggestions make that much sense, either. “The agenda is full of contradictions,” said Shepherd, pointing to a proposal that proposes a significant reduction in government support for the “life sciences,” while increasing support for “basic research in the biological sciences,” two categories that are closely related. Neither the report nor the White House explained those terms or explained which fields would receive or lose funding.
“This plan cuts a large part of that role, and it will have ripple effects on the American economy for years to come.”
The narrow focus on AI is also “misguided,” Karch said. While there is a chance it will speed up progress, he said “right now the problem is that a lot of the science that AI does is not completely perfect.” Human supervision seems to be “really important,” he said, but those people are primarily trained by universities that have had their funding reduced. “We may end up in a situation where AI will have a few insights buried under mountains of slop, and the number of people who have the knowledge and experience to distinguish the two can quickly decrease,” he said, adding that government actions actually hinder the ability of scientists to use this powerful new technology.
Funding and the document comes amid major cuts, grant cancellations, and institutional upheaval across the federal funding system, shaking up universities, research centers, and government agencies across the country. Researchers say reality is hard to reconcile with the administration’s promise of a new “golden age” of American science.
“As an outsider to the US system, this seems like a further attempt to dismantle US research universities,” de Vreese said. He called Kratsios’ idea a “departure from the most successful model of US science” that looks like another attempt to “develop the university model of US research.”
That move could spell disaster. Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, said The Verge program misunderstands and misrepresents the role that US funding agencies play in the scientific endeavour. While in part they promote technological discovery and medical breakthroughs — key priorities in the report — they are also designed to “enhance and advance the STEM ecosystem in the US,” Bergstrom said. “This plan cuts a large part of that role, and it will have ripple effects on the American economy for years to come.”
That narrow scientific perspective, focused on results, applications, and measurable returns, is exactly what this new model misses. It treats science like a business, which makes sense when Trump says he treats the country like one.
Most of the researchers spoke to it The Verge they had serious doubts that this strategy would bring about the promised golden age of American science, with many warning that it could cause lasting damage. For some groups, especially those closest to power, the future may look bright. “This looks like a golden age for certain groups and possibly 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 idea, but the Trump administration seems willing to try anyway.
