Inside Trump's Science Agenda: Anti-Science Claims, Fauci's Damage, DEI & China w/ Michael Kratsios

Is this administration anti-science?

We want to essentially double the scientific output of the United States.

Did we lose it, or did it lead to moments where you have, like, Fauci?

That's a great question.

Are we in this moment, this populist moment right now in the West, where science and technology are viewed as tools of the elite, and therefore they must be broken and destroyed?

That's what's most tragic.

That is a crazy fact. Has science stagnated in America? What the heck is going on?

Michael Kratsios, welcome to the All-In Interview.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

You are the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy here at the White House. Can you tell me a little bit about what that role is? What do you do here?

The Office of Science and Technology Policy was created in the ’60s to coordinate science and technology policy across the administration. It's very unique to the U.S. that we don't have an agency that does science and technology. We have lots of agencies that do pieces of the science and technology enterprise.

We have the National Science Foundation, which does basic research. We have the Department of Energy, which runs our national labs. The Department of War has extensive R&D programs, like DARPA, for example. The one office in the White House, or in the administration broadly, that's able to coordinate all those efforts is the office that I run, called OSTP.

What we try to do is work with the president to set the national science and technology agenda and then ultimately implement that across all of our agencies.

You had this role before. Is that right?

In the last administration, I was the chief technology officer of the United States. If you think about OSTP, it does science and it does technology. When Trump won, I ran the technology portfolio for the president.

1. Is this administration anti-science? The Nature poll, DEI grants, and $8B down the drain

Let me kick off by asking you: Is this administration anti-science?

It is not anti-science. One of the things that I'm most proud of is the release of a new report a couple of weeks ago called “Science: A New Golden Age.” Anyone who reads that report will most likely see an administration that deeply cares about the American science and technology enterprise.

We really want the U.S. to be the home for the next great scientific discoveries. We want to empower young scientists. We want to create an ecosystem that allows our greatest scientists to work on the hardest problems everywhere in the U.S. To us, we're doing everything we can to align all of our agencies, like I just mentioned, to help make that a reality.

Going back, there's a poll I'm going to give you from Nature, which is one of the scientific journals. They polled 2,000 of their readers, who are all scientists. According to the poll, 86% supported Kamala Harris in the election, and Donald Trump polled at 6%. Why is that? What is going on with the perception of the president and this administration as being anti-science?

To me, I think the scientific community has lost its way over the last few decades. America has been the place of some of the most amazing scientific transformations in history, and the government has played an important role in a lot of them.

If we look back and think about the Manhattan Project or Apollo, these are seismic events that only the U.S. government could bring together the ecosystem to achieve. To be honest, I think over the last 15 or 20 years, science has been deeply politicized. We are no longer asking the very hard and important questions of what the scientific method is, how we should be approaching it, and whether we should be questioning some of these conclusions. Rather, I think it's been dominated by this dogma.

I think it really crescendoed and peaked during COVID, when suddenly there was a certain individual who, if you didn't agree with what he said, then suddenly you were anti-science. To me, I think that is the most anti-science conclusion you could ever make. I really think we have to return to the basics, and that's what we're trying to do in this administration.

At the basis of what you call the scientific method, for many people here who might be watching who aren't familiar with it, it's that you ask questions. The process of science is a process of asking questions and inquiry. That inquiry leads to experiments, which collect data, and that data informs your view. Then you continue to ask questions.

The idea that science is authority is almost antithetical to the basis of the scientific method, which is constant inquiry.

I could not agree more. What we as a government have not taken the effort or the time to do for many decades is apply those same principles of the scientific method to the way that we, as a government, approach science policy and the way that we approach research and development.

Right now, if you talk to your median lobbyist for the science community, the only thing that they are fixated on is the R&D budget. If the number doesn't go up, then they haven't done their job and they haven't, quote-unquote, “supported science.”

To me, that's a question. The more important question that every scientist should be asking is: Is the way that the U.S. government spends $200 billion in science and technology funding every year actually driving the best and biggest breakthroughs for the American people?

Are there other ways that you could deploy that capital to different organizations, to different scientists, through different time horizons? There are so many questions we should be asking that we're not. That is what “Science: A New Golden Age” tries to bring to the forefront.

I've heard this a lot from my friends who are scientists and researchers who work in the academic community, private industry, and elsewhere: There's a perception that this government, this administration, is cutting science funding. It sounds like what you're saying is that there's an allocation of resources, perhaps away from some things and into other things. Is that the way you're viewing this?

I think the most important thing that people should initially set the table with is that there's a distinction between a proposed budget and the dollars that are appropriated by Congress. Congress controls the purse strings. They're the ones who say how much science funding there will be, and they've continued to fund science over the last decade-plus.

The more important policy question to think about, and the way I view it, is that spending more money on the wrong types of things is not the right policy action.

What's an example of that? Sorry, because I'll just say: In 2025, this administration disrupted, froze, or terminated $3 billion in unspent funds on active grants. You terminated grants that scientists or labs had received or gotten approval for, so maybe you could just give us an example. What were those $3 billion, and what were some of these other things that your administration would say are not really the right place?

Yeah. To me, I think the best example is the National Science Foundation. For some listeners, the NSF is essentially the premier funder of extramural basic research in the United States. We have about $8 billion to $9 billion a year, where most of that money is given to academics at universities who do research on all sorts of basic science domains.

Senator Ted Cruz and the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation conducted an analysis of the grants that were given during the Biden administration. They found that roughly one-quarter, or 25%, of grants at NSF during that time period went toward DEI-related, quote-unquote, “science.”

If you think about that, that's an astronomical amount. That is roughly $2 billion a year times 4 years. That's $8 billion of science funding that went to these DEI-related initiatives. That isn't science, and that shouldn't be.

That's a pure manifestation of the politicization of science, where you had the Biden administration stand up and say, “If you want to win a grant, you have to make sure that you talk about some DEI-related factor in your application. That's the only way we're going to give you money.” Obviously, that is not the way we should be doing it, and that is not gold-standard science.

2. Climate science cuts: RCP 8.5 gets pulled and the "climate emergency" narrative collapses

There were also cuts to climate science research. This is one that's been deeply criticized in the media and by broad scientific-community representation—journals, associations, and whatnot.

Can you frame up the administration's view on how settled anthropogenic climate change is, meaning the climate is changing because of human action and the release of carbon into the atmosphere, and the criticality of that? Is it a climate emergency? What do we know, what do we not know, and why are dollars being redirected away from those research efforts?

Secretary Wright has been very vocal on this and serves as the belly button for a lot of these issues in the administration. What he has advocated for very publicly, and has said many times, is that, yes, the climate is changing, and, yes, humans have burned fossil fuels over the last 100 years, and that has contributed to CO2 in the environment.

The thing that is not true, and what the data does not support, is that it is a climate emergency.

And I think one of the best examples of that is what's happened with RCP 8.5, as they call it. These are scenarios that climate scientists try to use to estimate the impact this quote-unquote climate change will have on the world. This was the most extreme scenario that had been included in numerous national climate assessments and run by the IPCC as well. Ultimately, they determined a few months ago that they could not, with any scientific integrity, substantiate continuing to have this scenario play out, so they had to pull it down.

And this is what a lot of media coverage and re-reporting was based on. A lot of funding was based on this simulation of the future that did not come to bear, that did not happen.

Precisely. And I think it's this crazy narrative that spun around where they threw in this extreme scenario, which most people believed would never happen, and now this year it's proven that it will never happen because they even removed it from all their predictions. Yet every media report of every climate assessment over the last 20 years has always focused on the extreme example. That's the one the media fixates on, and that's what captivates the attention of all these folks. I think that's a real disservice to science.

So, over the last decade or 2—15 years or so—is that why a lot of funding has rolled into climate research and climate science? Terminating grants and reducing budgets is kind of a rollback. Is that the way to think about it?

I think the way we like to view it is that we want to be investing in the technologies and the science that are ultimately going to create abundant energy for Americans. That's something that you advocate a lot for and talk about: We have to win. We have to win this fusion race. We set a target of 2035, for example, for that. We have been one of the most forward-leaning administrations in the history of this country on nuclear energy, and we're trying to get that up to speed and running and supplying energy for Americans as soon as humanly possible. To us, technology is what's going to have the biggest impact for everyday Americans.

Yeah. I mean, I would make 2 arguments. One is China's output of carbon into the atmosphere eclipses the rest of the world, so plus or minus 50% in the U.S. doesn't really move the needle. Then there's arguably a question: Is it worth the economic cost, particularly because it mostly impacts poorer communities? Wealthy communities can afford alternatives, but poorer communities that lose access to certain sources of energy have to pay the most.

Absolutely. I think the numbers that I've seen are roughly 2 billion people around the world using this very dirty fuel for cooking in their homes—things like wood, dung, or charcoal. The UN has reported that this leads to roughly 3 million deaths every year. These are the people for whom clean fossil fuels could make a huge difference in their quality of life overall. If we can accelerate the transition to alternative energy sources—which, arguably, you don't necessarily need the government to make happen—in some cases, you need technical breakthroughs like fusion, but solar and battery backup have such a strong economic incentive. They're cheaper, easier, and deployable, so the market is kind of—

Solving that problem on its own. That's what matters in solving the problem. You can believe that carbon going into the atmosphere can cause climate change. You can believe that the world is getting warmer, but you can also argue that the best way to solve that problem isn't necessarily to go backward by 30 or 40 years, but to go forward with new technology that replaces carbon rather than forcing things and making them more expensive, which makes it very hard for people to adapt.

Absolutely. And I keep going back to your point about China. Any of these extreme policy reactions to this perceived problem would inevitably hurt Americans the most and not actually solve the problem, whether you believe it's happening or not.

3. 47B at NIH, Eroom's Law, and golden tickets: has American science stagnated?

So let's talk about NIH. I want to talk a little bit about the stagnation of scientific progress in the United States. It's easy to look around and say, "We've got AI, we've got gene editing, we've got an understanding of the genome, we've got flying cars." I mean, all of this stuff came from the United States. I think it would be easy to argue that we are making great progress as a nation. We have made great progress as a nation.

But if you look at NIH funding, it was $14 billion in 1998, $27 billion in 2003, and $47 billion in 2024. The budget has more than tripled since 1998, but there has not been a proportional rise in breakthrough treatments coming out of that funding. Arguably, people call it Eroom's law—it's like Moore's law in reverse—it has fallen roughly 80-fold since 1950 in terms of outcomes per dollar spent, and it halves every 9 years. I think this comes from your report, or it's published. Has science stagnated in America? What the heck is going on?

I think, generally, our argument is that it has. I think the one example that a lot of Americans see, feel, and notice quite obviously, and that I always like to talk about, is the speed of flight. In the 1990s, you could fly on a Concorde, and now you can't. We're flying slower than we were 10 or 20 years ago. I think we can do much better.

The question we always ask is, why is this happening in the context of government funding? You could say, "Well, all the easy problems have already been solved. The low-hanging fruit has been picked, so it's harder to solve the next thing." Sure. But I think, broadly, the issue is that we have not been innovative in any way in how we actually conduct the science, whether it's at NIH, NSF, or any of our other science agencies.

The answer has always been, "Let's just keep doing the same thing, but add more money and hope that we get more outcomes proportionately," rather than asking the harder questions: Are there other ways we could be conducting the science? Are there other types of scientists who could be getting the funding? Are there other institutions that could be getting the funding?

I think those are some of the questions we start to bring up in A New Golden Age about how we should really be looking in the mirror and asking ourselves whether we're spending money in the smartest and best ways.

Why weren't we doing that along the way? And as you pour more money in, where does it go that makes the overall outcome less efficient?

I realize there's no incentive to do that. I think the incentive on the Hill oftentimes is to just keep increasing budgets that ultimately flow down to particular districts or particular states. On the government side, there's no incentive to check your homework and reveal that what you're doing is not actually working very well. It's always easy to take a headline that you're increasing funding in a particular domain.

The work is actually quite hard. It's not easy to go through $47 billion worth of funding and figure out what's working and what isn't. I think that's what we try to introduce. There's this concept of metascience that's introduced in the report, where we're setting up metascience units both at NSF and at NIH, and we're actually going to start running experiments. Maybe there are different ways that we should be doing funding, and then we can analyze those, course-correct, and direct money toward places where innovation is actually occurring.

So you're going to start doing your own experiments on how you're allocating money to see what has the highest return?

Exactly.

How do you measure that?

Well, I think you start by figuring out what experiments you want to run. Take, for example, the National Science Foundation. Almost all the grants are done in a very standard, typical format. There's a set of peer reviewers who do this merit-based review. It's maybe 3 or 4 people from a particular field. They take all the applications, review them, and select the ones they, as a group, believe are the most meritorious.

One could argue that it is merit-based, of course, but it also, in many cases, incentivizes scientists not necessarily to propose crazy, bold, innovative, out-of-the-box ideas. They tend to want to propose ideas that are in the strike zone and that the board, for example, will all support.

One thing that we're going to be testing at the National Science Foundation is a concept called golden tickets, where each of the evaluators is going to be given 1, 2, or 3 golden tickets. This was initially tested in Denmark and some other places. The theory is that the reviewer will then be able to unilaterally, without the rest of the committee agreeing, select a particular grant.

You incentivize folks to have more interesting grants. What's also kind of cool about this concept is that you're actually incentivizing better people to participate on the boards because they have a golden ticket now, and they're more likely to want to participate.

We want to run that experiment and see what kind of applications actually get approved and what kind of science gets done. It creates an incentive for scientists to propose wild and crazy ideas because the way scientists typically get a research grant—which is what they need to do because that's their living—is literally to get a grant to pay for your salary and the salary of the people in your lab.

You go and submit an application for a grant that looks like the kind of thing you think will get approved. Typically, that's low risk because if something is likely to happen, the review board would say, “Okay, great. We're giving that grant because we feel confident that money is well spent.” But the reality is, in venture capital, which you and I know well, you're going to have 1 out of 10 things work. It's a power law. That thing's worth 100x, and you want to have 9 out of 10 failures because that means you're taking a lot of risk. That's really how you push the envelope and discover new things and make big breakthroughs: you have to take risks, which means failure.

Yeah. Exactly that. That's exactly right. And I think another example of this is that, typically, most NSF grants are roughly 18 months, and that's just become a natural equilibrium that NSF has come to, given where the academic calendars are.

Not all research ideas require 18 months. Some of them require 3 months or 6 months. Some of them require 5 years. I think another thing we're going to be testing, which we proposed in A New Golden Age, was this idea of different durations of grants and allowing opportunities for people to try fast-track grants where they have an idea that can be done in 6 months. If it works, then they can apply for a longer grant.

Or you may have longer-dated ideas that you would need 3, 4, even 5 years to work on that we would be evaluating. At its core, at almost every turn, what A New Golden Age tries to do is meet scientists where they are. There are some ideas that require 18 months. There are other ones that require 6 months, and we want to make sure that there are opportunities for them to at least propose their ideas for evaluation.

Well, besides funding ideas, an alternative model is to fund individuals. This has been strongly advocated for, as you and I both know. In the venture capital world, you find great entrepreneurs, and they may have a crappy idea, but because they are who they are, they eventually make something amazing work.

I was just reading again about Stewart Butterfield, who started Slack, and he was working on a totally different business. He had $3 million left. He told the investors, “Should I give the money back? But, by the way, we built a communication tool that we use in our engineering team.” And they're like, “No, go ahead, pivot. Make that the business.” And then it turned into Slack, and they sold it for $30 billion.

So the idea in science may be the same: you find great people, give them significant funding, and let them decide how to spend the money rather than have some overlord scrutinize every dollar they're spending and every action they're taking. Get out of their way and say, “I trust that you're going to get somewhere. Here's a whole bunch of money, a lot more than you're asking for. Here's a whole lot of time. See you in 10 years. You'll figure something amazing out.”

So, I think one manifestation of that is the way that we think about some of these early-career fellowships. GRFPs are the flagship fellowship you have at the National Science Foundation. We give roughly 2,600 of these to the smartest and best aspiring PhDs in the country.

The idea there is, “We will give you this money to go pursue your PhD,” but it's totally portable, so you can take it anywhere you want. You can have universities compete for you, and ultimately you'll end up in a place where you're comfortable and you can do your best research. That's where, again, rewarding the scientist and the individual and giving them an opportunity to pursue their studies comes in.

And then the alternative is to go after big projects: the Human Genome Project, the Manhattan Project, the Apollo moon mission. China seems to be exceptionally good at this. In the central-planning context, they have these big objectives they want to achieve, and then they organize resources and allocate significant capital to achieve that objective.

4. Big bold bets: Genesis Mission, quantum by 2028, fusion by 2035, boots on the moon in '28

Yeah. Is that an alternative funding model? If so, how do we organize and execute in a world where you've got small labs, everyone's working on their own, maybe people are even competing with each other for grants, and you've got private industry doing their thing?

Do we have the capacity as a nation to tackle big, meaty projects that can really make incredible breakthroughs for humanity, but require significant capital and time and a long-term commitment?

I think the short answer is yes. What we advocate for and argue in A New Golden Age is that we have lost our way on doing that. I think most Americans look back favorably on things like the Apollo mission. It brought the country together. There was a discrete goal of something you were trying to accomplish, and only the federal government could marshal the resources to do that.

We advocate in A New Golden Age that we have to return to that. That's not the only thing we should do, but that should be one of the things we do, along with everything else I just mentioned. A couple of examples of what we're doing in that domain now: the first is around space.

The president very boldly said in the first Trump administration that we're going to go back to the moon, and we're almost there. We're going to have American boots back on the moon in 2028. We said we're going to have a nuclear reactor in space by 2028. We're going to have the first elements of a moon base by 2030. These are big, bold bets that take a decade to accomplish, and we're going to do it.

I think the second is around quantum computing. The president signed an executive order just last month launching a new National Quantum Initiative, and one of the key goals there is to create a scientifically relevant quantum computer by 2028. This was a directive to the Department of Energy, and we're going to be working very hard to make sure we can hit that pretty crazy timeline.

Your camp, you know, we really want to get to fusion by 2035, and we're trying very hard to get the resources allocated at DOE, combined with all the private-sector investment, to get there. I think the last one, which is our big flagship project for the whole administration, is called the Genesis Mission.

That is where we want to essentially double the scientific output of the United States by applying AI to our hardest scientific challenges and endeavors. We fundamentally believe that AI is going to be the biggest unlock to scientific discovery in the history of the world. Whether you're in materials science, chemistry, math, or physics, applying AI to your discipline is going to fundamentally change the way that you can do your science and accelerate the way that it's done.

We launched an initiative in late last year to do that, and now we have pretty much all of government working toward that effort.

So let me break this down and try to understand the selection process. Some things, you could argue, can be funded by private industry, and they will be because there are hundreds of billions of dollars of capital flowing into AI. There's a natural market incentive for individuals to use AI because it makes them more productive.

Do you really need the government to fund things like quantum computing and AI and science when those things are getting hundreds of billions of dollars of private capital, versus funding things that are not going to be found in the private capital markets, like deep-space research, understanding the origins of the universe, pure physics, and looking at these more fundamental scientific breakthroughs that everyone waves off?

We always find that from those fundamental understandings of our universe, some application emerges years down the road that we weren't even thinking about. How do we make those selections?

Yeah. No, that's a great point. Something that we've advocated for quite aggressively is that we have to return the primary focus of government-funded research to basic, early-stage, precompetitive R&D. This discovery science is an area where the private sector is not incentivized to participate, and only the government can do that.

At the same time, having these big, bold ideas that only the government can do is also very important for our enterprise. If you think about the urgency to create a scientifically relevant quantum computer by 2028, there's lots of activity in quantum going on throughout the private sector. But to them, it's for commercial applications. We want to create an instrument that can be used for scientific discovery that will pay huge dividends across the entire ecosystem.

The nuance with AI for science is that we're not spending money on the science that the private sector is doing around AI. There is more compute and more money going into AI than anything you could ever imagine today, and the government is not trying to compete in that space.

What it's trying to do is say, “Look, if you are doing basic research on all the things that you mentioned are so important, you should be considering how AI is going to impact or accelerate the work that you're doing, and we want to help you along in that journey.”

I always felt like so much of the challenge with government is the complication. It’s like entropy over time. You have all these different agencies, all these different groups, all competing for budget, and everything balloons. Is there a rationale for consolidating so many of our agencies into a single science and technology agency, being better organized and prioritized, and allocating capital to the most important things?

It’s a perennial debate, and I think, as I reflected on it for many years working on it, I honestly think it’s a feature and not a bug. I think the alternative, taken to an extreme, is kind of what the PRC, or what China, is doing. There, you have a top-down, directed, single-agency entity that sets priorities and tries to execute.

They have been trying to essentially figure out how to do EUV lithography since we put the export controls in 2019. No breakthrough has happened. There’s nothing more important to their economy than solving that scientific problem, and they haven’t been able to do that.

So, to me, I feel like one of the most special features about our system is that we do have people competing. This sort of free-market approach to innovation is a huge feature of our ecosystem, and one that I think is an important reason why we have all these breakthroughs.

So that’s critical for our success, fundamentally.

I think so. I think the fact that the DARPA people and the people working on national-security-related R&D are sitting at DoD and not sitting at some science agency makes their work much better and more relevant to their mission.

So, before we get to China and talk about the great race that’s underway across every domain, I don’t talk to anyone in industry, government, or elsewhere who isn’t acutely experiencing this kind of competitiveness with China at the moment. But I just want to talk about how we allocate capital, because NIH, NSF—so much of the money flows either to a government agency or to a university.

It seems to me that there are probably 4 channels, and you might have your own kind of rubric for this. A government agency can take the money and go do research. A university can take the money, and the lab is at the university, the university administers the lab, and it’s all done on campus at a university.

We can talk about the challenges with that, which I think is really important to highlight. Then there are industry companies that have an economic incentive, that can do research and have breakthroughs, and get money from the government to help them. And then there are these independent organizations, like Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Mayo Clinic. In Europe, there’s the Max Planck Institute. There are these sorts of institutes that are not a government and not private industry. They’re sort of like a nonprofit, if you will.

How do we think about allocating capital among those 4 channels? Why are they good, why are they not good, and how does the balance need to shift over time for us to get better ROI on our science dollars?

Yeah. What you’re bringing up here is one of the big reasons why we even wrote the New Golden Age report. If you rewind history back to 1945, World War II was ending. Vannevar Bush, who was the science adviser who had my role for FDR, received a letter from the president that asked him, “What do we do with the science enterprise post–World War II?”

Vannevar Bush wrote his response, which became Science, the Endless Frontier, the seminal work on the way that the U.S. government should interface with the science community. It has served as the north star for how we think about science funding for the last 70 years.

What Bush proposed was essentially the system that we have today, where the government funds basic research, primarily at universities. It set up this enterprise where all these researchers and all this research sprang up, and in the postwar era it was able to do this great basic research.

In parallel to that, all the national labs that had helped build the nuclear weapons of World War II and so on sprang up to do the intramural work that you were talking about. So there, you had 2 pieces: government and academia.

Why that was so important in that era was that, at that time, the vast majority of science funding was done by the federal government. Roughly 70% of R&D was paid for by the U.S. government. About 30% was in the private sector.

What has happened over the last 70 years is that there’s been this dramatic shift. Now, roughly 70% of R&D is done by the private sector, and 30% is funded by the federal government. And, as you mentioned correctly, new institutions have sprung up—things like philanthropies that fund focused research organizations, things like Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Institute, and so on.

The question now is: Is that model that Bush pushed forward and promulgated, and that actually led to the great discoveries of the last 50 years, still as relevant today as it was then? Our answer is that it’s not, and we need a refresh. That is why we wrote New Golden Age.

For us, the first basic question we always ask ourselves is: Is the government spending on something that the private sector or others in the community, like philanthropy, are not incentivized to do? That should be your first cut at all points.

Then you should ask yourself: What are the most important priorities for the United States? I think that is something that is sometimes almost in tension with the science community. Many people believe that all discovery science is good and that you should have no opinion about what’s important.

I think we would say, no, we disagree: The government is a set of elected individuals. Congress has a very strong opinion about where we should spend money, and they direct science funding all the time through their appropriations. The executive branch should have some sort of thesis about what’s important for the country.

I know we’ll talk about China in a second, but we have to win on things like AI, quantum, nuclear, and bio. There can be an overlay of what the biggest priorities for the U.S. government are, to make sure that where there are gaps—places where the private sector, philanthropy, and others aren’t able to fill the need—the government can step in.

Yeah. So what is going on with university funding? There’s this administrative charge that universities have. You changed that. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that.

What is this administration’s view on universities taking capital that’s been allocated for scientific research, getting an administrative fee, and where that money gets used in ways that maybe counter, or that this administration views as counter? Some people have made the case that this administration is being political with the changes that they’re making and how they’re allocating capital because they don’t like the politics or the social views of university administrators.

My view as the science adviser is that we should meet the best scientists wherever they are. If they’re at a university, we should fund them. If they’re at a focused research organization, we should fund them. If they’re on their own in their garage doing incredible work and can pass a merit-based review panel, we should fund them in their garage.

To me, I think the idea that we are open to funding scientists outside of universities has been twisted by the academic community to believe that we’re somehow anti-academic scientists. We are pro-scientists, and we don’t care where they are. I think that’s a core tenet of New Golden Age that we’re going to be pushing for the next few years.

5. The great race with China: $33B to $670B, and 7 out of 10 STEM PhDs aren't American

Okay. So, let’s talk about the great race with China. In the year 2000, China was spending $33 billion a year. In 2021, $670 billion. So China increased spending by 19x. Over the same time period, the U.S. increased spending by roughly 3x.

There’s a statistic I’ll quote, but it’s going to be hard to verify, but I’ve estimated it: About a decade ago, the U.S. published roughly twice as many papers in scientific journals as Chinese labs, academics, and scientists did. Today, China is publishing roughly 50% more in nearly every domain, with the exception of some life sciences.

Mhm.

China’s kind of raced ahead. Frame for us the importance of the scientific race with China. Why does it matter? Why should people care? Isn’t science for the benefit of humanity? Doesn’t everyone benefit when breakthroughs are made, when discoveries are made? Why should Americans care? And why should the world care about where we are with respect to this kind of competitiveness and discovery with China?

I think the Chinese realized a few years ago that technological and scientific leadership is the most important foundational block to economic and national security. Everything that we do as a country is, in some way, in my opinion, rooted in scientific and technological discovery.

We see it with what’s going on in semiconductors today. The breakthroughs that we had in transformers and other technology led to the large language models of today. Literally everything that’s powering our economy at its core was some sort of scientific discovery.

I think, to talk a little about what I mentioned earlier, I keep trying to push this idea that trying to centralize science has historically not led to the type of breakthroughs that you may want. To me, the free-market approach is that this extraordinarily vibrant venture ecosystem that we have, paired with the science funding that the government does, paired with what industry is incentivized to do, ultimately leads to these great discoveries.

I think I'm also very assured because we continue to be the place where everyone wants to come work, live, and study. Everyone wants to build a business here. Everyone wants to learn at our universities, and that is something that makes our ecosystem so special and so unique. That's why we have to nurture it and make sure to keep succeeding.

You could argue that some of our biggest breakthroughs were centrally planned, managed, and funded—the Human Genome Project, the Manhattan Project, Apollo, and so on. But, generally, the competitiveness in the market, the market-based system, yields greater risk-taking, greater pushing of the envelope, and ultimately greater outcomes. That's why I think the portfolio approach we talked about is so important. That's why we set these bold bets in quantum, space, and fusion. But at the same time, we've opened the aperture for this sort of discovery science and free-market approach to commercialization.

So where do you think China is getting things really right? When you advise the White House and the president, and you're talking about policy, when we look at China, what do we see as being incredibly well done with respect to their policy?

The playbook that they have used for a long time is essentially copying our IP, creating cheaper alternatives of that particular technology, dumping them in the United States, getting our businesses to go out of business, and then squeezing us. I think you've seen that with a wide variety of technologies over the years, and it's something that we need to be very cognizant of.

I think the second area, which they've taken action on or threatened action on, is around some of our critical minerals, which we realize are a very important piece of our larger tech and science ecosystem—our supply chain, if you will. Those are things that we have to constantly be thinking about and preparing ourselves to be independent.

But given the number of papers they're publishing—arguably, they're credible and peer-reviewed—let's just say they are making breakthroughs and getting ahead of us in many cases. What's helping them there? The IP theft and dumping on the market—that's industrial trade policy-type stuff. But on this core basis of discovery, are they not getting ahead, and what are they doing? Are they just funding more? Because I would argue, by some estimates, they're spending roughly on par with us.

Mm-hmm.

But by some estimates, they get 2x for every dollar they put in. By some estimates, 4x. By some estimates, 10x, because their labor costs are lower, they have much more automation, and their supply chain costs are lower. Obviously, the standards are different there in how things operate. So on a dollar-for-dollar basis, they're way outperforming us in terms of generating output, and it's showing up in the papers they're publishing. Is it just a function of spending more, or are there other things that we could be doing differently?

Look, I think what we could be doing a lot more of is encouraging more Americans to enter the STEM fields. This is something that has been on my mind for many, many years, and a statistic that I've tracked for a long time is the percentage of U.S.-born PhD recipients in computer science, for example. If you rewind the clock 30 years, I think it was 70% American and 30% foreign. Now it's inverted.

As a country, I believe that having a STEM-literate workforce is one of the most important superpowers we could have. We're doing everything we can to find ways to encourage our younger students to continue to pursue these degrees.

Another thing that we have to take a lot more seriously—and what I've observed in our science ecosystem—is our young scientists, the ones that have just finished up their PhDs and are starting their academic careers. This is one of the toughest jobs you can imagine. You're paid almost nothing. You're in a university, toiling away, trying to do research. These are the most underpaid people you could imagine for what they're doing for our country.

We have to return our scientific enterprise to rewarding them, giving them opportunities to work on their best ideas, and allowing them to excel. I think that's what we're focused on.

We train a lot of foreign students and bring them in; they get PhDs here. Why don't we let them stay more? What is the immigration policy that also bolsters the points you made earlier about getting the right people in the field and getting the right people into scientific research?

We've got a lot of Chinese students that come here, get a degree, get a PhD, and then we don't have a program for actively retaining that talent. They go back and work in Chinese labs or Chinese industry, or in other countries. China is now starting to attract scientists from India and Europe. Why aren't we doing that? We don't have the homegrown talent pool in science. Shouldn't we be more active in recruiting and retaining?

For us, I think you've got to do 2 things. One, you've got to make sure that we're encouraging young Americans to go into these STEM fields. For those who do want to stay, we should allow them to pursue legal pathways to stay here.

So is that policy being heard by the administration? Is it accepted, or is it in conflict with a more America First policy, which is looking out for Americans first and making sure jobs are for Americans first?

Well, I don't think it's in conflict with the policy. Before we even start thinking about anyone else, we have to get our house in order about how we can get more Americans to pursue this stuff.

Again, these numbers around computer science should be very alarming for people. The idea that 7 out of 10 STEM-related PhD candidates in the United States are not American—anyone can look at that and say, "That just doesn't look right," given the way that we've been educating Americans for so many decades.

I think we have a huge opportunity through a lot of these science programs to bring folks back in. One thing that I discovered in writing this book and this report was that we used to have programs at the National Science Foundation that would actually support and encourage gifted and talented students in American high schools and middle schools. Those were stopped for some reason.

Encouraging high-performing young students to pursue STEM in America was something that an actual decision was made by the government to no longer fund. Those are discouraging actions that we want to turn around.

Why is that? It seems silly. It feels like it's part of this larger DEI effort. You can imagine—and you probably know well, being in California—there were all these initiatives out in San Francisco where they stopped teaching advanced algebra to students in high school.

There's this battle right now at the University of California over SAT scores. The professors are all saying, "We've got kids coming in, and they can't do math." We have to do remedial math to teach them how to do math at UC Berkeley, which is where I went. It was like you had to get a 1500 on your SATs just to get in there back when it was on a 1600-point scale. I don't know if it still is, but they stopped taking SATs, and now you're seeing it in the performance when the kids show up.

The professors who initially wanted to remove the SAT are now saying, "No, no, no. We need it back. We need it back." These policies are fundamentally harming the progression of talented STEM kids in America and the pipeline for the next scientists in America.

Yes, we should be rewarding the greatest and most talented Americans and giving them opportunities to pursue all their great science and tech dreams and endeavors. That's what's most tragic: you have kids that have the potential to pursue this, yet we actively run programs that discourage them from doing that. That has to stop.

The rest of the world is doing it, and then they're getting paid a lot, given nice homes, and moving to China now.

Yeah. Yeah.

That is a crazy, crazy fact.

And again, to keep harping on it, honestly, the core tenet of the New Golden Age is about thinking about how we can elevate the scientist again. The way that we fund our programs, the types of programs we fund, and the way that we structure our grants and fellowships are all centered around the scientist himself.

6. Fauci did more damage to science than anyone in modern history, and NIH's median researcher is 71

It's not about what institution you work at or where you came from or where you grew up. It's about you yourself: Can you pursue gold-standard scientific work? We'll support you.

In the 20th century, scientists in the post–World War II era, particularly, were celebrities. They were rock stars. They were featured in magazines and newspapers and television shows, and they were rewarded economically with fame and notoriety. Did we lose it, or did it lead to moments where you have, like, Fauci?

That's a good—that's a great question. I do feel like there are a few names today that kind of meet that moment.

If you think of someone like Demis Hassabis at Google, who has won a Nobel Prize, that is sort of—

90% of people hate AI.

That is true. Maybe he can turn the tide on that one. I'm not sure.

He's probably the best qualified, but I think it's an uphill battle at this point.

It's true. I mean, there's this deep anti-science, anti-technology sentiment, not just in the U.S. but in the West. Do you think it's bred locally because people feel left behind?

Scientists and technologists, if you look historically through great cycles, are often scapegoats. They're often viewed as the elitists because they know stuff. They have stuff that others don't. There's knowledge, there's access, there's control, there's power. When you have a new technology, you have power that others don't have. When you have understanding, you have something that others don't have.

Are we in this moment, this populist moment right now in the West, where science and technology is viewed as a tool of the elite and therefore it must be broken and destroyed?

I don't know about that, but what I think about is what happened during COVID and what Fauci represented. I think he did more of a disservice to science than anyone in modern history. When he is advocating for positions like students needing to be masked in schools, while the pediatric societies are putting out letters saying it's okay for people to go out and collectively protest, but they're not allowed to go see their dying grandmother in a hospital, no regular, median American can listen to that and then take science seriously.

So, I think there's a lot of healing that needs to be done. That's why I think our approach to going back to the roots of gold-standard science is so important. We have to allow people to understand and trust what science is about and see that it's an inspiring and a good thing that can change our way of life. It's not some sort of dogma or rule or edict that comes from on high, but a process that all of us are part of, that we're all experimenting and learning about the world and the universe that we live in.

I try to be more optimistic, but I think we really, really hit a low point during COVID, and I think it's going to take quite a while to dig ourselves out.

Yeah. My observation during that era is that I always assume that if everyone thinks something, it's probably wrong.

Yes.

Like—

Yes.

But if some percentage of people argue viciously against it and some people argue for something, there's some objective truth to be found in that.

But if everyone aligns behind something in a very uniform way, there's something really off about that. What was scary to me was how so many people were making conclusions without empiricism. The whole fundamental basis of science is that you gather empirical data, you ask questions, you inquire, and then you go gather data and use that data to inform your conclusion. There wasn't a lot of empirical data being used to make conclusions. Everyone lined up behind these conclusions and assumptions, and it was, “Trust the science.”

I could not agree more. Anyone who asked questions was criticized by the scientific community as being anti-science.

It's crazy.

Anti-vaxxer, anti-this, anti-that, anti-science. You ask one question, you're anti-science. If you question some of the conclusions in the IPCC reports on climate change, you can agree with some things and disagree with other things, but if you don't agree with it all, you're anti-science.

Well, no, but the idea that you would push back on RCP 8.5—if I had pushed back on that publicly three or four years ago, I would have been criticized dramatically by everyone as being—

A Trump-er, anti-science MAGA guy.

But the IPCC says we can't even talk about that anymore.

So, I think if you stay the course and continue to stick to gold-standard science ideals—being inquisitive, asking questions, following the scientific method—I think you'll ultimately be proven right.

I think one of your points about the aging of scientists that you make in the reports is worth highlighting. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the importance of where we are, because the scientific community that we're working with today and the loss of STEM graduates—the loss of the pipeline—may be hurting us in our progress with China.

No, I mean, we have to continue to back and support young scientists. I think one of the statistics that was most alarming for me, which Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the NIH, shared with me, was that the median age of an intramural researcher at NIH is 71 years old.

71?

71.

That's the median age?

The median age of an intramural researcher—so, these are researchers who work at an NIH institution.

Wow. Isn't the retirement age—don't you get a pension before that?

I have to dig in more on that statistic, but I think so. I think there's this huge opportunity to bring young scientists back into the fold. I would say stay tuned, because I think there's a lot of interesting stuff going to happen at NIH.

So, how do you get science and pure science research—physics, mathematics, astronomy—funded and get the attention that they need in an era where it seems like everyone is so consumed with AI, which is an applied technology?

Yeah.

And there's important work still to do. AI can be leveraged in some of this other stuff, but how do you think about competing on AI? Every meeting I go into—and I'm sure you go into—it's AI this, AI that. Chips, progress with China, open models—that's dominating the conversation in D.C., dominating the conversation in the world.

I feel like we're leaving behind some of these really important advances that we need to be making in fundamental research.

A New Golden Age of American Innovation was released on the same day, actually, that Russ Vought, who's the OMB director—the budget director—and I wrote our annual R&D priorities memo. In that memo, we essentially list out the priorities of the administration and how individual agencies should write their budgets to map to those research priorities.

First and foremost, on the very first page, we talk about the importance of basic, fundamental research. I think those are the things that you mentioned, and I think that memo serves as the policy of the United States on how agencies like NSF should be prioritizing those things.

I'm excited to see us go in that direction and, as you say, keep reminding the world that there's an insane amount of capital going into R&D, really into AI, out in the private sector. We should be thinking about the stuff that only the U.S. government can fund, and that is basic research.

So, after the publication of A New Golden Age, are there executive orders coming out from the president to follow? Is there going to be asks of Congress? What are the actions that you need in the administration and with Congress to try and carry forward some of the ideals that you lay out?

Totally. The first implementation document is this R&D priorities memo. This is a memo that goes out from the White House to the agencies and essentially tells them, “These are the budget priority areas and practices that you need to implement going forward.”

The top 5 research agencies, those with over $3 billion in R&D, have a report due back to us 90 days after the publication on how they're going to implement it. You've already started seeing announcements from the agencies on how they're implementing the report.

There was an X-Labs announcement coming out of the National Science Foundation to fund these focused research organizations. NSF also put out an announcement around 4-year Ph.D.s that are done in partnership with industry, so people can graduate from the Ph.D. program and then go into industry much more quickly.

I think these are the programs we're going to be seeing across our agencies. The second piece is going to be actually working with Congress on the appropriations to make sure that they're aligned with the directions of A New Golden Age.

I would just stay tuned. We have a lot in the pipeline, and I think the first big step—the White House saying, “Thou shalt, in your budgets, prioritize these things”—is something you're going to start seeing manifested over the next year.

The one thing that pulls—I pull my hair out when I come to Washington, D.C.—and fortunately, I don't have to deal with it as often as you do, is you go to Congress down the road here and meet with these guys in the House and the Senate, and all they want is funding for their people. They want money to flow to their district or to their state.

How do you balance that demand from Congress against what really matters that we just talked about? This is the science.

This is how it’s got to get done. This is where the people are. This is where the institutions are. And it’s not about taking money and just spreading it to states. It’s about achieving the mission that is clearly defined. And the mission is what matters—not about a money grab for everyone.

I think there are a couple of ways. I think the first thing, which I’m very optimistic about, is that most of the recommendations that are in A New Golden Age of American Innovation are very nonpartisan or bipartisan. I think the idea of rethinking the methods by which we deploy science capital, try to fund different institutions, and promote individual scientists is something that I think will be universally accepted, or that people will be excited about, on the Hill.

I think the other thing that could actually work in our favor with the Hill is that a lot of these tenets will touch lots of different states. If you go out and say, look, there is really great work being done at a few select institutions in the Northeast, that being said, there’s lots of research being done all over the country, and we want to make sure that the best scientists, no matter where they are, are funded. I think that’s something that can also gain a lot of support. So I’m optimistic, but as you know, the Hill will always be a slog.

And if 2028 happens and there’s, let’s just say, a DSA person as president, do you think everything will quickly flip back to being the way it was? And what’s the institutional memory that gets created with your administration here, and this idea of a return to this gold standard in science, versus things being driven by social and political things?

I’m optimistic, one, that we’ll win in 2028. But I think, too, these ideas I said before are pretty nonpartisan. I mean, if you’re just someone looking at the science ecosystem and wanting it to succeed, I think these are generalizable ideas that you can get behind. And our hope is that we can run really hard through the tape over the next 2 years and prove that they’re actually working, and that changing or turning them around is going to be costly from a political capital standpoint because they’ll be working.

Michael Kratsios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy here at the White House, thank you for being with me today.

Thank you. This was so fun. I’m going all in.