Science News & Analysis

White House rolls out AI funding — and signals a new era for US science (July 24, 2026)

Dan Garisto and Kaia Glickman report for Nature on a week in which the Trump administration advanced the science it favors rather than cutting the science it does not. On Tuesday, presidential science adviser Michael Kratsios released Science: A New Golden Age, proposing substantial changes to federally funded research. The following day he helped unveil the first grant recipients of the Genesis Mission, the administration's flagship artificial intelligence initiative, which officials had billed as comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project. Roughly 5,000 teams applied; about 280 first-phase projects were announced at a summit on July 22, each receiving a nine-month grant of between $500,000 and $750,000 to apply AI to problems such as improving the electrical grid and automating laboratory work. Those teams may also apply for a three-year second phase carrying millions in annual funding. Jeremy Zucker, a computational scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory leading a project using AI to optimize algae growth for products including fertilizers and biofuels, described himself as very happy to have been selected given how competitive the process was.

The report met a cooler reception the same day at a hearing of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology. Kratsios calls in it for shifting federal science funding away from legacy institutions such as universities, writing that "too much of our research enterprise has come to serve itself rather than the scientists within it." His alternative would support individual researchers through mechanisms such as golden tickets, which let grant reviewers override their colleagues to fund high-risk proposals; he told the committee that other routes to breakthroughs deserve testing after so many years of the same approach, and argued that American science is stagnating and requires rethinking. Committee Republicans broadly endorsed the vision. Democrats attacked the administration's cuts to science budgets and agencies and its effort to assert political control over grant awards, with Rep. Gabe Amo of Rhode Island saying the direction was not toward a golden age of innovation but back to the Stone Age. Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington, wrote on Bluesky that the administration appears determined to destroy American universities — a charge that follows the administration's withholding of funds from some institutions on antisemitism grounds and Republican accusations that universities discriminate against conservative views.

The hearing also produced questions about money already appropriated. Lawmakers pressed Kratsios on reports, including Nature's own, that the National Science Foundation intended to reclaim roughly $500 million from its grant-making divisions to fund a new White House initiative. Asked directly by Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, Kratsios said he was unfamiliar with the details and referred her to the agency, while arguing that the country should be more deliberate and specific in tackling grand challenges. Nature subsequently learned that NSF has withdrawn $300 million from two divisions — mathematics and physical sciences, and computer and information science and engineering — with program officers pulling back 150 proposals that had already passed peer review to free up money Congress had allotted to the agency. Some awards were rescinded outright, others cut, others deferred to the next fiscal year. NSF staff speaking anonymously for fear of reprisal said the funds are probably destined for Grand Research Challenges, a program run by Kratsios's own Office of Science and Technology Policy; a preliminary document seen by Nature lists four areas — the future of intelligence, the frontier of quantum phenomena, advanced materials and matter, and the foundations of biological design. An NSF spokesperson declined to discuss internal budget deliberations, noting that fiscal 2026 research funds may be awarded in that year or the next and that the agency revises budgets and manages portfolios as needed.

N.B. — Nature issued a correction on 27 July 2026: an earlier version stated that Zucker's project would maximize biofuel production, where it optimizes algae growth for a range of products including biofuels. This entry reflects the corrected text.