Science News & Analysis

What's missing from the White House plan for the future of US science (August 4, 2026)

Editorial, Nature 656, 7–8 (4 August 2026).

In an unsigned editorial, Nature assesses Science: A New Golden Age, the 123-page report released last month by Michael Kratsios, head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, in response to a letter from President Trump tasking him with bringing about a new golden age of American innovation. The journal notes that such a letter is unremarkable in itself — presidents routinely use them to signal where the government's interests lie — but that this one arrives amid a systematic effort to reshape American research. It credits the report with raising difficult and necessary questions: how to sustain the foundational work underpinning technological advance, how to strengthen scientific infrastructure, what artificial intelligence means for research practice, and how grants ought to be issued. The report proposes rebalancing the federal research-funding portfolio, confronts the long-standing complaint that grant managers and reviewers are excessively cautious, and offers new routes to fund researchers willing to take risks and those working outside universities. Nature describes these as substantial matters it intends to revisit at greater length.

The editorial's central objection concerns process, and it draws the comparison the report itself invites. Science, The Endless Frontier, delivered to President Truman in 1945 by Vannevar Bush, then director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, produced the National Science Foundation; that effort ran for several years, drew on academia, industry and government, and was built through four committees covering medicine, science and public welfare, the development of scientific talent, and the publication of scientific information, whose advice reached the final text. The new report emerges from a turbulent period of a different character — eighteen months of executive orders, rule changes, abrupt funding cuts, delayed grant awards, and political intervention in matters Nature holds should belong to experts, from vaccine safety to climate change — and, unlike its predecessor, it does not name the members of the scientific and technical communities it consulted. The journal places that omission within a documented pattern of sharply reduced independent expert advice reaching the federal government. The operative instructions sit in an annex containing a memorandum to department and agency heads co-signed by Kratsios and Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. Priorities run to physics, materials science, chemistry, computer science, engineering, space science and mathematics, weighted toward national security–relevant portfolios, with named fields including AI, quantum information science, semiconductors, advanced communications, robotics, advanced manufacturing, nuclear fission and fusion, and space systems. Agencies with annual research budgets of at least $3 billion are given 90 days to report how they will prioritize both the absolute level and the relative share of their funding, and are directed to "prioritize foundational research in the biological sciences over the life sciences" — a distinction Nature asks who exactly is qualified to have drawn. The report claims consultation across the national scientific enterprise without naming participants, and the editorial finds no visible input from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine or from the scholarly societies, bodies it characterizes as the modern equivalent of professional guilds, which convene meetings, publish research, set standards of quality, carry their disciplines' interests to policymakers and defend scholarly integrity.

Nature also catalogs what the report leaves out. Climate change and public health go unmentioned in its account of the scientific future, as do the social sciences, though metascience appears — surprising gaps given that national security is among the stated objectives, since climate change and emerging infectious disease will shape the coming decades, and work in the social sciences and humanities bears as directly as science and engineering on any society navigating what AI will do to it. Absent from the annex too are the words world, global and international cooperation, which the journal reads as consistent with the withdrawal of American funding and participation from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the World Health Organization. The implicit assumption, it argues, is that a golden age can be reached in isolation from researchers elsewhere — against seventy-five years of evidence and against a history of science showing what civilizations achieve when they welcome people from everywhere. The report presents itself as successor to the 1945 document and uses the word frontier more than fifty times, but Nature finds the resemblance superficial: Bush's report opened a path to discovery and invention, building on radar, nuclear weapons and mass-produced penicillin through an inclusive process that offered grounds for hope. The current plan, in the journal's judgment, could have addressed the actual moment of planetary and societal crisis, could have spanned borders and disciplines not as box-ticking but because consultation offers the best chance of getting through, and could have committed to learning from the best regardless of who they are and treating scientists as partners in the conversation. That it does none of these things is what the editorial calls the missed opportunity.