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

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/68a59cd1802024c9

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 great question.
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. That's what's most tragic. That is a crazy, crazy fact.
Has science stagnated in America? What the heck is going on?
Michael Kratos, welcome to the all in interview. Thank you for having me, excited to be here.
So you are the director of the office of science and technology policy here at the White House. Can you just tell me a little bit about what that role is? What do you do here?
Yeah, so the Office of Science and Technology Policy was uh created in in the sixties to coordinate science and tech policy across the administration. So
Very unique to the US is 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 a national science foundation that does basic research. We have a department of energy that runs our national labs.
Department of War has uh extensive RD um
programs like DARPA, for example. So the one office in the White House or in the in the administration broadly that's able to coordinate all those efforts is the office that that I run called OSTP.
Um and we try to do is work with the president to set the national ST agenda.
Uh and then ultimately implement that across all of our agencies.
And you had this role before.
Is that right?
So last administration I was the chief technology officer of the United States. So if you think about OSTP, it does science and it does tech.
And in Trump one, uh I ran the tech portfolio for the for the president.
So let me kick off by asking you, is this administration anti science?
It is not anti science. I think uh one things that I'm most proud of is the release of a new report couple weeks ago called Science a New Golden Age. I think anyone who reads that report.
I think what try what we'll most likely see is administration that deeply cares about the American science and technology enterprise.
We really want the US 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.
Um, everywhere in the US. And and to us, we're doing everything we can to align all of our agencies, like I just mentioned.
Um, to be able to help that make a reality. But going back, there's a poll I'm gonna give you from Nature, which is one of the scientific journals.
They pull two thousand of their readers, which are all scientists.
Eighty six percent supported
Kamala Harris in the election?
According to the poll.
And Donald Trump polled at six percent.
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 over the last few decades. Um, I think America has 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.
Um, these are sort of seismic events that that only the US
government could bring together the ecosystem to to achieve
Um and to be honest, I think over the last you know fifteen or twenty years, I think science has been deeply and deeply politicized.
And we no longer are asking sort of the very hard and important questions of
You know.
What is a scientific method? How should we approaching it? Should we be questioning
Um
you know, s some of these conclusions.
Uh and rather, uh, you know, I think it's been dominated by kind of this this dogma. And I think it really crescendoed and peaked in in COVID, where
Um suddenly
You know, there was a certain individual that if you didn't agree with what he said.
then suddenly you were anti science. Uh and and to me, I think
I think that is the that that is the the most anti science conclusion you you could ever make.
Uh and I really think we have to return back to the basics, and that's what we're trying to do in this administration. Yeah, I mean at the basis of what you call the scientific method for for many people here who
might be watching that aren't familiar, it's like you ask questions.
The process of science is a process of asking questions.
An inquiry.
And that inquiry
Leads to experiments which collect data.
And that data is what informs your view, and 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 inquiries.
I I I could not agree more. And I think what we
as a government for many many decades have
hadn't taken the effort or the time to do
Із то оплай до
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.
Um, right now if you talk to so you're your your median lobbyist for the science community.
The only thing that they are fixated on is singularly is
The research and development budget. If the number doesn't go up, then they haven't done their job and they haven't, quote unquote, supported science.
And to me, that's a question.
But the more important question that every scientist should be asking is
Із way да ус ковермент спенс twohра більон долар з тюнє.
Is it actually driving
The best
breakthroughs and biggest breakthroughs of American people. Are there other ways that you could be deploying that capital?
In different to different organizations to different scientists.
Through different time horizons, there's so many questions we should be asking, which we're not.
And that is what uh science new golden age tries to bring to the front.
So I've heard this a lot from my friends who are scientists, who are researchers, who work in both the academic community, private industry, and elsewhere.
that there's a perception that this government, this administration is cutting science funding.
And it sounds like what you're saying
Is that there's
А на алокаче.
of resources
perhaps away from some things into other things as kind of the way that you're viewing this? Yeah, I think the most important thing that people should initially sort of table set is that there's a
distinction between a proposed budget
And the
Dollars that are appropriated by Congress.
So Congress controls the purse strings. They're the ones who say how much science funding there will be, and they've consistently continued to fund science over the last the dec decade plus.
But I think
You know
The the the more sort of policy question to think about is
А на way I view it is
Spending more money on the wrong types of things is not the right policy action. What's an example of that?
So to me I think sorry, because I'll just say like in twenty twenty five
This administration disrupted froze or terminated.
Three billion dollars in unspent funds on active grants. Yeah. And so
You terminated grants that scientists or labs had received or gotten approval for.
And so maybe you could just give us an example. What were those three billion and what were some of these other things that the administration would say are not really the right place a good point. To me, I think the best example is the National Science Foundation. And for some listeners, the NSF is essential the the premier funder of extramural basic research in the United States.
About eight to nine billion dollars a year, where most of that money is uh given to
Um academics at universities who do research on all sorts of basic science domains.
Um
Senator Ted Cruz and the committee on uh at on in in the Senate did did an analysis of the grants that were given during the Biden administration, and they found that roughly one quarter
Or twenty five percent of grants at NSF during that time period went towards DEI related.
quote unquote science.
And if you think about that, that's an
Astronomical amount. That is roughly$2 billion a year times four years. That's eight billion dollars of science funding.
that went to these DI related initiatives.
And that isn't science, and that shouldn't be. And that's that's a that's a pure manifestation of the polit politicization of science.
where you had the the Biden administration stand up and say, Oh, you know, 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 gonna give you money.
And that obviously is not the way we should be doing it, and that is not gold standard science.
There was also cuts to climate science research, and this is one that's been deeply criticized in media.
And by
broad kind of scientific community representation journals.
Associations and whatnot.
Can you just frame up the administration's view on how settled is anthropogenic
climate change meaning the climate is changing because of human action and
releasing carbon into the atmosphere.
And the criticality of that is it a climate emergency?
And what do we know, what do we not know, and and why are dollars being redirected away?
From those research ефей газ бі
has been very vocal on this and kind of serves as the belly button for a lot of these issues administration and
And what he has advocated for very publicly, um and has said many many times is that.
Yes, the climate.
Is changing and like yes, you know, um, humans have uh burned fossil fuels over the last hundred 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 is what's happened with these um
These the R C P eight point five, they call it. So these are scenarios that that climate scientists
I'm trying to estimate kind of the impact of this quote unquote climate change will have on on the world.
And this was a most extreme um scenario that had been in um in numerous sort of national climate assessments and run by the IPCC as well.
And ultimately they determined a few months ago that
Um they could not with any scientific integrity substantiate continuing to have this scenario play out. So he had to pull it down. So to me, I think this is what a lot of media and a lot of coverage and a lot of 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 kind of spun around where
You know, they they threw in this extreme scenario, which most people believe would never happen, and now this year proven that it will never happen because they they they even removed it from all the predictions.
Yeah.
Every media report of every climate assessment over the last twenty years has always focused on the extreme example. That's the one that the media fix fixates on.
And that's what sort of like captivates the attention of of of of all these folks. And I think
That's kind of a real disservice to science. So over
The last decade
to two decades, one fifteen years or so.
Is that
Why a lot of
Funding has rolled into climate research, climate science.
And terminating grants, reducing budgets.
Is kind of a roll back. Is that the way to think about
I I think the way we like to view it is that
You know, we want to be investing in the technologies and the science, which are ultimately going to create abundant energy for Americans.
Seven that you advocate a law for and you talk about we have to win in we have to win this fusion race. We set a target for twenty thirty-five, for example, for that.
We have been one of the most forwardly 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. So to us, I think.
Technology is what's gonna what's gonna gonna have the biggest impact for everyday Americans. Yeah, I mean I would make
Two arguments.
One is
China's output of carbon into the atmosphere.
eclipses the rest of the world. And so plus or minus fifty percent in the US doesn't really move the needle.
So then there's arguably a question like is it worth the economic cost, particularly because it mostly impacts the poorer c communities.
Then the w the wealthy communities can afford
alternatives but poorer communities that lose access to certain sources of energy.
Absolutely the most. Absolutely. I think the numbers that I've seen, you know, roughly
You know, two billion people around the world use sort of this very dirty fuel for cooking in their homes, things like wood or dung or charcoal.
And this leads, I mean the UN has report leads to roughly three million deaths every year because of this.
And you know, these are the people where where sort of um you know clean fossil fuel could make a huge difference in their quality of life and and and overall. And so if we can accelerate through to alternative energy sources, which
Arguably, you don't necessarily need the government to make happen. In some cases, you need to have technical breakthroughs like fusion.
But solar.
battery back up, I mean, there's such a strong economic incentive. It's cheaper, it's easier.
It's deployable.
that the market is kind of
Getting solving that problem on its own. That's what matters in solving 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 backwards by thirty years or forty years.
But to go forward.
with new technology that replaces carbon rather than
Forcing
And making things more expensive, which makes it very hard.
for people to adapt.
Absolutely. And I I keep going back to your point about about China. I mean that the any of these sort of um extreme policy reactions to this sort of perceived problem
Вот іневит Американсь замост.
And not actually solve the problem whether you believe it's happening or not.
So
Let's talk about NIH. I want to talk a little bit about the stagnation.
Of scientific прогрес інати стається.
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 must stuff came from the United States.
So
I think it would be easy to argue
We are making great progress as a nation. We have made great progress as a nation.
But
If you look at NIH funding
Nineteen ninety eight.
Fourteen billion.
Two thousand three, twenty seven billion.
Twenty twenty four, forty seven billion.
So the budget has more than tripled since nineteen ninety eight, but there has not been a proportional rise.
In breakthrough treatments.
Coming.
out of that funding.
Arguably the people callum's law, it's like Moore's Law in reverse.
It's fallen roughly eighty fold.
Since Nightin fifty, in terms of outcomes per dollar spent.
Uh and it halves every nine years. Every nine years
We get
half as efficient as we were at getting a return.
on the investment we're making. And I think this comes from your
Your report or it's it's it's published.
So
Has science stagnated in America? What the heck is going on?
I think generally
Our argument is it has. And I think that's one example. I think the one that um a lot of Americans see and feel and notice quite obviously that I always like to talk about is
uh the speed of flight.
You know, uh in the nineteen nineties you could you could fly on a Concord and and now you can't. We're flying slower than we were before, you know, ten, twenty years ago.
Um and and I think
And I think we can do much better. And I think the question we always ask is like why? Why is this why is this happening?
in a context of of of government funding um
I think you know
You could say one thing, Well, look, okay, all the all the easy problems have already kind of been solved, sort of low hanging fruit has been picked, so it's it's harder to solve the next thing. Sure.
But I think but I think broadly the issue is
We have not been
Innovative in any way on the way that we actually conduct the science.
The you know whether it's at NIH or at NSF or at any of their 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 proportionally.
rather than asking the harder questions about
Are there other ways that we could be conducting the science? Are there t other types of scientists that
Could be getting the funny.
could be getting the money. Are there other institutions that could be getting the funding? And I think those are some of the questions that we start to bring up in in new golden age.
About how we should really be looking in the mirror and asking ourselves are we 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?
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 sort of check your homework and reveal that what you're doing is not actually working very well. It's always easy to like take a headline that you're increasing funding in XYZ domain.
And the work is actually like quite hard. It's not easy to go through forty-seven billion dollars worth of funding and figure out.
You know, what's working and what isn't. And I think that's what we try to introduce. I think this concept of of meta science that's that's introduced in the report where
We're setting up meta science units both at NSF and at NIH where
We're actually gonna start running experiments. Maybe there are different ways that we should be doing we should be doing funding. And then we can analyze those and and then course correct and direct money towards places where innovation is actually occurring. So you're gonna 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. So I think, you know, take for example in the National Science Foundation, almost all the grants are done in a very standard typical format. There's a uh a set of peer reviewers or m that do this merit based review with maybe three or four people from a particular field.

take all the applications, they review them and they select the ones as a group they believe are more most meritorious.
You know, one could argue that, you know, it is merit based, of course, but it also um
І мене тамсь інтивізи сієнтист тонасері
Propose
crazy, bold, innovative out of box ideas.
they tend to want to propose ones that are in the strike zone that the board, for example, will will all support.
So one one thing that that we're gonna be testing at at National Science Foundation is a concept called golden tickets, where
Each of the evaluators are gonna be given one or two or three golden tickets.
And this was um initially actually tested in Denmark and some other places.
And the theory is that, you know, the the um reviewer will then be able to unilaterally without the rest of the of the committee agreeing, can make a selection of of a particular grant.
So you incentivize folks to to have more um more interesting grants. But I think what's also kinda cool about this concept is that
Um
You're actually incentivizing better people to participate in the boards because they have a golden ticket now and they're more more likely to wanna wanna participate. So we want to run that experiment and see what kind of what kind of uh um applications actually get approved and what kind of science gets done. So
Mm.
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'cause that's their living is literally get a grant
Pay for your salary, pay for the salary of the people in your lab.
is you go and submit an application for a grant that looks like the kind of thing that you think will get approved.
And 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 and venture capital, which you and I know well.
You're gonna have one out of ten things work. It's a power law, that thing's worth a hundred ex.
And you wanna have nine out of ten 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 is you gotta take risk, which means failure. Yeah, exactly. That that's exactly right. I think another another example of this is mo typically most NSF grants are roughly eighteen months.
And that's just become kind of a uh a natural equilibrium that NSF has come to just given where the academic calendars are.
But
You know, all research ideas don't require eighteen months. Some of them require three months or six months, some require five years.
I think another thing we're gonna be testing we proposed in in New Golden Age was this idea of different um durations of grants.
And allowing there to be opportunities for people to
try fast track grants where they have an idea that can be done in six months and if it works then they can apply for a longer grant.
Or you may have longer date ideas that you would need three, four, even five years to work on that we would be evaluating. So at at its core, at almost every turn, what Golden Age tries to do is meet scientists where they are.
There's some ideas that require eighteen months, there are other ones that require six 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, like in the venture capital world.
You find great entrepreneurs.
And they may have
Uh
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 three million left. He told the investors, Should I give the money back?
But by the way, we built a communication tool that we use on 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 thirty billion dollars.
And so the idea
In science may be the same, which is you find great
People
Yes. You give them significant funding.
You let them decide how to spend the money.
Rather than have some overlord board
that scrutinizes every dollar they're spending and every action they're taking.
I
Trust that you're gonna get somewhere.
There's a whole bunch of money, a lot more than you're asking for.
Gives a whole lot of time.
See you in ten years, you'll figure something amazing out.
So I think but one sort of manifestation of that is is the way that um we think about some of these early career uh fellowships. So GRFPs are kind of the the the flagship fellowship you have at the National Science Foundation, which
Um you know, we give
Um, roughly twenty six hundred these to to the smartest.
and best sort of aspiring PhDs in in in the country.
The idea there is
You know, we will give you this money to go pursue your your PhD, but it's totally portable. So you can take it anywhere you want. You can have universities compete for you, um, and ultimately you'll end up in in a place where you're comfortable and you can do your best research.
Um and that's where again like rewarding the scientist and the individual and giving them an opportunity to to pursue their studies.
And then the alternative is to go after big
project, the human genome project, Manhattan Project, 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. Yeah.
Is that an alternative funding model? And if so, how do we organize and execute in a in a world where
You got small labs, everyone's kinda working on their own.
Maybe people are even competing with each other for grants. 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, and I think what we advocate for and argue in in science new golden age is that we have lost our way on doing that. I think back to even what I mentioned earlier, I think
most Americans sort of look back favorably on things like
The Apollo mission. It kind of brought the country together. There was a discrete goal of something you're trying to accomplish.
And only the federal government could sort of marshal the resources to do that.
Um, and we advocate foreign golden ages, we have to return to that. Not that's the only thing we should do, but that should be one of the things we do along with everything else I just mentioned. And a couple examples of what we're doing in that domain now. I think the first is around space. The president very boldly
Sort of said in the first Trump administration that we're gonna go back to the moon and we're almost there. I mean we're gonna have American boots back on the moon in twenty eight.
We said we're gonna have a nuclear reactor in space by twenty eight. We're gonna have the first elements of a moon base by twenty thirty. These are like big, bold bets that take a decade to accomplish, and we're gonna we're gonna do it.
I think the second is around uh quantum computing.
So president signed an executive order just just last month launching a new national quantum initiative.
And one of the key goals there that we're trying to do is create a scientifically relevant
quantum computer by twenty twenty eight. This is a directive to the Department of Energy, and we're gonna be working very hard to make sure we can hit that pretty pretty crazy timeline. I mean your camp, you know, we really want to get the fusion by 2035, and we're trying very hard to get the resources allocated at at DOE and
combined with all the private sector investment to to get there.
And I think the last one, which is kind of our big flagship.
project for the whole administration is called the Genesis Mission, and 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 gonna be the biggest unlock to scientific discovery in the history of the world, whether you're in material science, whether you're in chemistry, whether you're in math, whether you're in physics.
You know, applying AI to your discipline is gonna fundamentally change the way that you can do your science.
and accelerate the way that it's done. Um and we launched an initiative in late last year to do that. And uh and now we have the
pretty much all of government sort of um working working towards that effort.
So
Let me just
Break this down and try and understand
The selection process then.
Because some things you could argue can be funded by private industry and they will be, because there's 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.
You really need the government to fund things like quantum computing and AI and science.
When those things are getting hundreds of millions of dollars of private capital.
Mm-hmm. Versus funding things that are like
Not gonna

private capital markets like
You know, deep space research, understanding the origins of the universe, pure physics, looking at these kind of
more fundamental scientific breakthroughs that everyone kind of waves off, but
We always find that in those fundamental understandings of our universe emerge some application years down the road that we weren't even thinking about. No and how do we make those selections? Yeah, no, that's that's a great point. Something that we've advocated for quite aggressively is we have to return
the the primary focus of government funded research on
Basic early stage, pre competitive R and D, this discovery science. That is an area where
You know, the private sector is not incentivized to participate in, and only the government can do that.
At the same time, having these kind of big bold ideas on your government can do is also very important for enterprise. If you think about sort of the urgency to create a scientifically relevant quantum computer.
By twenty twenty eight.
You know, there's lots of activity in in 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.
All the ecosystem.
And I think the AI for science, I think
The nuance there is
У нас спending money on
The the science that um the private sector is doing around AI.
you know, there is more computed, more money going into AI than anything you could ever imagine today. And the government's not trying to compete in that space.
What it's trying to do is saying like look, if you are doing
Basic research on all the things that you mentioned are so important.
You should be considering how AI is gonna impact or accelerate the work that you're doing. And we wanna help you along in that journey.
I 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, but like
Із террафо
Consolidating
so many of our agencies into a single science and technology agency and 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
It's it's a feature and it's not a bug, and I think
The alternative
to an extreme is kind of what
what uh what the PRC or what China is doing.
And there you have sort of a a a top down directed
Um
sort of single agency entity that that sets priorities and tries to execute.
Um they have been trying to essentially figure out how to do EV lfography since
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 having been able to do that.
To мі, I feel like.
One of the most special features about our system is we do have people competing. This sort of free market approach innovation is a is a huge feature of our ecosystem and one that I think is is an important reason why we have all these breakthroughs.
So that's critical for our success, fundamentally. I think so. I think
You know, the fact that the DARPA people and the people working on national security related RD are sitting at DOW and not sitting at some science agency.
I think makes their work much better and more relevant to 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.
That 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.
And it seems to me that there are probably four channels and you might have your own
kind of rubric for this, but
A government agency can take the money and go do research.
A university can take the money in the lab is at the university and the university administers the lab, and it's all done on campus at a university.
And we can talk about the challenges with that, which I think is really important to highlight.
And then there's 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's these kind of like independent
organizations like
Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Mayo Clinic.
In Europe, there's like Max Planck. I mean there's these sorts of
Institutes that are not a government, not private industry.
There's sort of like a nonprofit, if you will. How do we think about allocating capital amongst those four channels? W why they're good, why they're not good. And
How the balance needs to shift over time.
For us to get better ROI on our science dollars. Yeah.
So what you're bringing up here is kind of the one of the big reasons why we even wrote the Golden Age report. So if you kind of rewind history back in in nineteen forty five.
Uh
World War Two was ending. Van Ver Bush, who was sort of the science advisor, had my role for for FDR.
received a letter from the president that asked him you know what do we do with the science enterprise post world war two and
Benford Bush wrote his response that became Science Endless Frontier, which is kind of the the seminal work in the way that the US government should interface with science community, and has sort of served as sort of the the North Star for how we think about science funding for the last, you know, seventy years.
And what what Bush proposed was essentially the system that we have today where
The government funds basic research primarily at
Universities.
And it set up this enterprise where all these researchers sprung, all this research kind of sprung up in kind of the post-war era that was able to do this great basic research.
And in parallel to that, all the national labs that had helped sort of build the nuclear weapons of World War II and so on sort of sprung up to do the intramural work that you're talking about. So there you had sort of two pieces. You had government.
And you had you had academia.
And why that was so important in that era was at that time, the vast majority of science funding was done by the federal government. Roughly seventy percent of R D was paid for by the US government, about thirty was in the private sector.
What has happened over the last seventy years was there's been this dramatic shift. Now roughly seventy percent of RD is done by.
by the private sector and thirty is funded by the federal government.
And as you mentioned correctly, new institutions have sprung up, things like philanthropies at Fon Focused Research Organizations, things like Howard Hughes, Max Plock Institute, and so on.
And the question now is, is that model that that Bush pushed forward and and and promulgated and actually led to the the great discoveries of the last fifty years, is that still as relevant today as it was then?
And our answer is it's not, and we need a refresh, and that is why we wrote we wrote new golden age.
And 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?
And that should be your your first your first cut at all points.
And then you should ask yourself kind of what are the most important priorities for the United States? And I think
That is something that sometimes
It almost is like a tension with the science community.
Many sort of people believe that
You know, all discovery science is good, and you should have no opinion about what's important. And I think we would say, like, no, we disagree. Like the government is a set of elected individuals.
Um, Congress has a very strong opinion about where we should spend money and they direct science funding all the time through their appropriations. And 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 on AI, on quantum, on nuclear, on bio.
Um, and I think there we can there can be an overlay of kind of what are the biggest priorities for the US government and make sure that the gaps of places where
you know, the private sector and where 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 change that, maybe you can tell us a little bit about that.
And
What is this адміністраціян'в?
On
Universities taking capital that's been allocated for scientific research.
Getting an administrative fee and where does that money get used?
in ways that maybe counter or that this administration views being counter. Because 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 as the as a science advisor 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, do incredible work and can pass a merit a merit-based review panel, we should fund them in their garage.
And to me, I think the idea that that we are open to funding scientists.
outside of universities, I think has been sort of like twisted by the academic community to believe that we're like somehow anti-academic scientists.
We are pro scientist.
And we don't care where they are, and I think that's a core tenant of golden age that we're gonna be pushing for the next few years. Okay.
So let's talk about the great race with China in the year two thousand. China was spending thirty three billion dollars a year.
Twenty twenty one.
Six hundred and seventy billion.
So China increased spending by
Nineteen X.
Over the same time period the US increased spending by roughly
Three X.
There's a statistic all
quote, but it's gonna be hard to verify, but it I've estimated it.
that about a decade ago US published roughly twice as many
papers and scientific journals as
Chinese
labs and academics and scientists did and today
China's publishing roughly fifty percent more.
In nearly every domain, with the exception of some life sciences, 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 with China. I think
I think the Chinese realized a few like years ago that
Technological and scientific leadership is
The most important foundational block to economic and national security.
Everything that
Everything that we do as a country is sort of at some in some way, in my opinion, rooted in scientific and technological discovery.
Um, we see it with what's going on in semiconductors today. The breakthroughs that that we had in transformers and other technology led to the large language models of today. It's literally everything that's sort of powering our economy.
At its core was some sort of scientific discovery.
I think to me to talk a little about kind of mentioned earlier, I think what
What I
I keep trying to
trying to push is this idea that
Trying to centralize
Science
has historically not led to the type of breakthroughs that you may want.
Найк томі да фрі марки апроч естродили вибрант.
Um, venture ecosystem that we have paired with
the science funding that the that the government does paired with what
industry is incentivized to do ultimately leads to these to these great discoveries.
Um, and I think
To me, I'm also very sure 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.
а на сам that makes our our ecosystem so special and so unique
And uh and that's why we have to like nurture it and and make sure to keep succeeding. You could argue that some of our biggest breakthroughs were centrally planned, managed, and funded.
Human genome project, Manhattan Project, Apollo, and so on.
But yeah, generally the competitiveness in the market, the market based system.
yields greater risk taking, greater pushing of the envelope, and ultimately
Greater outcome. And that's why I think the portfolio approach we talked about is so important. I mean that's why we set these bold bets in quantum and space and fusion.
But at the same time, we've like opened the aperture for this sort of discovery science and free market approach to to commercialisation. So where do you think China's getting things really right?
You know, when you advise
the the White House, the President, and you know, you're talking about policy.
Mm. 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 RIP, creating cheaper alternatives to that particular technology, dumping them in the United States, getting our businesses to go out of business, and then and then squeezing us. And I think you've seen that with a a wide variety of technologies over the years.
And and I think it's something that we need to be very, very cognizant of. I think
The second area which you know they've taken action on and or or threatened action on is around some of our critical minerals, which we realize are a very important piece of our
larger sort of like tech and science ecosystem, if you will.
Supply chain.
Um so those those are things that that we have to constantly be be thinking about and preparing ourselves to be able to to to be uh to be independent. But given the number of papers they're publishing, arguably they're credible, they're peer reviewed, let's just say
They are making breakthroughs and they are getting ahead of us in many cases.
What's helping them there? So the I the IP theft, dumping on the market, that's industrial trade policy.
type stuff, but on this core basis of like discovery.
Are they not getting ahead and and what are they doing while they're are they just funding more?'Cause I would argue
By some estimates, so again, they're spending roughly on parity with us.
Mm-hmm.
By some estimates
They get two X for every dollar they put in. By some estimates four X, by some estimates ten X because their labor costs are lower, they have much more automation, their supply chain costs are lower.
Obviously the standards are different there. Yeah in how things operate. So on a dollar for dollar basis, they're they're
way over spending relative to us in terms of generating output.
And it's showing up in the papers that are publishing.
Is it just a function of spending more?
Or are there other things that we could be doing differently? Look, I I I think to me 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 for many, many years, and the statistic that I I've tracked for a long time is is sort of the the the percentage of US born
You know, PhD
recipients in computer science, for example. If you if you rewind the clock, you know, thirty years I think it was, you know, seventy percent were American and thirty percent were were foreign, and now it's now it's inverted.
Um and I think to us as a country, you know, I believe that having a a a STEM literate workforce is one of the most
important superpowers we could have as a country and
We're doing everything we can to kinda s find ways to encourage our younger students to continue to pursue these degrees.
And to me, I mean back to this thing, I think another thing that we have to take a lot more seriously is
And what I've observed in our science ecosystem is
You know.
Our young scientists, the ones that have just finishing up their PhD and are starting their academic careers
You know, these are one of the toughest jobs you can imagine. You're paid almost nothing.
you know, you're in a university, you're toying away trying to do trying to do research.
These are the most underpaid people you could imagine for what they're doing for our country. And to us, I think we have to return our scientific enterprise to reward them, to give them opportunities to work on their best ideas and to allow them to to excel. I think that's what that's what we're focused on. So we train a lot of foreign students.
We bring'em in, they get PhDs here.
Why don't we let'em stay more?
And so what is the imm immigration policy
That also bolsters the points you made earlier about getting the right people in the field, 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 they work in the Chinese lab, their Chinese industry.
Or, you know, in other countries.
And China's now starting to attract scientists from India, from Europe.
Why aren't we doing that? Because we don't have the home grown talent pool.

I think you gotta do two things. I think one, you gotta make sure that we're we're encouraging young Americans to to go into these STEM fields and
And for those who do want to stay, allow them to sort of pursue legal pathways to 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 looking out for Americans first.
Making sure jobs are for Americans before
Well, I don't think NISA's in conflict with the policy. I mean, I think I think we
We as basics, like before we even start thinking about anyone else, like we have to get our house in order about how we can get more Americans to to pursue this stuff. Again, these numbers around around computer science should be very alarming for people.
The idea that you know
Seven out of ten
СТЕМ релити Піч Ді кандидат і Уніста анамерикан.
like anyone can look at that and say like that just doesn't doesn't look right given the way that we've been educating Americans for for so many decades.
Um and I think we have a huge opportunity through through a lot of these these science programs to sort of bring bring folks back in.
I think one thing that I discovered kinda in in writing this book and this report was
You know, we used to have programs of National Science Foundation that would actually um support and encourage gifted and talented students in American high schools and middle schools.
Um
Those were stopped.
For some reason encouraging
high performing young students to pursue STEM in America was something that
And actual decisions made of the government to to no longer fund that.
And I think those are sort of discouraging actions that we want to we want to turn around.
Why is that?
Sim.
Silly.
It feels like it it's sort of part of this larger sort of DI effort. I mean they were there were, you know, you can imagine, um, and you probably know well being California, I mean there were all these in initiatives out in San Francisco where they stopped one to teach.
you know, advanced algebra to students in high school. And there's this battle right now at the University of California on SAT scores. The professors are all saying
We got kids coming in and they can't and we have to do remedial math to teach them how to do math. You see Berkeley.

And it was like
Like you had to get like a fifteen hundred on your S A T s just to get in there back in the well, this was on when it was on sixteen hundred. Yeah. I don't know if it still is. But they stopped taking S A Ts and now you're seeing it in the
Performance when the kids show up. And the professor initially didn't want it to remove the S T are now saying no no no we need it back.

These policies are like
Fundamentally harming the progression of talented STEM
Kids in America
To create that 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's dreams and endeavors. And
And I think to me, like that's that's what's most tragic, where you have kids that have potential to pursue this, yet we actively run programs which
Discourage them from doing that.
They're getting paid a lot and giving nice homes and moving to China now.
Yeah.
Yeah. That is a crazy fact.
And I think too, and I I again I to keep harping on it. I mean honestly that the the core tenant of new golden age is about thinking about how we can elevate the scientist again.

Fund our programs, the types of programs we do fund, the way that we structure our grants and fellowships.
Are all centered around the scientists himself. 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 sort of gold standard scientific work? And we'll scroll.
In the
post World War Two, particularly
Were celebrities, were rock stars, they were
Kind of
Фічур і магазинсь, і нюспейперс, і телевізін шос.
And
You know, they were rewarded.
Economically with
with fame and notoriety
Did we lose it?
Or did it lead to moments where you have like Fauci?
That's great that's great question. I do I do feel like there are a few
sort of names in in today
In today's time that kind of meet that moment. If you think of someone like Demis, for example, at Google that that you know has won a Nobel Prize that is sort of like Ninety percent of people hate AI.
That is true. 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 is true. I mean there's this deep anti science, anti technology sentiment.
Not just in the US, but in the West.
Do you think it's bread?
Locally because people feel left behind.
Scientists and technologists, if you look historically through
Great cycles.
They're often scapegoats, they're all often viewed as the elitists because they know stuff, they have stuff that others don't. Yep. There's knowledge.
Тер з аксес, де з контроль, де з повер.
Because 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 what I think about is
Is I I really do
oftentimes think about kind of what happened during Covid and and kind of what what Fauci represented. And I think
you know he did more disservice to science than than anyone in in modern history
You know, when he is advocating for
Positions like
You know, students need to be masked in schools.
When um societies, you know, you know, the pediatric societies are putting out letters saying
You know, um it's okay for
People to go out. Um
And
And uh collectively protest.
But they're not allowed to, you know, go see their dying grandmother in a hospital.
You know.
No regular median American
Can listen to that.
And and then take science seriously.
So I think there's a lot of healing that needs to be done, and 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 and can change our way of life.
It's not some sort of like dogma or rule or some edict that comes from on high.
But it's a 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.
Um and I I try to be more optimistic, but but I think we really, really hit a low point during Covid and
I think we're gonna have to take it's gonna take quite a while to dig ourselves out. Yeah, my observation during that era is like I I always assume that if everyone thinks something, it's probably wrong. Yes. Like
If some percent 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 kind of uniform way, there's something really off about that. But what was scary to me was how
So many people without empiricism, the whole fundamental basis of science is
You gather empirical data.
You ask questions, you inquire.
And then you go gather data and you use that data to inform
Your conclusion.
And there wasn't a lot of empirical data that was being used to make conclusions, and everyone wind up behind these conclusions.
And these assumptions.
And it was told.
Trust the science.
And as a result
Not only did it kind of destroy trust in science, but
I think it brings to light
Questions what happened to the scientists?
Why did they all kind of
Line up like this.
And why did everyone
feel it was okay to
Put down people that ask
Questions.
When the basis of science is to ask.
Questions. And it's okay if people ask dumb questions, if they ask wrong questions.
But there was this breakdown on the science basis.
Of scientists being

Without being
Sean. I I could not agree more. And anyone who asked questions were criticized by the scientific community as being anti-scientists. Yeah, it's it's crazy. 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, 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 the R sp eight point five.
If if I would have pushed back on that publicly three or four years ago, I would have been
criticized dramatically by everyone is being anti science. Your Trumper anti-science MAGA got to PCC says we can't even talk about that anymore. So so I I think
I think if you stay the course and continue to stick to course sort of gold standard science ideals of of being inquisitive, asking questions, following the scientific method, I think ultimately be proven proven right.
Uh-huh.
I mean I think one of your points about
The aging of
the scientists that you make in the reports worth highlighting. Maybe you could just 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 in our progress with China.
No, I mean we we have to continue to back and support young scientists. And I think one of the statistics which is most alarming for me, which uh was Jay the Jay Botarchari, the director of of NIH shared with me was that
The median age of an intramural
Researcher at NIH is seventy one years old.
Seventy one. Seventy one.
That's the median age. The median age of an So these are these are researchers that work at at an NIH institution.
Isn't the retirement age like don't you get a pension before that?
You know, I gotta dig into more of that statistic, but I think so. But I think there's this huge opportunity to bring young scientists back into the fold. So
I would say stay tuned there because I think there's a lot of interesting stuff gonna happen at N IH.
So
How do you get science and pure science research?
Physics.
Mathematics.
Astronomy.
How do you get these 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. Yep.
And
There's important work still to do. AI can be leveraged and some of this other stuff, but like how do you how do you think about competing on AI? Because every meeting
I go into I'm sure you go into it's AI this AI that
Chips.
Progress with China, open models. That's kind of dominating the conversation in DC.
Dominating the world.
And I feel like we're leaving behind
Some of these really important advances that we need to be making in fundamental research.
New Golden Age was was released on the same day, actually. Russ Vode, who's the OB director, the budget director, uh, and myself, we wrote um our annual R D priorities memo.
In that memo, we essentially list out kind of what are the priorities administration and how
uh individual agencies should write their budgets to map to those research priorities.
And kind of first and foremost, on the very first page, we talk about the importance of basic fundamental research. And I think those are the things that that you mentioned.
And I think that memo kind of serves the policy of the United States on how agencies like NSF should be prioritizing those things. So I'm excited to see us go in that direction.
And kind of as you say, keep remind the world there is
An insane amount of capital going into to RD really into AI out in the private sector.
We should be thinking about the stuff that that the only the US government can fund, and that is that sort of basic research. So after the publication of Golden Age, are there EOs executive orders coming out from the president to follow?
Is there gonna be ask of Congress? I mean, what are the actions that you need
In the admin and with Congress to try and carry forward some of the ideals that you lay out. Totally. So the first implementation document is this R D priorities memo. So this is a memo that goes out to the White House that is that goes out to the agencies that essentially tells them
These are the budget um priority areas and practices that you need to implement going forward.
Um in the top five research agencies, those with over three billion dollars in in R D, have a report due back to us ninety days after the publication on how they're gonna be doing implementation.
So you've already started seeing announcements from the agencies on how they're implementing the report.
You had an ex labs announcement coming out of National Science Foundation to sort of s fund these focus research organizations.
NSF also put out an announcement around four year PHDs that that are done in partnership with industry.
So people can graduate out of the PhD program and then go into industry um much much more quickly.
Um and I think these are the programs you're gonna be seeing across across our agencies.
I think the second piece is gonna be actually working with Congress on the appropriations to make sure that sort of they're aligned with the directions of of of new golden age. But I would just stay tuned. I think we have we have a lot down in in the pipe, and I think the burst first big step of the White House saying
Thou shalt in your budgets prioritize these things, or gonna start seeing that manifested over the next year.
The the one thing that pulled I pulled 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 you go 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 gotta 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.
You know, I I I think there's a couple of ways. I think the the first thing which I'm very optimistic about is most of the recommendations that are in Golden Age are are very, very nonpartisan or bipartisan. I think the idea of like rethinking about the methods by which we
deploy science capital and try to fund different institutions and
promote individual scientists are all things that I think will be uniformly
sort of accepted or or s people excited about on the hill.
I think the other thing that's actually um could work in our favor with the hill is that
A lot of these tenants are ones that will touch lots of different in lots of different states. Like if you go out and say, like, look.
You know.
There is really great work being done at a few select institutions in the Northeast. That being said, there's lots of research 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
Twenty twenty eight happens and there's let's just say a DSA person as president, you think everything will kinda quickly flip back to
being the way it was and you know, what's kind of the institutional memory that gets created with your administration here. And this idea of this return to this gold standard in science.
versus things being social political things
Driven
I'm optimistic one that we'll we'll win in twenty eight, but I but I think two these these ideas I said before are
Are are pretty nonpartisan. I mean, if you're just someone looking at the science ecosystem and wanting 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 two years.
And prove that they're actually working, and sort of changing it or turning around is gonna be costly from a political capital standpoint because they'll be working.
Michael Kratzios, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy here at the White House. Thank you for being with me today. Thank you. This is so fun.