US move to overhaul science funding prompts some agreement and much doubt

The Donald J. Trump administration proposed last month to overhaul how the federal government funds US research, detailing both the planned changes and criticisms of the current approach in a July 21 report.

“Our researchers are fighting against an increasingly calcified system that has driven up the cost of scientific progress over time,” the report says.

The increasing administrative burden of grant writing and conservative nature of peer review panels are just two of many issues the report says are slowing down scientific innovation in the US. Both criticisms have been discussed within the scientific community for years.

“I think the scientific community would agree with the critiques,” says Chris R. Glass, a professor of educational leadership and higher education at Boston College. One 2018 survey found that principal investigators spend upward of 40% of their time addressing the administrative requirements of their federally funded projects rather than conducting active research. Meanwhile, the idea of whether peer review panels deprioritize funding high-risk research in favor of lower-risk alternatives has been hotly debated within the scientific community—some studies have found that peer review panels are less likely to reward novel, high-risk research, while others have not.

Erica Goldman, director of policy entrepreneurship at the Federation of American Scientists, also agrees that current R&D structures “are a poor fit for large-scale, team-based interdisciplinary science.” X-Labs, a new initiative of the National Science Foundation focused on funding applied research, and focused research organizations, both of which are mentioned in the report, “are aiming to fill some of these gaps,” she says.

The issue some in the scientific community have with the report is not that it’s a critique of the federal R&D structure, Glass says. Instead, it’s “the implicit assumption that this approach should replace the one that has existed rather than be a part of a broader portfolio of how science gets funded.”

The existing funding structure in the US was laid out in Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report, Science, the Endless Frontier. And although the new report from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) praises Bush’s vision, it also suggests that the 81-year-old model has grown increasingly inadequate at propelling US science forward.

Shifting funding away from universities

To revamp the system, the OSTP report, Science: A New Golden Age, proposes directing funding away from universities and toward individual scientists, private industry, and other types of research institutions. It also recommends experimenting with new funding approaches and that federal agencies prioritize funding research topics that align with current presidential priorities. Artificial intelligence, for instance, features prominently throughout the report.

Glass likens the White House’s approach to that of a Silicon Valley investor. “They have a high tolerance for risk. They care about big bets, and they want to create value,” he says.

But those big bets could end up restructuring science in a way that degrades a system that many consider to be “the most successful way to organize the scientific enterprise of any country,” Glass says. It might prove difficult to undo some of these changes if they end up carrying more risk than people had originally anticipated, he adds.

A better approach would be one that’s more systematic and experimental, Glass says. Rather than completely restructuring US science in a way that could, for example, harm universities through the reallocation of funding, the administration should be using “scientific thinking and reasoning to address the problems, to evaluate solutions, to experiment with reforms,” he says.

But even that could prove difficult for the administration. It will be challenging to implement all its new initiatives and funding mechanisms while agencies “are still functionally hollowed out from the past year,” Goldman says. Many of these agencies “are still running at a fraction of normal operating capacity because of last year’s workforce erosion.”

The OSTP report seems to ignore many of the actions that the Trump administration has taken since the president’s return to office. “This administration calls for a golden age of science, but it’s been gutting the programs, regulations, institutions that have been the biggest advances in science and technology,” US Rep. April McClain Delaney (D-MD) said during a July 22 House hearing on US R&D priorities and the fiscal 2027 budget.

The OSTP did not respond to C&EN’s request for comment about the concerns raised by Delaney, Goldman, and Glass.

The White House is requiring federal R&D agencies to submit an action plan within 90 days outlining how they will implement the principles laid out in the OSTP report, as well as the fiscal 2028 budget guidance included in its annex.

“It remains to be seen whether those 90-day plans and next year’s budget requests turn specific pillars into funded, staffed programs,” Goldman says.