What Does it Take to Deliver a New Golden Age?
The vision outlined in Science: A New Golden Age is a serious reimagining of the structure of the scientific enterprise and its relationship to society. Michael Kratsios, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), ambitiously frames the report as an update to Vannevar Bush’s pivotal Science: The Endless Frontier, which set the general tone of federal R&D post-war. The structures and institutions formed under Bush’s vision helped position the United States as a global science and technology superpower, but prior success should not prevent an honest reflection on our ability to meet today’s needs and to regain the public’s trust. Kratsios’s report is a timely, constructive contribution to the ongoing debates on the direction of scientific inquiry, the technical merits of AI in research, and the role of metascience (the application of scientific methods to science itself). While refreshing to see these ideas in a policy document of this level, lessons from the last decade of federal science policy show that the next era ultimately hinges on what federal agencies can actually accomplish.
Bold visions have high implementation costs—agencies need to translate vision into organizational structure, funding models, and hiring practices. For example, FAS and the report both champion using metascience methods to evaluate scientific performance to inform better program design and funding decisions. Embedding metascience units within agencies gained traction through inclusion in NSF’s FY2027 budget request, but structural issues around authority, funding, and professionalization could threaten this promising idea. FAS’s recommendations to Director Kratsios on accelerating science are rich with examples on how to build that durable capacity, such as an interagency subcommittee that reviews and approves agency metascience pilots; a federal fellowship that embeds term-limited experts inside agencies; and a designated testbed agency where new grantmaking approaches can be tried without threatening a core mission. Vision becomes practical through the details of a well-designed metascience learning loop.
The same pattern holds for another major focus of the report, AI for science as embodied in the Genesis Mission. The promise of AI depends on the data, infrastructure, and integration into specific aspects of research processes. The flagship success story, AlphaFold, relied on training data curated and built over decades. Since many scientific fields have no equivalent, FAS’s recommendations to Director Kratsios include funding the creation of AI-ready datasets, establishing benchmarks and evaluation standards, and building the interdisciplinary workforce required for integration. Forging ahead without this infrastructure, or without testing the benefits of integration, risks failing to deliver on the vision.
These examples demonstrate the scale of implementation challenges which are largely ahead of us. While the report calls for a lighter, faster, and more capable research enterprise, the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) proposed revisions to the Uniform Guidance that governs how federal grant funding is administered, runs counter to that goal. As one example, it would make publication costs unallowable unless preapproved by Congress or the agency through yet-to-be-determined processes, even as the Gold Standard Science directive calls for transparency that open publication models enable. In both FAS’s public comment to OMB on the rule and our recommendations to Director Kratsios, we argue that major reform attempts should be supported by regulatory impact analysis to evaluate costs against stated benefits, and that reforms must be sequenced so that agencies and institutions can adapt with durability.
The public will judge the next era of American science by the innovation that touches their lives through the new cures, products, and opportunities created within their communities. FAS will keep pressure-testing good ideas, naming the costs honestly, and translating visions into programs and plans that agencies can adopt. If you have a tangible idea on strengthening the scientific enterprise, consider sharing it with us through our Day One Project Open Call. We would love to partner on shaping what comes next.
The public will judge the next era of American science by the innovation that touches their lives through the new cures, products, and opportunities created within their communities.
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