Eighty-one years ago, Vannevar Bush delivered a report to then-US President Harry S. Truman that defined American science for generations to come. The document, 'Science: The Infinite Frontier,' justified the need for federal funding of fundamental research and created the institutional foundation that helped win World War II, achieve the moon landing, and give rise to the digital age.
Heir to the Old Model
The White House has now unveiled its successor. The report 'Science: A New Golden Age,' presented to President Donald Trump by Michael Kracius, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on July 21, represents the most comprehensive review of US science policy in eight decades. It argues that the post-war model—the so-called 'linear model' of fundamental research flowing into applied work and then industry—no longer matches current reality. According to the new report, modern discoveries are an iterative cycle, and institutions established for mid-century science are becoming increasingly bottlenecks.
Institutional Reforms and New Tools
The first major focus of the report is on institutional reform. It criticizes a system where researchers spend nearly half their time on paperwork, grants take about a year from submission to award, and expert committees tend to reward consensus rather than bold ideas. The proposed solution is to return the individual scientist to the center of attention. It is necessary to expand portable fellowships for graduate students and long-term grants similar to the NIH Director's Award. It also proposes diversifying funding mechanisms beyond expert review by including 'golden tickets' that allow individual reviewers to support ambitious proposals, fast grants for timely decision-making, and prize competitions for achieved results. Furthermore, the report calls for creating new organizational forms: X-Labs, flexible temporary teams to solve specific problems, and Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), where program managers take bold risks. The message is clear: the US government spends about $200 billion annually on R&D, and the report's authors believe too much of these funds goes to bureaucracy rather than breakthroughs.
Artificial Intelligence as the Engine of Science
The most futuristic section is dedicated to what the report calls the 'revolution in science,' driven by artificial intelligence (AI). The central element is the 'Genesis' Mission—an AI initiative for science aimed at doubling the productivity and impact of US research within ten years. 'Genesis' will integrate supercomputers, AI models, scientific instruments, and datasets across the national laboratory system, creating a closed loop where AI generates hypotheses, automated laboratories test them, and the resulting data feeds back into the model. The report calls for building large-scale verification infrastructure, noting that 'while the cost of generation has fallen exponentially, the cost of verification has not.' Autonomous experimentation is also supported—self-driving laboratories capable of reducing discovery times by orders of magnitude. The ambitions of this initiative are similar to those being built by China in AI-driven science, from Baidu's PaddlePaddle in computational biology to Huawei's Pangu weather models. However, the American version has a political addition: the report simultaneously mandates 'Gold Standard Science' through executive order, ensuring reproducibility and data sharing as the foundation for AI-based discoveries.
Competition and the Innovation Ecosystem
China is rarely mentioned by name in the report, but its presence is felt in every chapter. It asserts that 'our competitors are directing unprecedented resources toward science and engineering, using a whole-of-society approach to capture high ground in strategic technologies.' The report insists that scientific leadership alone is insufficient to ensure economic or national sovereignty—breakthroughs must be prototyped, manufactured, and scaled domestically. This explains the report's drive to strengthen public-private partnerships, open federal laboratories to industry, and create dense regional innovation clusters linked to advanced manufacturing. This strategic shift is noticeable: while the first Trump administration focused on tariffs and trade wars, and the Biden administration on export controls and the CHIPS Act, this report presents something different—a systematic attempt to rebuild the entire US innovation ecosystem from scratch. The emphasis is less on blocking competitors and more on eliminating the bottlenecks that have slowed down American science itself.
Prospects for Implementation
The report's ambitions are undeniable, but its implementation remains uncertain. Many of the proposed measures—reducing bureaucracy, optimizing expert review, and opening federal facilities—require legislative action or deep institutional changes that have resisted reform for decades. Moreover, the $200 billion portfolio of federal R&D is distributed among agencies with established cultures and interests. What is clear, however, is the direction: after 81 years, the US declares its post-war scientific model obsolete and bets on a new one based on AI, individual talent, and industrial integration. For the rest of the world, including China, which the report implicitly views as a competitive benchmark, the question is not only whether America can restore its own engine but also how the new rules of the global scientific race will look when it happens.
