Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a two-part exchange on the White House report Science: A New Golden Age. Whereas Scott Turner evaluates the report’s underlying philosophy of federal science policy, David Randall examines where it aligns with—and departs from—the National Association of Scholars’s own recommendations for scientific research and science education. Together, the essays offer two complementary perspectives on the Trump administration’s vision for American science.

Science: A New Golden Age, written by Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, has rightly attracted significant media attention for articulating the Trump administration’s science policy program. I am particularly interested in how the New Golden Age overlaps with the science policy concerns of my colleagues and me at the National Association of Scholars (NAS). Some of what Kratsios has to say is very much on our wavelength—although not all.

We have concerned ourselves significantly with the irreproducibility crisis of modern science: the combination of improper research techniques, slipshod statistics, lack of accountability, disciplinary and political groupthink, and a scientific culture biased toward producing positive results, which together have made one half or more of modern scientific and social scientific results irreproduced and perhaps irreproducible. We have also focused on the reliability of science that informs government regulation. We have also wrestled with how to restore to science an ethic of discovery rather than an ethic of grant-getting, especially by unwinding the “Big Science Cartel.”

Our first concern inclines us toward tighter federal requirements to ensure research reproducibility; our second concern underpins a strategic emphasis on removing the federal government from science altogether. The Franklin Standards: Model K-12 State Science Standards aims to strengthen American K-12 science education, not least to increase the numbers and capabilities of Americans in our academic sciences and technology industries.

Kratsios’s New Golden Age overlaps with these concerns, but its emphasis is more about transforming the federal government into an efficient technology venture capitalist. Kratsios sketches a series of government reforms that would make American federal policy and regulations more flexible and better able to support scientific and technological innovation. He also advocates, especially on national security grounds, a strategic initiative to increase American self-reliance by increasing the number of American scientists and technicians and reducing our country’s dependence on foreigners.

The Franklin Standards dovetail with Kratsios’s national security priorities, since, if adopted in our states and school districts, they would increase the number of young Americans prepared for scientific and technological careers. NAS has championed separately, both out of love of country and on national security grounds, a greater reliance on American students and a decreased reliance on international students. Our work on the irreproducibility crisis also merges with New Golden Age, which repeatedly calls for following up on the Trump administration’s Executive Order Restoring Gold Standard Science, which mandates the restoration of reproducible science. New Golden Age also highlights innovations such as strengthening portable funding for individual scientists, which NAS has championed strongly. Much of New Golden Age is on the same page as NAS science policy.

Indeed, we are grateful to New Golden Age for suggesting interesting new approaches to some of our enduring concerns. Kratsios writes at length on how artificial intelligence (AI) can aid both the mass production of irreproducible science and its mass detection. What Elisabeth Bik has done manually, looking at scientific images in biomedical research papers to see which are fraudulent, presumably can be automated by an AI program and done for the entire corpus of scientific literature at the blink of an eye. An AI BS-detector could be generally helpful in ensuring reproducible science. But AI is still vulnerable to GIGO—Garbage In, Garbage Out. Kratsios correctly and excitingly focuses on how AI could help solve the irreproducibility crisis—but the devil is in the details.

The New Golden Age also differs from our priority in its central focus. Kratsios’s report emphasizes how to make federal science investment and regulations more effective. We care dearly about America’s national security and about the effectiveness of federal science research dollars. But we also care about science and science education for their own sake. We want science education done properly in K-12 schools. We want science done with reproducible data and techniques. We want scientists to do science because they are curious about the world, not because they want a federal subsidy. All these missions align with our country’s interests, but they are not fundamentally about the country. They are rooted in NAS’s love of the scientific vocation and of the science teaching vocation. We would champion them even if they benefited America not at all—though we trust they do benefit America greatly.

And we do think that the state and federal governments should make these reforms a priority—perhaps even before the reforms needed to turn the government into an efficient technology investor. Getting the science right needs to come before getting the technology and the investment right.

Then too, our sense of science public policy has a somewhat different series of interests. This year, NAS published The Prometheus Program, which provides a broad range of recommended science policy reforms. These are public policy recommendations and, therefore, akin in their motivation to the New Golden Age. But they are policy recommendations rooted in the perspective of scholars, rather than in the point of view of government technology investment. Again, I think our recommendations complement those of Kratsios—but they are distinct in their scope and motivation.

NAS speaks for scholars and scientists who love their country and their vocation. I approve of Science: A New Golden Age and endorse it. But we have other priorities as well, which we urge the Trump administration, and indeed all policymakers and citizens, to read and to adopt.

Follow David Randall on X.