Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a two-part exchange examining the White House report Science: A New Golden Age. While both authors welcome the administration’s renewed attention to American science, they offer different assessments of its assumptions, priorities, and proposed reforms. Readers of this essay should also read David Randall’s essay, which considers the report from the perspective of the National Association of Scholars’s longstanding science policy work.

After more than 18 tumultuous months of the Trump administration’s alleged “war on science,” the White House has laid out its vision for the future of American science in Science: A New Golden Age, authored by Michael Kratsios, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The response has been tepid. The Wall Street Journal frumps, “White House to Direct Billions in Research Funds Toward AI, Away From Colleges.” Poor colleges. Science magazine has yet to react, but just last week exhorted its members that “University science in the US needs a coherent plan.” Well, now they have one, but they’re unlikely to be happy about it. Nature magazine is more sanguine, reporting what we have known since 2016, namely that Donald Trump intends to set the agenda for federal spending programs he, the President, administers.

Better late than never, I suppose.

Among these spending programs is academic science to the tune of roughly $100 billion annually. Artificial intelligence (AI) research is his top priority. The vast landscape of grievance studies research is not.

There’s a quasi-religious war going on right now over science and its role in our society. The sacred text in this war is the 1945 report Science: The Endless Frontier (hereafter STEF), authored by Vannevar Bush, who was effectively President Roosevelt’s science advisor. Roosevelt tasked Bush with making the case for the federal government to do something it had not theretofore done: fund university research with federal dollars. Bush came through for his president: five years after STEF was published, President Truman signed the National Science Foundation Act into law. That unlocked a revenue stream that has been the mainstay for academic science for more than seven decades.

Abundance theology is the Christian doctrine that God wants his flock to be prosperous and that wealth is evidence of God’s grace. Science now has its own version of abundance theology. The tenets of the scientific abundance gospel are straightforward: (1) Science is crucial to a bright, prosperous, and secure future for the nation. (2) The path to that glorious future is littered with obstacles, some laid by our own selfishness or ineptitude, some laid by others who wish us ill. (3) Clearing the path is a very complicated task, which only the government can be trusted to do properly.

STEF was the founding document of the scientific abundance gospel. Science: A New Golden Age (hereafter SANGA) is the Trump administration’s homage to Vannevar the Evangelist. The White House makes this clear right from SANGA’s cover page, which was composed to strongly resemble STEF’s (Figure 1). Turn the cover, and the text bubbles over with the optimism of the scientific abundance gospel. Do science right, and riches will flow to us like milk and honey.

Left: The cover of Science: The New Golden Age. Right: The cover of Science: The Endless Frontier.

SANGA is also Trump’s Ninety-Five Theses, nailed to the metal and glass door of the National Science Foundation (NSF). Science is in trouble because it has strayed from the scientific abundance gospel. Science has become too bureaucratic and cumbersome; our funding mechanisms turn scientists into grant-seeking galley slaves for the colleges and universities that employ them; we fund institutions, not the scientists that are the fons et origo of scientific discovery; the $100 billion annual “investment” of taxpayer dollars mostly produces torrents of trivial, unreproducible, and sometimes downright fraudulent publications (500,000 in 2024). Since 1950, science has become an engine of empty piety and the corrupt dispenser of indulgences, with Anthony (I am Science) Fauci standing in for Leo X (Figure 2). Devotional candles are, in fact, available.

Figure 2. Left: Anthony (I am Science) Fauci as Pope Leo X (artwork by Grok).

Like STEF, SANGA brims with innovative ideas for improving the spent ecosystem of modern science. Lift the cumbersome bureaucracy of federal grant-making, liberating scientists from the exhausting grants treadmill so they can be creative solvers of problems. In its place, elevate funding mechanisms like DARPA, which provide longer-term, stable funding that is more tolerant of intellectual dead ends and early failures that characterize true scientific discovery. Enable scientists to break free from the “tenure trap” and move seamlessly among academia, private research labs, and government science agencies. Move away from the current practice of consensus-based funding, which rewards intellectual conformity and crowd-following, perhaps by giving reviewers a “golden ticket” to fund “out-there” projects that fall outside the consensus. Reverse the “crowding out” of philanthropic funding that has gone along with ever-rising federal funding. Be more attentive to the dangers posed by research espionage from our geopolitical adversaries.

SANGA’s critique and outline of proposed reforms echo those we at the National Association of Scholars (NAS) have been making for several years, and, to be fair, those of others since the 1950s, when President Eisenhower issued similar warnings about the military-industrial-academic complex. Suffice it to say, I am very pleased that the White House is paying serious attention to those critiques.

Here is where I become the dog-in-the-manger. For all its virtues, SANGA will have no effect whatsoever on the state church of modern science. We have already seen ample evidence that the needle will not be moved. Every reform the Trump administration has attempted so far has been met with furious resistance. Some of this opposition is active, such as that from a hostile Congress and astroturf activist groups like the United Automobile Workers Union’s support for Stand Up for Science and the teachers’ union-aligned American Association of University Professors (from universities); some of it performative, as from professional associations like the (inaptly named) American Association for the Advancement of Science; and some of it passive, crouching defensively until a new administration or Congress comes along to “undo the damage” allegedly being wrought by the Trump administration.

SANGA will fail for the same reason STEF failed: both are based upon the scientific abundance gospel, in particular on tenet three. STEF established the scientific abundance gospel as doctrine; SANGA perpetuates it. In both instances, their respective policy recommendations boil down to (1) start doing Good Things and (2) stop doing Bad Things. In STEF’s case, the Bad Things were leaving scientific research in the hands of fractious scientists and self-interested colleges and universities, and the Good Things were to bring all that under the umbrella of a benign and capable management state. In SANGA’s case, the Bad Things are failures of the management state to implement the scientific abundance gospel, and the Good Things are to change the management.

Neither sees that the problem lies in tenet three of the scientific abundance gospel. Science is not in deep trouble because Bad People have been doing Bad Things. Science is in deep trouble because we have been deliberately subsidizing and incentivizing the Bad Things for more than 70 years. This has happened because the enormous stream of government revenues directed to science has dramatically reshaped the landscape of incentives and disincentives governing the practices and careers of people working in the system. If we are to reorient science back toward the aims of tenets one and two of the scientific abundance gospel, the incentives landscape needs to be reshaped.

SANGA gets this, but only partially, and the shortcomings arise from its continued fealty to tenet three of the scientific abundance gospel. Yet the translation of scientific research into marketable products is not well understood. SANGA presumes that it is, and that the promised land of abundance is simply a matter of twiddling the dials by people who Know Better. Does the Trump administration Know Better? It’s hard to gin up confidence that it does when it uncritically repeats whoppers such as the supposed 21,000 percent return-on-investment of the National Institutes of Health-Department of Energy-funded Human Genome Project (HGP). In fact, the HGP was a lumbering bureaucratic and scientific behemoth, and the polymerase chain reaction (developed in the private sector) was what really got genome sequencing moving as a useful tool. Fallacious claims of high ROIs from public “investment” in science (which often exceed the promised ROIs of Bernie Madoff and Sam Bankman-Fried) are a stock-in-trade of defenders of the scientific status quo, leaving the important question unasked: if the ROI is so great, why isn’t the private sector rushing to cash in? Taxpayers should check their wallets when governments make such claims.

SANGA also stumbles over the second tenet of the scientific abundance gospel, with China branded as the primary litterbug on the path to prosperity and security. That China is a major geopolitical rival to the United States is undisputed, and the penetration of Chinese espionage and intellectual property theft into our scientific enterprise is a significant problem. SANGA tends to fall into another trope defending the status quo: that China takes science more seriously than we do. Evidence for this usually points to the more prolific output of scientific papers by Chinese scientists (roughly three times that of American scientists). This feeds a kind of “Sputnik panic” mentality that China is “winning” at science, that we must counter, or else (an actual comment once made to me) “we’ll all be speaking Chinese.” The logical end of that line of reasoning is for American science to emulate Chinese science. Is that what we really want to do? My admittedly limited conversations with colleagues who have worked in China suggest that we do not.

SANGA rightly points to American scientific prowess being rooted in the Tocquevillian model of science as civic virtue, free individuals pursuing science as something civilized free societies did. Prosperity follows from the infinitude of free individuals creatively striving to improve their lives. Prior to World War II, before the scientific abundance gospel became doctrine, science and government mostly kept each other at arm’s length, and the “invisible hand” of a free economy shaped by the infinitude of free individuals guided American prosperity and power to unprecedented heights. SANGA gets this, but only partially, because it fails to see the real obstacle on the path connecting science to national prosperity: governments imagining themselves as the only ones who can guide science. The logical solution, as I have argued elsewhere, is to get government entirely out of the way of the real scientific engine of prosperity, free minds exploring new ways to understand nature.

Colleges and universities are supposed to be the havens for this, but under the influence of the scientific abundance gospel, they no longer are. SANGA gets this, but only partially, because they fail to see the real solution for connecting science with abundance: close the NSF and shutter the NIH’s extramural programs, along with the dozen other federal agencies that support academic science. SANGA pays lip service to the Tocquevillian ideal, but perpetuates the very thing that has crushed it.

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