Michael Kratsios: Trump's Science Agenda, Anti-Science Claims, Fauci's Damage, DEI & China
Episode
55 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Fundraising & VC, Artificial Intelligence, Product & Tech Trends
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓DEI Funding Displacement: A Senate analysis found roughly 25% of NSF grants during the Biden administration — approximately $2 billion annually, totaling $8 billion over four years — went toward DEI-related initiatives rather than core scientific research. Redirecting this capital toward merit-based discovery science is a stated priority of the current administration's reform agenda.
- ✓Research ROI Collapse: NIH funding tripled from $14 billion in 1998 to $47 billion in 2024, yet breakthrough treatments per dollar spent have fallen roughly 80-fold since 1950, halving every nine years. The administration's response is establishing "metascience units" at both NSF and NIH to run experiments on funding allocation methods and measure actual output returns.
- ✓Golden Ticket Grant Reform: NSF is piloting a "golden ticket" system where individual peer reviewers can unilaterally approve one to three grants without full committee consensus. Modeled on a Danish experiment, this incentivizes reviewers to champion unconventional, high-risk proposals that consensus-based panels typically reject in favor of safer, incremental research applications.
- ✓China's Science Spending Gap: China increased annual science spending from $33 billion in 2000 to $670 billion by 2021 — a 19x increase — while the US grew roughly 3x. China now publishes approximately 50% more scientific papers than the US across most domains. Compounding this, foreign-born PhD recipients in US computer science programs have inverted from 30% to roughly 70% over three decades.
- ✓Big Bet Targets: The administration has set four concrete science moonshots with defined deadlines: American boots on the moon by 2028, a nuclear reactor in space by 2028, a scientifically relevant quantum computer by 2028 via a Department of Energy directive, and commercially viable nuclear fusion by 2035 — with the "Genesis Mission" applying AI across all scientific disciplines to double total US scientific output.
What It Covers
Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, outlines the Trump administration's "Science: A New Golden Age" report, addressing claims of anti-science bias, declining research ROI, DEI funding misallocation, the China science race, and structural reforms to NSF and NIH grant systems.
Key Questions Answered
- •DEI Funding Displacement: A Senate analysis found roughly 25% of NSF grants during the Biden administration — approximately $2 billion annually, totaling $8 billion over four years — went toward DEI-related initiatives rather than core scientific research. Redirecting this capital toward merit-based discovery science is a stated priority of the current administration's reform agenda.
- •Research ROI Collapse: NIH funding tripled from $14 billion in 1998 to $47 billion in 2024, yet breakthrough treatments per dollar spent have fallen roughly 80-fold since 1950, halving every nine years. The administration's response is establishing "metascience units" at both NSF and NIH to run experiments on funding allocation methods and measure actual output returns.
- •Golden Ticket Grant Reform: NSF is piloting a "golden ticket" system where individual peer reviewers can unilaterally approve one to three grants without full committee consensus. Modeled on a Danish experiment, this incentivizes reviewers to champion unconventional, high-risk proposals that consensus-based panels typically reject in favor of safer, incremental research applications.
- •China's Science Spending Gap: China increased annual science spending from $33 billion in 2000 to $670 billion by 2021 — a 19x increase — while the US grew roughly 3x. China now publishes approximately 50% more scientific papers than the US across most domains. Compounding this, foreign-born PhD recipients in US computer science programs have inverted from 30% to roughly 70% over three decades.
- •Big Bet Targets: The administration has set four concrete science moonshots with defined deadlines: American boots on the moon by 2028, a nuclear reactor in space by 2028, a scientifically relevant quantum computer by 2028 via a Department of Energy directive, and commercially viable nuclear fusion by 2035 — with the "Genesis Mission" applying AI across all scientific disciplines to double total US scientific output.
Notable Moment
Kratsios revealed that the median age of intramural researchers at NIH institutions is 71 years old — a figure shared by NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. This single statistic frames the administration's urgency around rebuilding the early-career scientist pipeline as a national competitiveness issue.
Episode Transcript
Is this administration anti science? We want to essentially double the scientific output of The United States. Did we lose it? Or did it lead to moments where you have like Fauci? That's a great question. Are we in this moment, this populist moment right now in the West where science and technology is viewed as a tool of the elite and therefore it must be broken and destroyed? That's what's most tragic. That is a crazy, crazy fact. Has science stagnated in America and what the heck is going on? Michael Kratios, welcome to the all in interview. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. So you are the director of the office of science and technology policy here at the White House. Can you just tell me a little bit about what that role is? What do you do here? Yeah. So the Office of Science and Technology Policy was, created in in the sixties to coordinate science and tech policy across the administration. So very unique to The US is that we don't have an agency that does science and technology. We have lots of agencies that do pieces of a science and technology enterprise. We have a National Science Foundation that does basic research. We have a Department of Energy that runs our national labs. The Department of War has, extensive r and d programs like DARPA, for example. So the one office in the White House or in the in the administration broadly that's able to coordinate all those efforts is the office that that I run, called OSTP. And we try to do is work with the president to set the national S and T agenda, and then ultimately implement that across all of our agencies. And you had this role before. Is that right? So last administration, I was the chief technology officer of The United States. So, if you think about OSTP, it does science and it does tech. And in Trump won, I ran the tech portfolio for the for the president. So let me kick off by asking you, is this administration anti science? It is not anti science. I think, one of the things that I'm most proud of is the release of a new report a couple weeks ago called Science, A New Golden Age. And I think anyone who reads that report, I think what try what we will most likely see is administration that deeply cares about the American science technology enterprise. We really want The US to be the home for the next great scientific discoveries. We wanna empower young scientists. We wanna create an ecosystem that allows our greatest scientists to work on the hardest problems, everywhere in The US. And and to us, we're doing everything we can to align all of our agencies, like I just mentioned, to be able to help that make a reality. But going back, there's a poll I'm gonna give you from Nature, which is …
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by White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
“Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, outlines the Trump administration's "Science: A New Golden Age" report, addressing claims of anti-science bias, declining research ROI, DEI funding misallocation, the China science race, and structural reforms to NSF and NIH grant systems.”
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