White House report says Trump can usher in a "new golden age" of science - Ars Technica

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On Tuesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released a report entitled “Science: A New Golden Age,” in which it lays out how it has viewed science, found it lacking, and believes the Trump administration is in the perfect position to fix things. It’s a bit unexpected coming from an administration that has been proposing crippling funding cuts to research and trying to enable political appointees to terminate grants awarded based on scientific merit.

The report presents itself as the spiritual successor of “Science, the Endless Frontier,” a policy document that laid out the case for government-funded science in the wake of World War II. The New Golden Age (SNGA) says that, while the concepts promoted by the original remain vital, the circumstances have changed such that we need major revisions to how the government is implementing things.

The result is an odd mix. It completely ignores or glosses over many things that the administration is doing to harm scientific progress. In some cases, it identifies issues that have already been discussed as problems within the scientific community. Elsewhere, it’s a mixture of political grievances, ideas without a solid intellectual foundation, and an injection of Silicon Valley’s perspective on innovation (Michael Kratsios, the director of the OSTP, formerly worked with Peter Thiel). As a result, it’s unlikely to have anything like the impact of “Science, the Endless Frontier.”

Lacking internal coherence

The report is trying to make the case that US government-funded science has some structural problems, serious enough that they require major changes to the entire enterprise. (It also makes a positive argument, namely that developments in AI necessitate a new approach, which we’ll come back to.) Some of those concerns are real and had been discussed within the research community previously.

One of the real problems it discusses is the amount of time researchers need to spend on writing grants and performing administrative tasks, taking away from their time doing research. SNGA promises to relieve this by simplifying regulations and streamlining the grant application process. But it’s also remarkably vague, in that its authors do not identify a single regulation that is in need of reform.

The report also seems not to realize that it is being written by the Trump administration. One of the reasons researchers have spent so much time writing grants is a general uncertainty about funding, and that’s something that the administration has dramatically increased through the haphazard termination of existing grants, by proposing massive budget cuts for science agencies, and by slowing the release of funds that had been allocated to researchers by Congress.

This lack of self-awareness permeates the document, but it’s worth looking at a second example. In several instances, the report highlights the Human Genome Project as an example of the sort of project that government excels at driving. But it seems to be unaware that the project was a major international collaboration, with entire chromosomes being sequenced outside the US. Pride in the completion of the genome seems out of place from an administration that is actively trying to minimize international collaborations involving the researchers it funds.

In the same way, it highlights how the Human Genome Project required the immediate and open release of the data it generated as an example of what the Trump administration considers “gold standard science.” But SNGA also decries how making results accessible to all has allowed other countries to develop industries based on advances that occurred within the US.

In short, the report lacks a perspective that’s internally coherent, or consistent with the other goals and actions of the Trump administration.

The role of innovation

Another area of concern in the SNGA is that of innovation, both within science and in the translation of scientific findings to commercialization. The former has been recognized as a potential issue by the scientific community, as some measures indicate that more of the research we’re doing in recent decades is incremental, and there are fewer large advances. The challenge is that these measures are controversial; it’s hard to reach consensus on what counts as innovative, and some impacts of research may take longer to become apparent than most studies of the issue consider.

Yet the SNGA...