The conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which provided much of the blueprint for Trump’s second term, recommended the president “increase the prominence” of the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. To that end, then-President-elect Trump named Michael Kratsios as Office of Science and Technology Policy director and his chief scientific adviser weeks before taking office, tasking him with “(blazing) a trail to the next frontiers of science.”
Kratsios, a high-ranking alum of the first Trump administration and protégé of billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, shares Trump’s skepticism of universities.
Kratsios arrived at the White House with a clear vision for redesigning America’s 80-year-old social compact for science in line with Trump’s political agenda. In under a year, he helped push through four major science policy reforms.
“Gold Standard Science” recommits the U.S. to scientific integrity and adds political oversight into agency operations.
Another sweeping executive order works to centralize federal grantmaking and align research activities with presidential priorities.
The White House AI Action Plan supports AI upskilling and reskilling workforce programs and catalyzes private sector innovation through deregulation.
And Project Genesis, branded as a successor to the Manhattan Project and Apollo program, leverages public datasets and the computing infrastructure of the Department of Energy’s national labs to advance AI for science.
Taken together, Trump’s second-term science policy reflects several emerging trends in U.S. research policy: the public’s growing distrust of higher education, the private sector’s accelerating investment in fundamental research, and the government’s increasing appetite for state interventions to increase scientific and industrial competitiveness.
DOGE’s well-publicized flop masks its less visible but more pernicious legacy: Instead of disappearing, it has been institutionalized. Trump’s budget director, Russell Vought, who spent 2025 taking aim at the federal workforce, is leveraging DOGE’s network to continue its core mission. Through forced relocations, layoffs, a deferred resignation program and the legal gray area of the shutdown, Vought is pushing science-mission agencies to reform their grant review processes and align new grants with Trump’s priorities.
Kratsios seems to have Trump’s ear. The future of U.S. science rests not on whether government-sponsored research will survive the next three years. Instead, it rides on U.S. higher ed’s ability to regain the trust of the American public – and the White House.
Lambert here: Let me know how that works out.
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