Change is coming to science policy. On the one side, the current paradigm’s credibility has been recently buffeted by the replication crisis, the pandemic, and a generalized anti-establishment turn. And on the other, AI is poised to bring about a very different future for science.
It’s been a tumultuous two years for science and several pieces from the last month do a good job of collectively charting where we’ve been and where we might be headed. To start, consider this great interview between the New Atlantis’ Ari Schulman and AEI’s M. Anthony Mills. Describing the contradictions of the Trump administration’s science policy, Schulman writes:
One story is about restoring gold-standard science, restoring trust in science, solving the replication crisis, fueling cutting-edge research, and doing more to free scientists from needless grant paperwork and support them early in their careers. It’s a lofty story, practically a love letter to science. One of the narrators of this story writes in City Journal that “we should be working toward tapping the energy at the heart of the sun and hanging our achievements in the balance of the stars.”
The other story is the crackdown. It’s a crackdown against anything that stinks of DEI. It’s a crackdown against elite universities that allowed antisemitism, but by way of cutting or threatening the vast funding the government gives them to do scientific research. It’s against entire categories of research funding like mRNA vaccines and pandemic preparedness, which the administration seems committed to undermining. And it’s a crackdown against the massive funding the government gives to science broadly, with the administration proposing 40 to 60 percent budget cuts to the NIH, NSF, and others.
You could try and squint to see a coherent reform agenda here: maybe a plan to break the status quo and then rebuild; or a good cop / bad cop routine. But more likely what’s going on here is simply that this political coalition, like any other, is composed of groups with different interests. When it comes to science, the most important factions Mills points to are the populists, social conservatives, MAHA, tech right, national conservatives, and science reformers. Meanwhile, outside the administration, Congress still has an essential role to play.
These groups differ in their goals for science policy, their areas of influence, and their relative prioritization of science relative to other goals. The result is a set of policies that are often contradictory and at times self-undermining. But from this confusion of different priorities, some other articles published this month point to the possibility of an emerging consensus at least along a few dimensions.
Everyone likes agency, variety, and evidence
One of the clearest places we can see this is in a joint memo from two of these different groups: Michael Kratsios at the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Russ Vought at the Office of Management and Budget. As pointed out by Stuart Buck, Aishwarya Khanduja, and Hiya Jain in a very helpful post about the joint memo, OMB’s authority over federal spending means this memo has power to compel real action.
Most substantively, the memo calls for science agencies to develop and submit plans to implement a variety of directives. These directives vary, but they do share some common themes. They push for science funders to exhibit more agency, get comfortable with a greater variety of approaches to supporting science, and generate better evidence to inform the shape of future agency actions. For example:
Agency: agencies are encouraged to map the scientific and technological landscape and use those maps to close gaps, rather than rely on historical funding patterns. They’re also encouraged to recruit and empower great program officers.
Variety: agencies should support a broader portfolio of institutional models, including NSF’s X-Labs and ARPA-style programs; experiment with alternatives to conventional peer review, such as golden tickets and delegating funding decisions to working scientists; and go beyond conventional grantmaking through prizes, advance market commitments, fast grants, and longer-duration grants.
Evidence: agencies are encouraged to develop metascience capabilities, test new funding approaches, and collect better data on applications, review decisions, and research outcomes to inform future funding decisions.
In Schulman’s New Atlantis interview with Mills, he worries this style of top-down (“high-church”) reform may not work:
Obviously, a Kratsios or Bush can inaugurate major changes in policy frameworks. But can they inaugurate major changes in scientific culture, in beliefs about how science works, in the ways that the vast army of science’s boot soldiers reason and decide and understand themselves?
An encouraging partial answer to that question comes from a new report by Matt Faherty on the National Science Foundation. Faherty is an independent researcher, and his report on the NSF is the culmination of more than a year’s work, interviewing dozens of people (including me). Faherty’s report is an alternative perspective from a group of people who worked at, or with, or were funded by NSF.
Most importantly, Faherty’s interviewees were coming from a position that was disposed to view the current NSF favorably: most thought the NSF produced good work and wanted to defend the institution against the cuts that had been proposed by the president’s budget. Even so, at least along some dimensions, their perspective on what’s desirable in science pointed in the same direction as OSTP and OMB.
This is most clear when it comes to metascience. In the introduction to his report, Faherty contrasted his experience conducting interviews about NSF with his experiences doing interviews for a similar report in 2022 on the NIH:
when comparing my NIH interviews to my NSF interviews, I get the strong sense that scientists have become significantly more open to exploring reforms to the way science is currently funded, particularly by using modern metascience techniques. Researchers I spoke to from fields as diverse as oceanography to neuroscience expressed keen awareness of discussions around the Replication Crisis, the scientific response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and metascience theories about how to tweak funding mechanisms to produce higher-quality work.
Moreover, similarities were not restricted to an interest in metascience. Faherty also notes enthusiasm for NSF’s use of competent, empowered program officers, who use their taste and judgment to decide what work should be supported and defer less to the judgment of peer review than at NIH. And the interviewees also proposed a very wide range of reforms, suggesting an openness to a greater variety of ways the government could support science.
When it comes to science, much is contested,1 but there may be top-down and bottom-up agreement on at least a few things: more agency, variety, and evidence in how the government supports science.
Do you think (with my state capacity hat on near-compulsively) that such changes in approach proffered by eg OMB are paired with comparable levels-up in implementation fidelity? Ari capably mentions the ‘culture’ point, but there is also the rote capability issue engendered by the pendulum ‘cut-and-resuscitate’ approach to the various large-scale funding agencies.
Words are wind. It is not an accident that MAGA says one thing and does another; it is a deliberate power move. Taking their words at face value is dangerously naive. They can be judged only by their actions, and their actions are wholly destructive.