Washington's 'New Golden Age': How the US plans to rewrite the rules of science competition

The US is overhauling how it funds science to stay ahead of global rivals. A new 123-page White House report scraps the post-war model of university-led research and instead bets on individual scientists, AI-driven discovery and a $5 billion platform called Genesis Mission.  

The report, Science: A New Golden Age, was submitted to President Trump on July 21 by Michael Kratsios, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). 

It consciously echoes Vannevar Bush's 1945 Science: The Endless Frontier – the document that shaped America's post-war research order – but reframes scientific reform in the context of long-term strategic competition.

Bush's 1945 report established a "linear model": federal money funds basic research at universities, and industry handles commercialization. The new report declares this model obsolete. Despite growing investment, scientific productivity has slowed, and research has become increasingly concentrated in a small number of established institutions. The report calls for redirecting federal R&D funding to individual researchers, betting on people, not proposals.

At the heart of the report is the Genesis Mission which aims to double US research productivity within a decade. Backed by over $5 billion in federal commitments, it builds a unified platform linking the US Department of Energy​'s 17 national laboratories, including supercomputers, instruments and datasets, with private-sector AI models. 

Of more than 5,000 applications received, 278 projects have been funded, spanning biomedical research, energy grid reliability, quantum computing, and microelectronics manufacturing. The largest single award – $600 million – goes to an AI-driven nuclear energy project. The ambition is to make AI the operating system of American science itself.

The report cites "foreign competitors' all-of-society approach to science and technology" as a core argument for urgency, and stresses that scientific discovery must be reconnected with advanced manufacturing and regional innovation clusters, so that American-invented innovations are manufactured and scaled on American soil. 

The logic is straightforward – the US aims to repair the broken links in its own innovation chain. But the plan has already drawn fire. Democratic lawmakers and some science policy experts argue that reducing support for universities could weaken the very research system that made American science a global leader in the first place.