Before 2025, science policy rarely made headline news. Through decades of changing political winds, financial crises and global conflicts, funding for U.S. research and innovation has remained remarkably stable, reflecting the American public’s strong support for investing in basic science.
In his first year back in office, President Donald Trump’s relentless attempts to overhaul the federal support system for research and development has put science policy back above the fold.
As a policy scholar, I study how American presidents treat science and technology. Trump is far from the first president to be deeply skeptical of the academic research community. But his second-term actions have set a new precedent for the level of mutual distrust and its consequences for scientists.
Unlike Trump’s first term, which lacked a coherent science policy beyond its attempted across-the-board cuts to federal research agencies, his current administration has used science policy as a vehicle for its ideological goals. Policy levers historically used to drive science in the national interest have instead been repurposed to punish universities, limit freedom of inquiry and promote private sector interests.
Given science and technology’s critical importance to the nation’s economic growth, industrial competitiveness and national security, it’s worth taking a look back at science policy in 2025, a year of unprecedented reform – and resilience.
Science gets a voice
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.”
As head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Michael Kratsios’ role is to advise President Trump on science-related matters.
Roy Rochlin/Hill & Valley Forum via Getty Images
Kratsios, a high-ranking alum of the first Trump administration and protégé of billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, shares Trump’s skepticism of universities. His tenure in the White House has so far been marked by highlighting the failures of the U.S. science policy system rather than its successes. For Kratsios, American science is suffering from an outdated and morally corrupt incentive system too reliant on research 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.
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