Presidents need science advice. From climate change and pandemics to the governance of AI and the country’s nuclear arsenal, science sits at the center of a range of foreign and domestic policy challenges that reach the president’s desk.
Thankfully for the president – and the nation – the Office of Science and Technology Policy, known as OSTP, is just across the White House South Lawn in the Executive Office of the President. Led by the president’s science adviser, OSTP serves as a one-stop shop for everything science and innovation inside the White House.
The Office of Science and Technology Policy is also responsible for coordinating the government’s large, decentralized research and development policy system. With dozens of participating agencies, offices and departments – and 10 with individual R&D budgets of over a billion dollars annually – OSTP works to break down silos across the government and oversees the health of the nation’s vast R&D ecosystem.
As a research scholar studying the U.S. science advisory system, I am a close observer of OSTP and the president’s science agenda. President-elect Donald Trump recently selected Michael Kratsios, the chief technology officer from his previous administration, as his next science adviser and director of OSTP.
Here’s a look back at OSTP’s history, where the science adviser has made a difference, and how the office might be organized inside the Trump White House.
The Cold War origins of the science adviser
Like many good stories about U.S. science policy, OSTP’s begins with Sputnik. Just days after the Soviet Union took a commanding lead in the space race with the launch of Sputnik I and II in 1957, President Dwight Eisenhower upgraded the World War II-era Science Advisory Committee to be the President’s Science Advisory Committee. The one-word change signaled an elevated role of scientists inside the White House.
James Killian, second from left, the first science adviser, confers with committee members Donald Hornig, George Kistiakowsky and Jerome Wiesner.
AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives, Physics Today Collection
The President’s Science Advisory Committee was hugely influential during the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. It helped create NASA. It led the government’s response to Rachel Carson’s investigation of the dangers of widespread pesticide use, “Silent Spring,” which launched the modern environmental movement. And it was the driving force behind the dramatic growth in federal R&D spending in the 1960s.
President John F. Kennedy created the Office of Science and Technology, a predecessor to OSTP, to staff Committee activities and respond to increasing requests from the executive office about how best to fund federal science programs.
The President’s Science Advisory Committee’s influence waned in the late 1960s, burdened by the administrative duties of managing the growing U.S. R&D…
