Science A New Golden Age on Superphysics

A NEW GOLDEN AGE

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America stands at the cusp of a revolution in science, in which AI will accelerate discovery, multiply human cognitive capabilities, and unlock solutions to some of our greatest challenges. But “AI for science” will still find itself subject to the frictions and inefficiencies of human institutions. We can only fully harness AI and its associated productivity uplift by boldly reforming our scientific institutions, building national-scale infrastructure, and ensuring rigorous verification of the knowledge base from which AI will learn.

ADAPTING TO THE CHANGING NATURE OF SCIENCE

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The 19th and 20th centuries witnessed a series of institutional innovations that ushered in a fertile era of discovery. The natural philosophy of earlier ages, where a single scholar might range freely across what we now call physics, chemistry, and biology, had given way to specialized disciplines. Each had its own departments, journals, and staff. This transformation, pioneered primarily in German universities during the 19th century, laid the foundation for scientific professionalization.54

ENSURING THAT SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY BETTER THE LIVES OF ALL AMERICANS

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America’s scientific creativity and entrepreneurial culture position us to translate breakthroughs into technologies that enrich every American’s life.

That enrichment should include the creation of manufacturing jobs, not just the development of consumer products. By rebuilding the link between science and hands-on craft, federal leadership can ensure that the economic returns of discovery, including the jobs, supplier networks, and process knowledge encoded in the hands of workers, accrue to Americans in every region of the country and every sector of the economy, sustaining our technological leadership for generations to come.

OUR RESEARCHERS FACE MOUNTING CHALLENGES

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These rapid changes demand that our institutions adapt. As will be addressed in Chapter II, significant portions of our federal funding apparatus remain anchored to outdated assumptions. This is not an indictment of the talented scientists and grantmakers who staff these bureaucracies, but a product of institutional inertia, born from the lack of market selection pressure that drives constant experimentation.

REVITALIZING AMERICA’S SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ENTERPRISE

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To reverse stagnation and restore breakthrough momentum, the Federal Government must free American scientists to do their best work. Federal funding in academia remains anchored to mid-century assumptions, channeled through traditional disciplines and overly focused on short, project-based grants. Review panels often gatekeep proposals by consensus, disincentivizing transformative ideas. Agencies face little corrective pressure when portfolios underperform.

Science A New Golden Age

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JULY 2026

Dear Mr. President:

Eighty-one years ago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote a letter to Vannevar Bush, tasking him with reorganizing America’s scientific enterprise after World War II. Bush’s response was a report, titled Science: The Endless Frontier. It established the Federal Government’s role in supporting basic science, led to the creation of the National Science Foundation, and shaped our nation’s science and technology strategy for decades afterward. That report was foundational to the American Century and to the technological world in which we live today. Now, as we celebrate the United States’ 250th anniversary, we have the responsibility to renew our foundations once more. Never have science and technology been more central to our nation’s security and prosperity, and, although America continues to set the pace of scientific progress, global competitors are racing to challenge our leadership. This historical moment demands that we modernize our institutions to match the achievements of our past and the ambitions of our future. In your letter of March 26, 2025, on the occasion of my Senate confirmation as Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, you challenged me to reexamine America’s research and development ecosystem in light of changes brought on by the 21st century. The report I present here diagnoses the obstacles American researchers face today, and the ways our scientific enterprise has fundamentally transformed since its basic organization was established in 1945. Though our investments in research have grown, scientific productivity has slowed. We have become dependent on a narrow set of legacy institutions. Our incentive structures reward conformity over bold inquiry. And the capacity that once turned American discoveries into American strength has eroded, undermined by decades of industrial offshoring. To address these and related challenges, this report puts forward recommendations for the entire scientific and technological ecosystem, across government, academia, philanthropy, and industry. Underlying all of these recommendations is a simple measure of success. A decade from now, American researchers should look back at our work and say: “The vital questions I could not pursue then, I am free to pursue now.” That purpose will be achieved if we make progress toward four overarching goals. First, the U.S. research system should prioritize the individual scientist over legacy institutions. If we are serious about expanding what our scientists can do, we must invest directly in American researchers and the bold ideas that drive them. Too much of our research enterprise has come to serve itself rather than the scientists within it. Federal funding agencies should support a broader range of performers, including a new generation of mission-driven research organizations, to expand our scientific horizons. And these agencies should organize themselves around the interdisciplinary frontiers of science today, rather than the academic silos of the last century. Second, the Federal Government should fundamentally change how research dollars are allocated, distributed, and assessed. Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, the government should fund more flexible types of grants, including fasttrack grants, long-horizon grants, and new mechanisms that allow reviewers to champion radically unconventional proposals. Federal research agencies should evaluate their own performance as capital allocators, test new ways of making grants, and construct portfolios with the intentionality of a serious investor. Third, the Federal Government should set clear scientific goals and build the industrial muscle to translate scientific discovery into technological strength. The greatest technical achievements of the last century came about because leaders in government identified national priorities and marshaled the resources to accomplish them. As our competitors race us to capture the value chain of strategic technologies, including with tactics we would never countenance, we can no longer assume that the fruits of American science will accrue to our own people. Government must mobilize the full force of our enterprise around national challenges, clear the ground for American builders, and reunite the work of discovery and manufacturing across the country. Fourth, we must prepare our research enterprise for the AI revolution. AI will accelerate and radically transform the way we do science. But even the most capable AI models will be slowed down in the bottleneck of institutions and systems built for the last century. As we renew the infrastructure that powers American science, we must reengineer it for the AI age. And even as AI compresses the time from question to answer, we will still need human hands to build the instrument or prototype. We must build that capacity, too, investing in advanced manufacturing, the skilled trades, and the vast pools of talent and tacit knowledge outside the traditional academic pipeline. Letter of Transmittal vii In preparing this report, I have consulted widely across the country’s scientific enterprise, from entrepreneurs driving world-changing breakthroughs in fusion technology, to researchers eager to pursue bold ideas in neuroscience at our universities, to venture capitalists funding revolutionary platforms for drug discovery. Their message is clear and inspiring: given the right conditions, American ingenuity will continue to achieve the impossible. Throughout our history, Americans have shown remarkable courage in their willingness to reinvent our institutions when the challenges we faced demanded it, from establishing the land-grant university to creating the National Science Foundation to launching the Apollo Program. Each generation has seized its opportunity to expand the frontiers of knowledge and lay down the paving stones of progress. Now it is our time to build the scientific enterprise that will carry America forward and bring prosperity to Americans through the 21st century and beyond. Mr. President, you have called for a Golden Age of American Innovation. This report is the map to that vision. Our nation cured polio, placed men on the Moon, decoded the human genome, and launched the digital revolution. With your leadership, we will extend our scientific and technological might into the Second American Century and continue to deliver the innovations and discoveries that define the modern world.

SECURING U.S. DOMINANCE IN CRITICAL AND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

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America has the world’s most vibrant scientific enterprise and most dynamic private sector, which routinely turns novel ideas into new industries. But scientific leadership alone does not guarantee national strength or economic vitality.

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DRIVING CONSTANT INNOVATION

The foundation of this portfolio should be a metascience unit in each federal science agency. Each unit should be highly empowered, reporting directly to the director or administrator to ensure cross-agency visibility and guard against capture by particular programs or constituencies. Each unit should be staffed with researchers possessing expertise in the science of science, program evaluation, and data analysis, supplemented by rotating program officers who bring operational knowledge of how grants actually get made. Federal funding agencies should develop systematic gap-mapping capacity, regularly review their funding portfolios, and drive more intentional grantmaking instead of deferring to the portfolio allocation of the previous fiscal year. Such a process could identify both bottlenecks and the foundational capabilities that would address them.80 Metascience units could, for instance, convene expert workshops and maintain living maps of capability gaps, or work externally with foundations that have developed sophisticated methods for identifying transformative research opportunities. DARPA’s Heilmeier Catechism embodies this discipline, forcing explicit articulation of what gap a program addresses and why solving it matters.81

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OPENING AMERICA’S LABORATORIES

Beyond test beds, America possesses extraordinary research infrastructure, built up over decades of federal investment. The DOE alone operates 28 user facilities, from the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne to the Spallation Neutron Source at Oak Ridge, providing capabilities available nowhere else on Earth.101 These facilities represent billions of dollars in capital investment by the American taxpayer and decades of accumulated expertise.

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ADAPTING OUR INSTITUTIONS

Our task is to build a scientific enterprise that maximizes the marginal returns to intelligence, which means confronting, clearly, the factors that constrain its work. Three stand out. The first is the speed of feedback. Particle physicists have devised myriad theories about our universe, but we currently lack the experimental data to distinguish among them. No amount of intelligence can conjure observations that do not yet exist.