US' endless science frontier risks receding to 'golden age' of a few

In November 1944, as Allied armies pushed across Europe and the United States raced to develop nuclear weapons, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt asked Vannevar Bush, head of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, how wartime science could serve peace. Bush's answer, Science: The Endless Frontier, became one of the most consequential policy documents of the modern era. Its premise was simple: let the federal government fund basic research, give scientists room to follow curiosity and trust that discoveries would eventually produce prosperity, health and national strength. For over eight decades that bargain helped define science in the US.

Now, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios' Science: A New Golden Age proposes something different. Where Bush trusted institutions, Kratsios distrusts "legacy" ones. Where Bush emphasized exploratory research, Kratsios emphasizes national missions. Where the postwar system tried to protect scientific judgment from political direction, the new model places science more explicitly in the service of national competition.

The contrast reflects two different countries. Bush wrote from a position of confidence. The US had emerged from World War II with its industrial base intact, its universities ascendant and a flood of European scientific talent arriving at US laboratories.

Kratsios writes out of anxiety. Manufacturing has migrated overseas. China is viewed by Washington as a scientific and technological competitor. Artificial intelligence is compressing the distance between discovery and application. The proposed revolution in the government's policies on research is driven by the anxiety that the US invents while others manufacture.

The report published last month argues that federal money is too concentrated in elite universities. It proposes directing more money toward individual researchers, start-ups, focused research organizations and industry-linked laboratories. Peer review is portrayed as too conservative. In its place would come challenge prizes, Advanced Research Projects Agency-style programs, "golden tickets", longer-term grants, and mission-driven initiatives in AI, quantum computing, nuclear fusion, robotics and advanced manufacturing.

The postwar system worked because authority was distributed among government, universities, industry and philanthropy. It was inefficient, competitive and sometimes maddening. Yet its "looseness" created room for discoveries whose uses nobody could foresee. The transistor, the internet, biotechnology and countless advances in medicine did not arrive because a government mission statement correctly predicted them.

Science is not an assembly line. A government can announce a mission to build a fusion reactor; it cannot order the next transistor or modify the DNA of living organisms.

The geopolitical stakes are even larger because the report is ultimately a response to China, as some observers said. But it is here that the change of approach becomes self-defeating. China is not the Soviet Union. China combines extensive public support with powerful companies, enormous manufacturing capacity, market scale and deep integration into global trade and scientific networks.

Consider Apple. Washington has reportedly pressed the company not to source memory chips from Chinese suppliers. Apple may ultimately comply. But finding alternatives can cost more.

This is the paradox of the new strategy. In trying to compete with a comprehensive Chinese system, Washington risks technically nationalizing a science enterprise whose greatest strength has been its openness.

Political priorities can also make collaboration more difficult. US allies and partners may increasingly be asked to align their research, supply chains and standards with Washington. China, meanwhile, will have incentives to deepen its own international networks. The world could gradually develop two parallel scientific ecosystems.

Bush's frontier was endless because it was open. Kratsios' frontier risks becoming fortified, directed and inward-looking.

The reform of the US' research system should make it more open not merely more obedient to political missions; more connected to industry, without sacrificing basic science; and more resilient, without confusing openness with weakness.

The first golden age of US science was built on confidence that the future could not be completely planned. The danger of the new one is that, in trying too hard to plan the future, Washington may close off the very frontier it is trying to conquer.