The Trump Administration is spending big money to push scientists to use artificial intelligence:
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST: The Trump administration is pursuing what it calls a new golden age of science. At the heart of it is a $5 billion artificial intelligence initiative. President Trump’s chief science and technology adviser, Michael Kratsios, introduced the plan to lawmakers at a hearing on Capitol Hill. It’s called the Genesis Mission.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MICHAEL KRATSIOS: The Genesis Mission will be the central hub for the entire federal government to revolutionize the conduct of American science with AI [host introduction to Katia Riddle, “Trump Administration Launches $5B AI Initiative Aimed at Advancing Science,” NPR: Morning Edition, 2026.08.19].
When President Joe Biden talked about science, he said, Let’s cure cancer!When Trump talks about science, he says, Let’s treat science like a business and make my tech-bro cronies rich!
Jason Shepherd, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Utah, told The Verge that “there are certainly some aspirations in this agenda that most US scientists would agree with: we need more stability, faster peer review, and more incentives to do high risk science.”
But Shepherd said the document looks like it “was written by political appointees without any real consultation with scientists” and warned that its assumptions science functions like a business were misplaced. “Academic science is different to VC funded startups or tech companies.”
It’s an important distinction to make considering Kratsios’ background. Unlike most White House science advisers, Kratsios is not a scientist in any sense of the word, and has no scientific credentials. He has a background in tech policy and finance, spending part of his working life at a fund run by Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel [Robert Hart, “The Tech-Broification of American Science Has Officially Begun,” The Verge, 2026.07.24].
Trump’s Genesis Project enriches Silicon Valley companies while diverting vital funding from the independent universities and other science institutions that Trump wants to wreck:
Yet critics says that funding for exploratory science is not the administration’s only target. “It’s very clear that Kratsios/Trump want to destroy universities, or what he calls ‘legacy institutions’,” says public policy expert Shobita Parthasarathy from the University of Michigan. “There is no respect for basic research, which has historically driven innovation in the US [but that] industry won’t fund” [Peter Gwynne, “Critics Deride US Administration’s ‘Golden Age of Science’ Report,” Physics World, 2026.08.05]
Trump’s war on universities is culling exactly the experts we need to discern science from slop:
The narrow focus on AI is also “misguided,” University of Texas at Austin physics professor Andreas] Karch said. While there’s certainly a chance it will accelerate progress, he said “right now the problem is that most science done by AI is absolute slop.” Supervision by humans seems “absolutely key,” he said, but those humans are primarily trained by the universities having their funding slashed. “We may well end up in the situation where AI will have a few major insights buried under mountains of slop, and the number of people with the experience and knowledge to tell the two apart may rapidly dwindle,” he said, adding that the government’s actions are actually hindering scientists’ abilities to make use of these powerful new technologies [Hart, 2026.07.24].
All the taxpayer dollars thrown at slop-bots won’t make up for the ongoing cuts to real science budgets that will undermine America’s leadership in science and technology:
The report comes as the administration’s proposed budget for financial year 2027, which Congress must approve, would cut overall government spending on R&D by 22%, with support for the NSF slashed by more than 50%, NASA by 23% and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science by 15%. The OMB also proposes guidelines that would allow agencies to terminate grants that “no longer serve agency priorities or the national interest”.
Tess DeBlanc Knowles, a senior director at the US thinktank the Atlantic Council, says US science will be hit badly if those cuts go ahead. “No amount of experimentation can counteract the damaging effects that dramatically reduced funds will have on the foundation of the US’s scientific and technological leadership and ability to train the next generation of scientists,” she says [Gwynne, 2026.08.05].
And crazily, Trump is handing the reins of scientific research over to the billionaires whose own capitalist imperatives decimated their own once-mighty corporate research laboratories:
Business funding tends to focus on shorter-term applications and measurable returns, not the patient, open-ended research that leads to fundamental breakthroughs.
And even that business contribution represents a shadow of what corporations once invested in science. They were killed by shareholder value maximization, the management philosophy that demanded every division justify its existence through immediate profitability. Jack Welch at General Electric epitomized this thinking in the 1980s and 1990s and helped make it mainstream. Long-term research that might pay off in a decade became indefensible when quarterly earnings reports dominated decision-making.
In the 1960s, chemical giant DuPont published more papers in American Chemical Society journals than MIT and Caltech combined. By 2006, just 6% of R&D Magazine’s innovation awards went to Fortune 500 companies, down from 47% in 1975.
The same capitalist logic that made Altman, Bezos, and Zuckerberg successful is what made Bell Labs-style research impossible for AT&T, IBM, and Xerox: move fast, optimize for growth, maximize shareholder value [Jackie Snow, “Trump Is Slashing Science Funding. Tech Billionaires Are Stepping in with AI,” Quartz, 2025.12.10].
Transfer more wealth to the tech billionaires, impoverish American science—once again, Trump is squandering our nation’s wealth on favors for a few already rich chums.
Really hate to say this. Really!!
Cory is the reason SD is consistently fifteen or more years behind America in innovation and tech savvy.
i.e. Not the only reason because he’s not widely read but certainly Cory’s on the wrong side of history.