The Verge reports:

The Trump administration unveiled the first “Genesis Mission” grants on Thursday, directing $5 billion toward hundreds of AI-driven science projects in an effort the White House has described as “comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project.” At roughly the same time, Trump’s science adviser Michael Kratsios was on Capitol Hill selling lawmakers on an equally grandiose promise: “A New Golden Age” of American science, one that would prioritize artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuclear energy and downplay life sciences.

Taken together, the two announcements offer the clearest picture yet of how Donald Trump wants to remake American science. They mark the latest front in a wider war on the research establishment — one that has worked to suppress “woke” or DEI projects, threatened funding for universities, researchers, and projects on ideological grounds, curtailed the flow of international students and researchers, and handed unprecedented control over federal funding to political appointees. The result has been the gradual, systemic dismantling of the long-established norms and institutions that, for all their flaws, helped turn the United States into the world’s scientific superpower.

Researchers say the vision is ill-conceived, contradictory, and less a blueprint for scientific renewal than a politicized power grab that fundamentally misunderstands how science works. It treats public research more like a Silicon Valley startup than a public good, privileging measurable returns and speed over the slow, uncertain, and unpredictable work that has produced some of history’s most consequential discoveries. Far from reviving US science, they warn, the agenda could prove disastrous for American research. [Continue reading…]