A New Golden Age or a Narrow One
The White House’s vision for American science rests on a fundamental choice about how research should be funded. One approach prioritizes applied technology and engineering, betting that targeted investments in specific fields will produce rapid, measurable results. The other approach spreads resources across a broader spectrum of inquiry, including social sciences, public health, and the humanities, trusting that foundational knowledge eventually yields practical breakthroughs. These two philosophies have shaped American research policy since World War II, when Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report to President Franklin Roosevelt laid the groundwork for the modern US research enterprise. Bush, then director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development, argued that government support for basic science would drive innovation and national prosperity. [3]
The current report, Science: A New Golden Age, released last month by Michael Kratsios, head of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, responds directly to President Donald Trump’s letter tasking Kratsios with ushering in “a new golden age of American innovation.” Kratsios, a former tech executive, has framed the document as a deliberate break from past practice, emphasizing speed and deployment over discovery for its own sake. The 123-page document represents a significant departure from the Bush model. Where Bush envisioned a broad federal commitment to fundamental research across all disciplines, the new report signals a narrower focus on technology and engineering. That shift carries consequences for which questions scientists ask, which projects receive funding, and ultimately what knowledge the nation can produce.
The Price of Narrowing the Aperture
The report’s emphasis on technology and engineering creates a specific blind spot. Social sciences, public health, and the humanities examine how people behave, how societies function, and how communities stay healthy. These fields produce knowledge that technology alone cannot generate. A new medical device, for instance, does nothing for a population that cannot access it or chooses not to use it. Understanding those barriers requires research that the current plan deprioritizes.
Public health offers a concrete example of what gets lost in a purely technological frame. Disease outbreaks are not purely biological events. They are shaped by housing conditions, income inequality, cultural practices, and trust in institutions. Each of those factors falls within the domain of social science and public health research, not engineering. The push for a golden age of innovation that ignores these dimensions risks producing advances that work in laboratories but falter in communities.
The humanities contribute something equally essential: the capacity to ask what goals are worth pursuing in the first place. Ethics, history, and philosophy provide the frameworks for evaluating whether a technological capability should be deployed. Without these disciplines, innovation becomes a value-neutral exercise, measured purely by what can be built rather than what should be built. The report’s framing appears to treat that evaluative dimension as secondary.
Open Borders as a Research Strategy
The funding question connects directly to another constraint: who gets to participate in American science. The report’s vision for a golden age requires talent from around the world. Research universities in the United States have long depended on graduate students and faculty from other countries to sustain their laboratories and classrooms. International collaboration has been a defining feature of American scientific leadership for decades.
Open borders are not merely a matter of fairness or generosity. They function as a research strategy. When scientists from different countries, cultures, and educational systems work together, they bring different questions, methods, and assumptions to shared problems. That diversity of perspective is itself a productive force. Restricting who can enter the country to study and work in science would constrain the very innovation the report seeks to accelerate.
The connection between immigration policy and research output is not abstract. Laboratories across the country are staffed by researchers who came to the United States as students and chose to stay. Their contributions appear in the publications, patents, and discoveries that define American scientific achievement. A policy that narrows the pipeline of international talent would take years to reverse, even if later corrected.
Building on the Bush Legacy
The institution that shaped the original golden age of American science still exists. The Office of Scientific Research and Development, which Vannevar Bush directed during World War II, demonstrated what coordinated federal investment could achieve. Its legacy includes not only the weapons that ended the war but also the model of government-university partnerships that produced decades of peacetime discovery. That model remains the reference point for every subsequent attempt to reshape American science policy, and its architect’s vision continues to frame the debate.
The question now is whether the current administration’s plan can reproduce that success with a different formula. The Bush framework succeeded because it combined generous funding with broad disciplinary coverage and openness to international talent. Each element reinforced the others. Removing any one of them, whether through budget cuts to social sciences, restricted immigration, or a narrowed definition of what counts as valuable research, weakens the entire structure.
The report’s own framing acknowledges the scale of the ambition. A new golden age, by definition, must match or exceed the achievements of the original one. That standard sets a high bar. The original golden age produced the transistor, the laser, the internet, and the mapping of the human genome. Reaching that level again will require every tool available, including the social sciences that understand human behavior, the public health research that protects populations, and the humanities that clarify what innovation is for. Whether the plan can hold all of these elements together will determine not just the fate of American science, but the shape of the society that depends on it.
Sources
1. DOI: 10.1038/d41586-026-02384-w