The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a 123-page report on July 21 that recommends federal research agencies operate more like venture investors than grant administrators. The report, titled Science: A New Golden Age, is billed by OSTP as the first comprehensive rewrite of U.S. science policy since Vannevar Bush's 1945 report Science: The Endless Frontier, and it arrives alongside a Fiscal Year 2028 R&D Priorities Memorandum requiring agencies to submit implementation plans within 90 days.
OSTP Director Michael Kratsios built his career in Silicon Valley before entering government, working at Peter Thiel's investment firm Thiel Capital and later at Scale AI. That background runs through the report's four pillars, which call for faster grant cycles, portfolio-style evaluation of agency research spending, and closer integration between discovery and domestic production.
Report Recommends Treating Federal R&D Like a Venture Portfolio
Rather than administering grants uniformly, the report asks agencies to experiment with funding models: long-duration awards, prize competitions, advanced market commitments, and "golden ticket" mechanisms that let individual reviewers fund unconventional proposals outside consensus peer review. It also calls for metascience teams inside agencies to continuously test whether their own funding processes produce better outcomes.
Genesis Mission Ties AI Directly to Federal Research Infrastructure
The report designates AI as central infrastructure for research itself, not a funding category alongside it. Its flagship vehicle, the Genesis Mission, would link supercomputers, foundation models, national laboratories and shared datasets with a goal of doubling U.S. scientific productivity within a decade. The report pairs that expansion with new reproducibility requirements, including automated verification systems and machine-readable publications that AI tools can evaluate directly.
Manufacturing Capacity Becomes a Measure of Scientific Leadership
The report argues the U.S. has repeatedly originated breakthrough technologies, citing semiconductor manufacturing equipment and lithium-ion batteries, only to lose production and supply chains overseas. Its recommendations include expanded public-private manufacturing partnerships, broader access to national laboratory infrastructure, and workforce programs linking research institutions to technicians and machinists.
Report Draws Pushback Over University Funding Shift and Budget Contradictions
The report's reception has been mixed since its release. Scientific societies and university researchers have raised concerns that shifting federal dollars away from universities toward industry and AI companies would erode the research base the report itself says it wants to strengthen. Critics have also argued that the plan's stated ambitions sit awkwardly alongside other administration positions on immigration, higher education and diversity programs, which they say are already straining the research workforce the report depends on.
The most concrete point of criticism concerns money rather than tone. Kratsios's report does not address the administration's own proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget, which would cut the National Science Foundation's funding by roughly 53% alongside reductions at other science agencies. At a July 22 House Science Committee hearing, Rep. Zoe Lofgren argued that new initiatives carry little weight while agencies continue canceling and delaying already-approved grants and restricting funding to specific institutions.
Whether Congress funds the recommendations is still an open question, since many of the report's mechanisms would require new appropriations language rather than executive action alone. The FY2028 R&D Priorities Memorandum gives agencies a concrete near-term deadline: implementation plans are due within 90 days, and agency budget submissions for FY2028 will show whether the venture-style funding language becomes actual line items or stays aspirational.
