They’re rethinking R&D. Last week, the Trump administration released a pair of documents guiding its science and technology strategy. Science: A New Golden Age, by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), lays out the administration’s path to “reexamine America’s research and development ecosystem in light of changes brought on by the 21st century.” Then the Ushering in a New Golden Age of American Innovation memo, by the OSTP and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), details how that strategy will be implemented in the administration’s budget priorities. The dual documents raise a number of burning questions. We had our experts research the answers below.
1. Big picture, what does this mean for US research and development?
Since World War II, if you were a scientist doing government-funded research, you most likely worked at one of a handful of universities. Washington just signaled that’s no longer guaranteed, and that shift could fundamentally change which scientists get funded, which research centers get built, and where and what kinds of breakthroughs make their way into US industry.
The OSTP memos are pushing this structural shift away from the traditional academic grantee in three ways.
1. They cut the percentage of overhead universities are allowed to charge on their grants, squeezing the university overhead structure that has captured a growing share of federal science funding.
2. They require grant recipients to share the costs with a private funder or state and local government, rather than the federal government bearing the burden alone.
3. They formally build out non-university research institutions (Focused Research Organizations, X-Labs, industry consortia) as parallel recipients of the kind of mid-scale funding that used to default to university labs.
—Trisha Ray is an associate director and resident fellow at the GeoTech Center, part of the Atlantic Council Technology Programs.
2. What specifically do these documents do, and why are they important to the White House?
OSTP’s Science: A New Golden Age sets out a bold vision for restructuring how federal research and development (R&D) dollars reach the research community. The report knits together many of the leading ideas circulating in recent years in the “science of science” community: longer time horizons for grants, investments in people rather than projects, supporting focused research organizations, using “golden tickets” in the review process (empowering individual reviewers to fund unconventional proposals), and more. The Atlantic Council recently made a similar case for embracing these mechanisms to strengthen artificial intelligence (AI) innovation. To the administration’s credit, the vision arrives with a bureaucratic cudgel—the annual OMB/OSTP budget guidance memo, which includes guidance on the adoption of these methods. Agencies with at least three billion dollars in R&D authority have ninety days to submit action plans for how they’ll meet this new guidance.
Many agencies already run programs or pilots along these lines. But adopting these approaches at scale, across every R&D funding agency, would represent a genuine transformation—particularly if paired with resident metascience units and assessment capabilities that build capacity for continuous innovation and learning.
However, bold experimentation cannot compensate for a shrinking base. The president’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget request would reduce the budget of the National Science Foundation by more than half, alongside a 23 percent cut to NASA, a 15 percent cut to the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and a 12 percent cut to the National Institutes of Health. Further, the OMB has proposed a rewrite of federal grant guidelines that would allow agencies to terminate awards that no longer serve “agency priorities” or the “national interest,” while routing every proposal by senior political appointees before funding decisions can be made. No amount of experimentation can counteract the damaging effects that dramatically reduced funds and politicized processes will have on the foundation of the United States’ scientific and technological leadership and ability to train the next generation of innovators.
—Tess deBlanc-Knowles is the senior director of the Atlantic Council Technology Programs. She previously served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy as a senior policy advisor.
Every US presidential administration arrives in Washington with their own set of science and technology priorities. They typically seek to launch new R&D initiatives, redirect funding towards specific fields, and influence science and technology policy in ways that support the administration’s economic and national security agendas.
Science: A New Golden Age can be viewed as an expanded continuation of the science and technology priorities articulated during President Donald Trump’s first term, supplemented by proposals for changing how R&D funding is administered. Most of the approaches discussed are not entirely new; many are already used to varying degrees within the federal R&D enterprise and/or by philanthropic research funders. In the absence of congressional action, increasing the funding for the stated R&D priorities will require agencies to redirect existing funding—with significant legal and administrative constraints. (Though the current administration has shown a willingness to take this path.)
More consequential than these largely aspirational policy statements are two proposed regulatory changes currently under consideration:
- The Office of Management and Budget proposed rewriting the government-wide rulebook that governs how every federal research grant is issued and managed (and which has received over 55,000 public comments, a sign of how high the stakes are seen to be across the research community).
- The National Science Foundation has proposed a parallel, sweeping rewrite of its own rulebook for how it accepts, reviews, and manages grant proposals.
Unlike the strategy documents discussed above, these proposed regulatory changes would directly affect how federal research grants are awarded and administered. If adopted substantially as proposed, they would have significant effects on the federal R&D enterprise.
—Lloyd Whitman is a senior advisor and fellow for science and technology policy at the GeoTech Center. He held senior positions at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in both the Obama and Trump administrations.
3. How does this change the university-industry-government compact that has long underwritten US science?
If properly implemented and resourced, OSTP’s vision holds the potential to strengthen the ability of the three pillars that underpin the United States’ innovation ecosystem to work at the speed technology now moves. The pathway from research breakthrough to commercialization faces multiple hurdles (or so-called “valleys of death”) that neither industry nor government are positioned to meet on their own. Take cutting-edge hardware as an example. American founders increasingly turn to China for early prototyping and engineering due to advantages in speed and cost. That’s not a failure of American ingenuity; it’s a missing component in the US ecosystem.
The OSTP strategy includes multiple provisions focused on meeting those gaps: building out testbed and R&D infrastructure, fostering new industry-government and industry-academic partnership models to connect academic research to “frontier-scale resources,” developing exchanges and cross-institutional pathways, strengthening regional innovation hubs, and more. If paired with investments in foundational research directed in the Fiscal Year 2028 R&D priorities memo, these provisions would reinforce academia’s foundational role while building the infrastructure to translate discovery into use. Together, they could refresh the university-industry-government compact for the decades ahead.
—Tess deBlanc-Knowles
4. What are the implications of the talent agenda on foreign talent?
The OSTP strategy takes a nativist approach, viewing foreign science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) talent as a liability rather than a resource: “This reliance on foreign talent sidelines American students, a deep domestic talent pool that remains under-supported by its own government. At the same time, we train extraordinary global talent at enormous expense, only to lose this effort when foreign governments recruit them to build up their own technological enterprises.”
Identifying and supporting domestic talent across geographies, incomes, and demographics is an important step laid out in the strategy, and the Atlantic Council’s research has surfaced recommendations on fully funding K–12 education reform and expanding and formalizing nontraditional skilling pathways. However, the loss of foreign Ph.D. students is caused in part by how the US immigration system assesses applicants, favoring individuals with stronger ties to their home countries. Furthermore, post-graduate work authorization for international students in STEM fields caps out at three years. Therefore, while the strategy raises an important policy challenge, namely that the domestic talent pool is underdeveloped, it misdiagnoses the problem by saying that the United States’ ability to attract world-class talent doesn’t benefit the United States.
—Trisha Ray
5. How should US rivals and allies read this new “national mission” model?
The OSTP strategy document is first and foremost a signal of urgency. The named missions—i.e. Genesis (AI), QC-ADDS (quantum), fusion demonstration, lunar return, general-purpose robotics, next-generation semiconductors—are each tied to a specific competitive deadline or milestone in the next five to ten years.
The strategy also compares the United States against adversaries and allies. The story the strategy tells is a familiar one: the US is inventing but ceding downstream production and materials capture. The cited examples of this highlight a confusion within the US government, with callouts for both battery production (where China leads) and chip lithography (where Dutch giant ASML leads). This framing undermines initiatives like Pax Silica by signaling that US leadership competes with, rather than builds upon, the strengths of its allies. US leadership scales with that of partners and allies, and the memo must heed its own message: “technological leadership can also mean strategic integration, supplying the platforms that drive economic growth across our partners’ economies.”
—Trisha Ray
6. What does this mean for the US-China competition on AI and other emerging technologies?
The clearest implication is that the administration now views US-China technology competition as a contest between innovation systems. The Fiscal Year 2028 R&D priorities memorandum has the Genesis Mission connecting federal data, advanced compute, national labs, foundation models, and scientific instruments to accelerate progress across a number of core sectors. This approach makes sense directionally, but the White House’s diagnosis of where China stands is too static. The National Science Foundation estimates that China surpassed the United States in R&D spending in 2024, while the Stanford 2026 AI index finds that the model performance gap between the two countries had narrowed to 2.7 percent by March 2026. China also leads in AI publications, patent outputs, and industrial robot installations. The US retains key advantages in private capital, frontier companies, and compute infrastructure.
At the level of national innovation systems, competitive advantage in AI may increasingly depend on capability, cost, reliability, industrial adoption, and global diffusion rather than just better performance. Genesis provides a detailed response to domestic deployment, but less attention to global adoption. Chinese firms often can pair lower cost open-weight models with established diplomatic, cloud, telecommunications, data center, and financing relationships abroad. Models embedded in this ecosystem can shape standards and create switching costs even where American systems perform better. Effectively operationalizing this strategy will also require stable multi-year funding, international talent, research independence, and allies to get on board. Competing with China will also require making US technology accessible, affordable, and institutionally attractive across global markets.
—Kenton Thibaut is senior resident China fellow at the Digital Forensic Research Lab, part of the Atlantic Council’s Technology Programs.