1. The new Trump / Kratsios plan for US science appears explicitly designed to destroy US universities. Diverting money to tech donors is probably just a bonus. Gift link.
www.nytimes.com
2. Remarkably, given how universally unpopular this would be, the intent seems accept the ruination of US health and medical research as collateral damage.
3. I know this will strain credulity, but at times it seems as if the report's author Michael Kratsios has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. Take this statement. As a former member of a department of biological sciences and a department of life sciences, I have no idea what this means.
4. His role as Trump's science advisor and head of OSTP aside, Kratsios has no scientific experience whatsoever. His degree is a BA in politics, and his main credentials are as a Thiel apparatchik. So when he compares himself to Vannevar Bush… Kratsios is not a Vannevar. He isn't even a George W.
5. If it weren't so tragic it would be hilarious how these sycophants and courtesans think they can sell anything to their idiot king if they just add the word "gold". First "gold-standard science", now a "new golden age..."
6. On a more serious note, I work a lot in the science of science. The report prominently claims that scientific breakthroughs are far rarer than they used to be, and concludes that this somehow the fault of the funding system. Such claims are egregious misrepresentations of the cited research. 7. I'll put together more about this tomorrow, but in the meantime feel free to leave comments, explanations, contextualizations, additional references, etc. here. 8. One of the biggest misunderstandings or misrepresentations running through the report involves the role of US funding agencies. Indeed, they serve in part to promote tech discoveries and medical breakthroughs, but their role and charge is also to develop and perpetuate a vibrant STEM ecosystem. 9. By supporting universities, they support the human capital development that flows into the commercial sector and generates the growth and innovation that has been a massive boon for US commerce. This plan undercuts that role, with disastrous consequences that will ricochet for years to come. 10. Hard to even know where to start in commenting on this report because it's such a jumble of grievances, lies, and accelerationist fever dreams. But this paragraph floors me. Not only is it talking about AI agents doing the science, it's utterly ignorant of the information economics of science.
11. I don't think I have to help anyone read between the lines here. AI: good. Universities: bad. Trades: good. Academics: bad. It's a straightforward continuation of the Vought/Vance "the universities are the enemy" program.
12. Again, where do you even start with something like this? "President Trump's inability to understand the basic logic of global trade has worked so well for the US that we need to implement something analogous for scientific discovery"
14. Here's the report itself; I encourage you to read as much as you can stomach of it.
www.whitehouse.gov
15. I keep coming back to this line. It is willful misrepresentation of our federal funding agencies' mission beyond discovery: developing that R&D workforce (and a pipeline of ideas) that flow into the private sector so beloved to our author. We employ trainEES because trainING is what we do.
16. Responding to this report is hard because it's a Gish Gallop of incoherent, self-contradictory justifications for the conclusion they began with: we want to dismantle universities. Just a few pages after the above, we get this proposal. If adopted, tech companies WOULD have trainee workforces!
17. How could you write this paragraph and also reach the conclusions that the report reaches? It beggars belief. The entire document is a set of soundbites, some right, many wrong, all designed to appeal to the Vought/Vance/Thiel axis and utterly disconnected to the point of absolute incoherence.
18. Don't sleep on the national labs giveaway.
19. Biologists study the theory of photosynthesis but few can convert light energy into chemical energy in the form of simple sugars....The result is a generation of researchers who can model phenomena mathematically but cannot create their own food by standing outside with arms outstretched.
20. I could go on and on but this report is slop for a mind addled by TikTok. Every point is a soundbite: idea, but never plan or solution. The sections or even subsections directly contradict one another. Irrelevant grievances and pet hobbyhorses flicker into view and disappear without explanation. 21. Vannevar Bush is lionized, then cast aside as missing the point. A new vision (or perhaps more accurately, an acid dream of images colliding into one another) is proposed, but at no point do we see anything that the pragmatic understanding let alone the detailed planning that Bush offered. 22. It's transparently clear that the author(s) started with the conclusion—let's demolish universities and replace them with a Peter Thiel model of public investment in inventors and entrepreneurs untainted by formal education and propelled by VC funding—and then tried to find supporting arguments. 23. Scattered throughout are appeals to finding from my field—the science of science / metascience that point to problems with some of the the existing norms and institutions that undergird academic science. Some of these are taken out of context, others are presented reasonably fairly. But... 24. Essentially, the report cites metascientists as observing that there's might be raccoon in the attic, and then concludes that the best course of action is to burn down the entire house. This is inconsistent with virtually all of the scholarship in this area. 25. We can build a new, better house, the report proposes. We'll have VC principles and markets and agentic AI doing microtransactions on the blockchain, it gushes. But the report offers nothing by way of a plan for how any of this would work. It's just an excuse to get out the flamethrower. 26. In summary? A disastrous and incoherent jumble that might sound good, one paragraph at a time, to a president who is not known for deep thought or a politics major accustomed to judging pitch decks, but falls woefully short as serious thought let alone rigorous planning for a national future. 27. A final aspect that probably deserves mention: the Rufo playbook of kneecapping government institutions, then complaining that they are inefficient and using that as rationale to eliminate them. The majority of things this report identifies as broken are things the Trump administration broke. 28. To everyone who should know better but is still saying "actually, I agree with this one point in the report" or "to be fair Kratsios is right about this" — I give you Derek Lowe's reponse.
www.science.org