How will Trump’s new science strategy change US research?

Atlantic Council  |  Trisha Ray, Tess deBlanc-Knowles, Lloyd Whitman, Kenton Thibaut

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has released a new national science strategy designed to fundamentally restructure the United States’ research and development ecosystem. By capping university overhead rates and requiring private cost-sharing, the policy aims to shift federal funding away from traditional academic institutions toward focused research organizations and industry consortia.

This structural pivot occurs alongside proposed regulatory rewrites by the Office of Management and Budget to allow political reviews of federal grants, even as the administration proposes to reduce the budget of key scientific agencies. Geopolitically, the strategy frames foreign STEM talent as a liability and establishes targeted national missions in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and semiconductors to counter China. However, experts warn that domestic funding cuts, politicised grant reviews, and nativist talent policies could undermine long-term American competitiveness against Chinese technological diffusion and lower-cost open-weight models in global markets.

Comment

The Genesis Mission represents a structural shift in how the United States intends to consolidate federal data and advanced compute to accelerate artificial intelligence development. By centralising these frontier-scale resources within national laboratories, the strategy attempts to bypass traditional academic bottlenecks to match China's rapid model performance gains. However, restricting international STEM talent and reducing the National Science Foundation budget may starve this centralised infrastructure of the foundational research necessary to sustain long-term technological breakthroughs. This tension exposes a fundamental trade-off between immediate state control over the Genesis Mission and the open, collaborative ecosystem that historically drove American software dominance.

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