White House rolls out AI funding — and signals a new era for US science

Washington DC

It was a big week for science in the administration of US President Donald Trump. On Tuesday, the president’s chief science adviser, Michael Kratsios, release a report called Science: A New Golden Age that proposes substantial changes to federally funded research. The next day saw him help to unveil some of the first winners of research grants from the Genesis Mission, the administration’s flagship artificial-intelligence initiative.

For the past year and a half, the Republican-led administration has made headlines for attempting to cut funding for US science that it disfavours. This week’s events are notable because they move forward the science that it does favour — in particular, AI.

Trump has big AI and quantum ambitions: this scientist’s job is to make them reality

Some 5,000 teams applied for funding from the Genesis Mission, which the administration billed as a programme “comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project” to accelerate US science with AI. At a summit on 22 July, officials announced about 280 winning projects in a first phase of the programme. Teams will apply AI to problems such as improving the US power grid and automating laboratories, and will receive a 9-month grant for between US$500,000 and $750,000. Researchers in these teams can also submit applications for a second phase: a three-year programme involving millions in annual funding.

“I was very, very, very happy” to be chosen “because it was incredibly competitive,” winner Jeremy Zucker told Nature at the summit. Zucker, a computational scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, is leading a project that will model algal growth in ponds to maximize biofuel production.

Kratsios’s report got a more mixed reception at a hearing in Washington DC that he attended on the same day. In the report, he calls for shifting US science funding away from “legacy institutions” such as universities. “Too much of our research enterprise has come to serve itself rather than the scientists within it,” he wrote. Under this new vision, individual scientists would be supported by programmes such as ‘golden tickets’, which give grant reviewers the ability to override the decisions of their colleagues to fund high-risk proposals. “We should be testing other ways to make breakthroughs than what we’ve been doing for so many years,” he said at the hearing of the US House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology. He argued that US science is stagnating and needs to be rethought.

Members of the US Congress, who decide what science to fund, had mixed reactions. Republicans on the committee broadly expressed support for Kratsios’s vision for US science; Democrats, however, criticized the Trump administration’s cuts to science budgets and agencies, as well as its push to take political control of grant awards. “You aren’t launching us into ‘the golden age of innovation’. You’re sending us back to the Stone Age,” said Gabe Amo, a Democrat representing Rhode Island.

Some scientists have been quick to criticize the report. Carl Bergstrom, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, wrote on the social-media platform Bluesky that the administration seems determined to “destroy” US universities. (Trump and his Republican allies have accused US research institutions of being discriminatory towards conservative views, and the administration has withheld funding from some universities, citing antisemitism.)

Grant challenges

Lawmakers also questioned Kratsios about media reports, including one from Nature, that the US National Science Foundation (NSF) plans to claw back about $500 million from its grant-making divisions and funnelling the money towards a new White House initiative. Democrat Zoe Lofgren of California queried the chief science adviser about this. He responded: “I’m not familiar with those details. I would refer you to NSF,” but made the case that the United States should “be more deliberative and specific about trying to tackle grand challenges”.

NSF plans cuts to core science programmes to fund White House initiative

Nature has learnt that the NSF has now pulled back $300 million from two of its divisions: mathematics and physical sciences, and computer and information science and engineering. Programme officers, who handle grant proposals at the NSF, have pulled back 150 proposals that have already passed peer review to free up the money, which was allotted to the agency by the US Congress. Some proposals have been rescinded, others have had funding cuts and still others have been held until the next fiscal year.

Staff members at the NSF, who spoke to Nature on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals, say the money is probably going to a programme called Grand Research Challenges, organized by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, which Kratsios runs. A preliminary document shown to Nature that appears to outline the challenges lists four areas: the future of intelligence, the frontier of quantum phenomena, advanced materials and matter and the foundations of biological design.

A spokesperson for the NSF said that the agency would not comment on internal budget deliberations. They said that funds for research activities in fiscal year 2026 could be awarded that year or the next one, and that “NSF revises budgets and manages portfolios as needed”.