- The White House wants to reallocate hundreds of billions of dollars in federal funds away from universities and peer-reviewed research panels.
- Instead, the funding would go to individual scientists and native AI labs.
- The plan’s credibility is undermined by the US government’s record on science and artificial intelligence.
The Trump administration has revealed plans to transfer about $200 billion in research funds to individual scientists and a “national AI for science initiative.”
The move would pull funding from university research and “slow” consensus peer review panels in an effort to stay ahead of China, which is making strides to catch up in artificial intelligence and quantum computing technology.
The plans were laid out in a new report, called “Science: A New Golden Age,” presented to Donald Trump by Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Michael Kratsios.
Funding will shift to AI and individual scientists
Peer-reviewed studies have been the foundation of American research since the end of World War II, but Krastios says science must be reinvented again in a way “that frees American scientists to do their most innovative work, revives the national pursuit of ambitious scientific missions, and positions the United States to lead the AI-powered scientific revolution that will define the next century.”
The report is a suggestion of the direction in which the Trump administration wants to shape the future of federal funding for science, but the federal funding budget is supported by Congress.
The goal of peer-reviewed research is to prevent research from being conducted in an echo chamber, detect errors and misinformation, and critique research methodology and bias. By moving away from peer review and giving funding to individual scientists (likely vetted by the government to provide conclusions that toe the party line), this change in the way academic research is conducted will undermine America’s scientific credibility both domestically and on the global stage.
The report also suggested providing full funding for the ‘Genesis Mission’, which seeks to bring together “national laboratories, industry, academia and more to leverage AI for advances in the energy domain, discovery science and national security” by creating “AI-native scientific institutions better suited for an era of machine-augmented research.” There are obviously use cases for AI in science, but the US government doesn’t have the best track record in using AI for science.
The US government has been caught before using AI to create documents presented at hearings, with a research report presented by US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. riddled with errors and citing studies that did not exist – a classic case of AI hallucination.
Trump has also made significant departures in the direction of climate science in the US, with the removal of authoritative peer-reviewed assessments of the US national climate from US government websites, the withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement, along with funding and staff cuts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Mauna Loa Observatory, and multiple climate monitoring centers.
To stay at the forefront of AI development, the United States is also undergoing massive construction of AI data centers to provide cutting-edge model development, training, and usability capabilities. But this has presented a major challenge in providing enough power to sites already operating, as well as planned sites that will require multi-gigawatt connections.
Trump has encouraged AI companies and data center developers to turn to fossil fuels to provide additional power capacity, and many AI campuses are deploying turbines that burn natural gas. Some of these sites operate with noise levels equivalent to an international airport 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and local residents report illnesses and symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, vertigo, and sleep disturbances as a result of the infrasound emitted by the turbines.
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