Over the holidays this winter, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) solicited information on how “to accelerate the American scientific enterprise, enable groundbreaking discoveries, and ensure that scientific progress and technological innovation benefit all Americans.” Building on work to accelerate and reform the American scientific enterprise, I offered suggestions for how to effectively direct this effort to improve the function, productivity, vitality, and health of American science. It is a welcome attempt to wrest American science from the grip of malaise that characterizes the status quo. Science is viewed as slowing down, productivity decreasing, and requiring more resources, more grants, and more personnel to achieve tremendous breakthroughs.
The institutions of science we inherited from the 1950s are ill-suited to the task of innovating in the 21st century. Instead, some grantmaking agencies can be accused, with some cause, of simply serving as tools to fund elite universities or advance ideologies inimical to a large percentage of American taxpayers. Whether through political ideology, perceived financial excesses, or polarization during and after the pandemic, the “no-strings-attached” model of public trust and funding for science, inaugurated in Science the Endless Frontier and the establishment of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), has shown wide fissures in collapsing trust and political backlash. For there to be a thorough restoration of the health of the scientific enterprise and the preconditions for acceleration, scientists must reassert that their work is focused on seeking out the truth, on pursuing their research not for ideological reasons, not for advancing a social agenda, but for the sake of discovery. This request for information sought practical steps for improving our science agencies.
