Scientific research needs more precise federal funding, White House tech leader says
Then-White House CTO Michael Kratsios delivers a speech on the last day of the Web Summit in Lisbon on November 7, 2019. Kratsios said at a May 19 event that federal agencies "need to be sort of resetting" the way they think about spending at science agencies. Rita Franca/NurPhoto via Getty Images
“To get more bang for America's research bucks, we need to enhance the creativity and precision of our funding,” OSTP Director Michael Kratsios said.
Federal funds should only be directed toward necessary scientific research, the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said on Monday.
During a speech and subsequent sitdown discussion at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., OSTP Director Michael Kratsios said that increasing federal investments in research and development in recent years have not resulted in wider scientific breakthroughs.
“Spending more money on the wrong things is far worse than spending less money on the right things,” Kratsios said. “And I think we're at a moment, a very important moment in time, where we need to be sort of resetting the way that we think about spending in a lot of these science agencies.”
Kratsios’ remarks come as the Trump administration and the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency have moved to cut personnel and research grants from agencies, particularly those that are perceived as furthering diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
The National Science Foundation has cancelled more than 1,000 grants, with Nature reporting that staff at the agency were directed to “stop awarding all funding actions until further notice.” An analysis published earlier this month in the medical journal JAMA also found that the National Institutes of Health terminated more than $1.8 billion in research funding. The White House’s fiscal year 2026 budget blueprint also proposes further cuts to NIH.
Kratsios said DEI initiatives, in particular, “degrade our scientific enterprise” and represent “an existential threat to the real diversity of thought that forms the foundation of the scientific community.” He called it essential that the scientific community maintain “a suspicion of blind consensus and a celebration of informed dissent” to promote a “gold-standard science.”
DOGE’s work, Kratsios said, has shown that “there have been large amounts of money that have been spent on things which are clearly not national interests or uphold or meet what is called standard science.”
Kratsios said he envisions more private industry involvement when it comes to supporting scientific research, noting that industry spends more than three times as much on R&D as the federal government.
“In a period of fiscal constraint and geopolitical challenges, an increase in private funding can make it easier for federal grant-making agencies to refocus public funds on basic research in the national interests,” he said. “What we target is what we measure and what we measure is what we get more of. To get more bang for America's research bucks, we need to enhance the creativity and precision of our funding.”
Trump previously wrote an open letter to Kratsios in March that outlined several priorities for the administration, including ensuring U.S. leadership in the development of emerging technologies. The directive also called for the creation of “new paradigms for the research enterprise, including innovative models for funding and sharing scientific research, redefining how America conducts the business of discovery.”
Kratsios said that the administration has already moved to tackle the emerging tech leadership component of the president’s letter, and that Monday’s discussion “kind of opened the conversation on the science challenge.”