American Science: A New Golden Cage! On 21 July, the White House published "Science: A New Golden Age", the report that presents itself as…

Maarten Weyn

American Science: A New Golden Cage! On 21 July, the White House published "Science: A New Golden Age", the report that presents itself as the successor to Vannevar Bush's 1945 "The Endless Frontier". Same typeface, same letter to the president, same frontier rhetoric. I analyzed the report. The diagnosis is often right. Researchers lose nearly half their funded time to paperwork. Grants take up to twenty months. Review panels reward the safe proposal over the strange one. We recognize all of it in Europe. But a policy document has to pass one test: do its authors act on what they preach? I found six contradictions. A report that demands selection purely on merit, from an administration that cancelled thousands of grants for ideological reasons. A plea for trust in individual reviewers, published while a new rule puts political appointees in charge of every grant decision. A golden age, announced alongside a budget request that cuts NSF by more than half. The contradictions all fall the same way. Each states a principle that favours the individual researcher, and each arrives with a measure that weakens the institution where that researcher works. In 1945, Bush defeated Senator Kilgore's model of politically controlled science. Eighty-one years later, the report that claims Bush's mantle proposes Kilgore's architecture. It arrives in Bush's typeface and carries his opponent's argument. For Europe, this is not a spectator sport. The diagnosis applies to us too, and the instruments are worth testing. We can take some of the tools and refuse the frame at the same time. Link to full analysis in the comments.

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