Michael Kratsios: Trump's Science Agenda, Anti-Science Claims, Fauci's Damage, DEI & China

The interview opens by welcoming Michael Kratsios, introduced as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The office was created in the 1960s to coordinate science and technology policy across the administration. That coordination is needed because, as the conversation explains, the U.S. has no single science and technology agency. Instead, many agencies each handle part of the work: the National Science Foundation funds basic research, the Department of Energy runs the national labs, and the Department of War runs large R&D programs such as DARPA.

OSTP's stated job is to work with the president to set a national science and technology agenda and then carry it out across those agencies. The office covers both science and technology. In the first Trump administration, the tech side was run under the title of chief technology officer of the United States.

The first direct question is whether the administration is anti-science. The answer is no, and it points to a report released a few weeks earlier, titled in the transcript as "Science and New Golden Age" (elsewhere "Golden Age"). The report is offered as evidence of an administration that wants the U.S. to be home to the next great discoveries, wants to empower young scientists, and wants an ecosystem where top scientists can work on the hardest problems.

The interview then puts a counterpoint on the table: a poll by the journal Nature of 2,000 of its readers, all scientists, in which 86% supported Kamala Harris and 6% supported Donald Trump. The explanation offered is that the scientific community "has lost its way over the last few decades." The answer credits government with historic achievements such as the Manhattan Project and Apollo, then argues that over the past 15 to 20 years science has been politicized and has stopped asking basic questions about method.

I think over the last 15 or 20 years, I think science has been deeply and deeply politicized.

According to this account, the politicization peaked during COVID, when disagreeing with "a certain individual" got people labeled anti-science. The individual isn't named in this passage, though the episode's title and opening refer to Fauci. That labeling is called "the most anti-science conclusion you could ever make." The conversation then describes the scientific method as a cycle of questions, experiments, data, and more questions, and treats deference to authority as at odds with it.

The idea that science is authority is almost antithetical to the basis of the scientific method, which is, constant inquiry.

The administration's argument, as presented here, is that government has failed to apply the scientific method to its own science policy. Science-community media and lobbyists are described as focused almost entirely on whether the R&D budget goes up. The answer says the more important question is whether the roughly $200 billion the U.S. government spends on science and technology each year actually produces the biggest breakthroughs, and whether the money could go to different organizations, scientists, or time horizons.

The interview raises a common view among researchers in academia and industry: that the administration is cutting science funding. Two points come back. First, a proposed budget is different from the money Congress appropriates. Congress holds the purse strings and, according to the answer, has kept funding science for more than a decade. Second, a policy principle:

spending more money on the wrong types of things is not the right policy action.

The interview presses with a specific figure: in 2025 the administration disrupted, froze, or terminated $3 billion in unspent funds on active grants, and it asks for examples. The answer turns to the National Science Foundation, described as the leading funder of extramural basic research, with about $8 to $9 billion a year that mostly goes to university academics. It cites an analysis by Senator Ted Cruz and a Senate committee which found that about 25% of NSF grants during the Biden administration went to what the answer calls DEI-related "science." That share is put at roughly $2 billion a year for four years, or $8 billion in total.

The answer calls this a "pure manifestation of the politicization of science" and says applicants were told they had to discuss a DEI-related factor to win grants. The interview relies on the Senate analysis for these figures and gives no further breakdown. It also does not connect the $8 billion estimate directly to the $3 billion in 2025 terminations it asked about.