- The White House wants to reallocate hundreds of billions of dollar worth of federal funding away from universities and peer reviewed research panels
- The funding would instead go to individual scientists and AI-native laboratories
- The credibility of the plan is undermined by the US government’s track record on science and AI
The Trump administration has unveiled plans to shift around $200 billion dollars of research funding into 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 AI and quantum computing technology.
Plans were laid out in a new report, dubbed ‘Science: A New Golden Age’, presented to Donald Trump by the Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Michael Kratsios.
Funding to be moved to AI and individual scientists
Peer-reviewed study has been the basis of American research since the end of World War II, but Krastios says that science must again be reinvented in a way “that frees American scientists to do their most groundbreaking work, revives the national pursuit of ambitious scientific missions, and positions the United States to lead the AI-driven scientific revolution that will define the next century.”
The report is a suggestion of the direction the Trump administration wants to shape the future of federal funding for science, but the federal funding budget is underwritten by Congress.
The point of peer reviewed research is to prevent research from being performed in an echo chamber, to spot errors and misinformation, and to provide criticism on research methodology and bias. By moving away from peer review and placing funding with individual scientists (likely vetted by the government to provide conclusions that toe the party line), this shift in how academic research is conducted will undermine US scientific credibility both at home and on the global stage.
The report also suggested providing full funding for the ‘Genesis Mission’, which seeks to unite “National Labs, industry, academia, and more to harness AI for breakthroughs in energy dominance, discovery science, and national security” by creating “AI-native scientific institutions better suited to an era of machine-augmented research.” There are obviously use-cases for AI in science, but the US government does not have the best track record of using AI for science.
The US government has already been previously caught out using AI to create documents presented in hearings, with a research report presented by US health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. being riddled with errors and citing studies that did not exist – a classic case of AI hallucination.
Trump has also made significant deviations to the direction of climate science in the US, with peer-reviewed authoritative assessments on the US national climate being deleted from US government websites, the US withdrawal from the Paris Accord, alongside funding and staffing cuts across the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Mauna Loa Observatory, and multiple climate monitoring centers.
In order to maintain the forefront of AI development, the US is also experiencing a mass-buildout of AI data centers to provide capacity for usage, training, and development of frontier models. But this has presented a major challenge in providing enough power to sites already running, as well as planned sites that will require multi-gigawatt connections.
Trump has encouraged AI companies and data center developers to lean into fossil fuels to provide extra energy capacity, with many AI campuses deploying natural gas burning turbines. Some of these sites operate at noise levels matching an international airport 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with local residents reporting illnesses and symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, vertigo, and sleep disruption as a result of the infrasound emitting from turbines.
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benedict.collins@futurenet.com (Benedict Collins)
