The Trump administration is writing a $5 billion check to fundamentally rewire American science, and not everyone is applauding. On Thursday, the White House announced the first “Genesis Mission” grants, funding 278 AI-driven projects across energy, drug discovery, and robotics. The initiative, which science adviser Michael Kratsios compared in urgency to the Manhattan Project, pulls in compute power from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
This isn’t just a funding drop. Kratsios explicitly tied the grants to a broader manifesto for a “New Golden Age” of US science, a document that proposes shifting money away from universities and toward individual researchers and private companies, while giving political appointees more power to block grants they disagree with. It’s a vision that treats public research less like a public good and more like a Silicon Valley startup, prizing speed and measurable returns.
The problem, as researchers are loudly pointing out, is that science doesn’t work that way. Basic research is slow, uncertain, and often looks useless until it suddenly isn’t. “You cannot use venture capital to force breakthroughs while virtually already selling the patent,” said Claes de Vreese, a professor at the University of Amsterdam. The fear isn’t just about approach but about atrophy. One critic warned we could end up with “AI having a few major insights buried under mountains of slop, and the number of people with the experience and knowledge to tell the two apart may rapidly dwindle.”
This push comes amid a wider crackdown on the research establishment, including threats to funding over “woke” ideology and curtailing international talent. Critics see the Genesis Mission not as a revival but as a politicized dismantling of the very system that made the US a scientific superpower. The bet is that AI can accelerate discovery. The risk is that in sidelining the slow, serendipitous work of universities, we gut the pipeline of people who actually know what a real breakthrough looks like.
