Space Policy Edition: “Science: A New Golden Age” - Reimagining U.S. science policy

Casey Dreier: Hello and welcome to the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Casey Dreier, the Chief of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society, and this is a show about the processes and policies behind space exploration. This month we are looking at Science: A New Golden Age? Released by the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy at the White House, Michael Kratsios.

This is a big report and I'm going to quote a quick section. 81 years ago, Vannevar Bush wrote that the scientific progress would be an essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living and to our cultural progress. Bush had seen a glimpse of science's promise for America in the triumphs of penicillin and radar in securing victory in World War II.

His vision proved prescient through the eight decades that followed. And just a scientific inquiry demands that we revise our theories when evidence contradicts them, evidence of scientific slowdown and serious competition from abroad should spur us to experiment with new systems, new models, and new ways of funding, conducting and translating research. Vannevar Bush's pioneering spirit calls us to do what he would surely do today, reimagine the entire enterprise for our time.

Those are bold words and the report is correspondingly bold and assertive. I recommend that you read it. It's for a report surprisingly readable from something that comes out from a public policy perspective, and it says a lot. It identifies problems with the application of science, the pursuit of science in the United States, including excessive bureaucracy, long durations of weight between proposals and grants, the issues of young career scientists breaking into new fields, potential ossification of institutions, a host of them, but what it proposes are pretty dramatic.

As it says, a wholesale almost reinvention of how the United States does science. It proposes faster grants, less bureaucracy, more integration of AI, supportive individual scientists over institutions, and that's just to start. This report that came out in July of 2026 took quite a few people by surprise, not necessarily because of its contents, but because of the context in which it arose, that the White House that commissioned it has also proposed to slash the budgets of US scientific institutions by half or sometimes even two-thirds, that the number of new funding awards made by the National Science Foundation is down by more than half in this year, more than 20% at NASA and elsewhere across the government.

That the Office of Management and Budget within the White House has proposed a wholesale revision of the rules governing scientific grants that add bureaucracy, that add additional reporting, that insert more overtly political control, approval, and less insight and oversight into the funding and control of the scientific process itself. How do you square these two ideas and what is actually going on in this Science of Golden Age? And I'll note that it has a question mark and maybe it unintentionally is an insightful addition to this.

To help me answer this, I welcome two guests this month. First, my colleague, Jack Kiraly, who is the Chief of Advocacy here at the Planetary Society, and Zach Pirtle, formerly at NASA, and now the Deputy Director for the Consortium of Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University. Zach wrote a very interesting article talking about this as a reformation of the mythos or mythology of what science is and how it's practiced in the United States.

I thought it was quite insightful and a little more, I'd say, productive than some of the other responses that we've seen, however understandable they may be. I believe there are actually some very interesting and important ideas represented in this report. And this discussion, the goal I have with this is to highlight, I think, where some of those are coming from because not all of them are coming out of whole cloth and not all of them are partisan despite the context in which it arises.

I believe it's very important to engage on these ideas, to not instinctively say that the system that we have now is perfect and does not deserve any sort of reform. I don't want to be on the side of bureaucracy for scientists. However, imperfect or inelegant or even completely out of step other actions by this administration have been with that regard. I don't want to be on the side of ossification of institutions or turning away from new technologies.

I want those ideas to survive what is becoming a rapidly highly partisan situation. You will hear throughout this discussion are grappling with the good and bad aspects of this report, the inconsistencies, the broader actions taken by the administration that undermine some of the prepared proposals within this report. And I believe that you can see this report as a part of the administration arguing with another part.

There is no uniform approach here. But again, I encourage you to read at least the overall summary and to engage with some of the ideas of how can we do science better? Are there better ways than what we just happen to have? But also of course, to engage with the real failures in terms of budget cuts and Draconian rules being proposed, the consolidation and the imposition of overtly partisan control over science as well.

That's the way I think you see mythology of science, the practice of science, science as a philosophy enduring beyond a political cycle, which is where I fear we may be heading, particularly for things like NASA, which require long-term thinking, which require large groups of individuals that defy the idea of an individual scientist in order to make a spacecraft to gather the data to even do the science in the first place.

Lots to discuss in this episode, but before we get to that discussion, the Planetary Society, the organization that produces this show is a nonprofit member supported organization. We promote space science exploration. We produce great policy, insights, and we advocate for what we believe in, space science and exploration in Washington DC and beyond. Please check us out at planetary.org. If you're not a member, please consider supporting us at planetary.org/join.

Memberships start at just a few bucks a month. You can donate to us if you're already a member. Thank you. Honestly, you keep the lights on at this organization and consider upgrading your membership to support us even more. We truly, and I cannot emphasize this enough, truly rely on our members across the world to keep us going. That's planetary.org/join, that's very important. We got a lot of work to do, as you will hear in this discussion. And now Zach Pirtle and Jack Kiraly. Zach and Jack, welcome to the Space Policy Edition.

Jack Kiraly: Great to be here, Casey.

Zach Pirtle: Thanks, Casey. Such a fan and an honor.

Casey Dreier: Well, I'm delighted, Zach, that you could be here because I read your Substack piece that we'll have linked in the show notes here. Let's just start at the top for folks who have not been reading all of the 100-page plus report from Office of Science and Technology Policy. Zach, can you give just a quick rundown of what this is, this report, A New Golden Age, and what context this is coming out of, and particularly its references to itself, its self-references in terms to what it's coming out of and what it's trying to do.

Zach Pirtle: Yeah, in every presidential administration, the Office of Science and Technology Policy helps integrate across the federal government, across all the agencies, a vision for the president on science and engineering. And the report that was released last week called Science: A New Golden Age by OSTP Director Michael Kratsios is a pretty interesting read.

It's the attempt by this administration to lay out its more detailed vision for what science policy should look like across the administration's term. And the report in some ways tries to highlight a very old version of a comparable report from 1945 by President Roosevelt's science advisor during World War II, Dr. Vannevar Bush. And that report was called Science Analyst Frontier. And this report is often mythologized, pointed to as the origin story for US science policy and the argument for federal funding for basic science and a lot of the areas of science funding that we fund today.

The Vannevar Bush effort made a lot of arguments about why we fund science and why we do it. And what Kratsios released last week was this administration's view of an update and their desire for changing and to create a more dynamic science in the United States.

Casey Dreier: You called it a better mythology in your piece, which I liked a lot. Why do you call it a mythology? What's important about that? Why that framing?

Zach Pirtle: Every organization has a set of beliefs about what it is that they do and why it matters, how it affects society. And sometimes those are very data-driven. You can get very clear data about the benefits of everything. For something as complicated as the US science policy system, it can be difficult to get the brass tacks on here are the tangible benefits for society from funding this little piece of research.

There's lots of studies that can track patents that can do long-term studies on where did a particular piece of impact for society come from, but it's hard to do in a simple, easily digestible way. The Vannevar Bush narrative claimed at the time that basic science was the key in order to get new products for society, in order to get new applications that can help improve and make society improve overall. Vannevar Bush's mythos, if you call it that, was a focus on how science was part of a broader team.

There were several aspects of civil society that need to be a part of it, but that science helps create this wellspring of knowledge that can then be applied towards other projects. Now, while Bush never used the phrase, it's often referred to as a linear model of innovation, that basic science is this key that leads towards applied science, that leads towards development efforts in engineering, and that leads towards societal outcomes.

There's been a lot of historians who've claimed that the linear model is not true. For example, people built the first steam engine before they actually had thermodynamics. And so there's lots of areas where engineering often leads the way. And there's lots of areas where engineers and scientists work collaboratively. There's no easy way to distinguish between basic science and applied engineering efforts, and then you want to have them done together.

The Science: A New Golden Age is unique in that it makes the linear model of innovation a central target that it's trying to replace that vision for how science works and it's trying to give a new argument for what the nature of innovation is and how you should support that using a variety of approaches from funding different types of institutions, different ways to do meta science and to track insights to shape the way in which we manage science and to make it better.

There's ways to empower program officers. There's a litany of different specific proposals within Science: A New Golden Age that are of interest. But I called it, it's a question of whether the new report by Kratsios will lead to a better mythology, will it be a better narrative about why we do science, will it lead to better outcomes for society? And I think it's so unclear it has potential, but there's a lot of things that need to happen in order to make that occur.

Casey Dreier: To say the least, yes. And just to be clear, I mean it makes a lot of recommendations and claims and broad statements, not least of which of that. Again, it's explicitly comparing itself to this kind of sea change event of this Vannevar Bush report, which basically ushered in this era of public investment responsibility for fundamental science. And this 21st century is no longer the same as the 20th century with AI and all these other new technologies. We have this non-linear kind of relationship of science, therefore we need these different things to happen.

I'd say it highlights, just to try to pick out the big threads, it really highlights the fund diminishes the role of the institution to a degree in order to empower individual scientists, tries to talk about incorporating AI in ways that have a complex kind of feedback cycle into the process of science itself, multidisciplinary, but also multi-technical and engineering, much more applied in its kind of focus, bringing into the idea of science craftsmen and tradespeople and skilled crafts as a critical part of it, while also bringing in this kind of host of political and relatively partisan mythology itself about where it's obviously coming out of this administration, which did not like the way that science was going, particularly with issues around DEI and other aspects. Jack, how did you react when you first saw this report?

Jack Kiraly: I think an important context for this report coming out obviously is in response to, it's on page two, in response to a memo, a request from the president, and is in response to the litany of executive orders that have come out as it relates to what they're calling gold standard science. This has been a document I think probably in the works for months and I think notable that it was released the day before Director Kratsios testified to the House Science Committee on these plans.

And I think one of the things I really took away from my first read of it is how much it is focused on trying to define a new mythos more than actually laying out a plan of action and just using the right phrases and the right mechanisms that obviously excite other parts of the administration. Anything related to AI is something that the administration has largely embraced. And although there are these very good points that the memo makes and I think legitimate grievances that the people have had with the linear model as it relates to science.

But it's all happening in the context of this was announced the day before a hearing, which was a note of consternation from members of the House Science Panel. And it seems to be more focused on creating that new mythos than it is on solving the problem because there's not really any arena for public input on this. And it's really kind of trying to create this thing out of whole cloth and trying to say we, this administration is putting forward this proposal.

And so outside of any individual argument, the broad thing that I think I picked up was just the timing of this is really significant in that it's coming at a time when the administration through the Office of Management budget had proposed sweeping cuts last year, almost all of which were rejected by Congress to the budgets. A lot of those were rekindled this year in the fiscal year 27 budget requests, which we are still in the midst of that debate and congressional action to reject those.

And then so this comes out and it's kind of diametrically opposed to some of those very proposals that are coming out of the OMB, despite OMB being a co-signatory on this memo. And so those are some of the idiosyncrasies of this memo that I'm kind of paying the closest attention to and how it's playing out in the broader policy discussion.

Casey Dreier: We'll get to the context because I think that's such an important aspect of this, that this is not happening itself in a vacuum. It's not coming out of a administration that has been super friendly to the scientific endeavor, at least from the OMB, the budgetary perspective. Let's just put that off to the side for a second because I just want to focus a bit more on the report itself, and I do encourage folks to read.

I found it surprisingly readable, which is refreshing for most reports, that may be because it's not a product of consensus. And I was actually going to ask Zach in terms of it did not seem like a lot of scientists were consulted in this report. I'm not saying you or I necessarily have clear insight into this, but it certainly wasn't a standing committee through the National Academies of Sciences.

Can you impose a new mythos from above like this or from the outside? Because Kratsios himself notably doesn't have a scientific background, I think political science. Is that a strategy that can work here? Can this functionally persist beyond maybe this brief administration's window that they're working with?

Zach Pirtle: President Trump requested this report some months ago, and OSTP is able to source out reviews and to get all the different agencies within the federal government to help provide ideas and to vet things. I don't have any personal insight into how the report was written. It currently lists only Director Kratsios as the only author of the report, but it does say in the upfront letter from Director Kratsios to the president that he consulted broadly and widely. And the ability for OSTP to get a broad range of expertise should not be underestimated.

I do think that with Kratsios, I think the ability to come at this from the perspective of political science, it leads to actually some interesting citations in the reference book, which I found refreshing. You found references to things that aren't necessarily as common in some of these high level OSTP reports. There's a discussion about technological determinism in one footnote, as well as the sociologist Harry Collins in the important, this is actually a very important debate that I discuss in the Substack, the role of tacit knowledge of things that engineers and technicians can know, but that are hard to write down on paper.

And that oftentimes at NASA and other places, there's a large amount of tacit knowledge that is part of the secret know-how to make things work that is sometimes underestimated and that people think you don't need those people around, but once you lose it becomes quite difficult.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. We had a whole episode on that last year on this very show.

Zach Pirtle: And so I think there's certain themes in the report that really focus on the way in which knowledge is going to be distributed around new innovations that I think could have the potential to be important and to get different conversations going. The report does cite a variety of innovation policy resources from management science and some other scientific journals.

It does cite a number of Substack posts, including one on a framework for thinking about innovation that seems like a fine post when I went through it briefly as I wrote this post in the week since the report came out. But the report, definitely I'm very excited to learn more about who exactly wrote it because I don't have the answers and insight into it, but there's a lot in there that's perhaps a bit unusual compared to past OSTP reports.

Casey Dreier: Maybe something important to emphasize here is that this is not being created at a whole cloth. It's pulling together a number of sources and would you call it meta science study, scientific study of science, how it works, ideas of progress. A lot of these are been floating around for a number of years. Is that correct, that we see in this report?

Zach Pirtle: Part of my interest in this report comes, I'm the deputy director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University based in DC. And we've long been engaged in the history of science policy research and efforts. There's been journals and decades worth of research across very scientific disciplines on the social sciences and policy and history and philosophy of science and science policy.

And yeah, the discussions and references to say the Sociologist Harry Collins on tacit knowledge were classic references from, I think some of that foundational work was from the '80s and '90s. And the report draws on a lot of historical references that do tie into this history of science policy that is part of what makes this a little bit more unusual than some past OSTP reports that don't go as much into those details. Now, one could say maybe other OSTP reports have a lot of insights or they already have assumed that the linear model of innovation doesn't exist or that we've moved past that, but-

Casey Dreier: Jack, what else stood out to you at least in a positive perspective when you read this or if anything?

Jack Kiraly: Yeah, I guess I don't want to come across as saying this, that the context spoils the content. I mean, I think like Zach, the conversation that it has about tacit knowledge, thinking back to the episode of the show talking about Apollo and tacit knowledge loss was really meaningful. But it does seem to have a very strong, it is rooted very strongly in the philosophy of science.

It really does show the Director Kratsios, and then in his performance to the House Science Committee really shows that this is something that he focuses very heavily on. And so it's almost whether or not you agree ultimately with the philosophical underpinnings of what they're trying to create with this. The argument itself is overall pretty solid. Obviously inconsistencies exist as with any 120-page report, but it really does try to lay out, and I think maybe as much as I had said earlier, trying to create this successive document to Endless Frontier.

It really is focused on creating this philosophical backing. And it's probably the most cohesive in such a document that we've seen in recent years of putting forward that sort of meta science philosophy because it has been a while since we've had this conversation about what it means to do science and what is the motivating factor. But also at the same time, there's elements of it where it does show that the outcomes that they're looking for are rather narrow.

And looking to maybe our primary focuses, you and I, Casey, is how this intersects with NASA and the NASA Space Science Program. There's only a handful of references. Obviously this is talking about science in the grandest, capital S science. And so you're talking about everything from Department of Energy to NIH to NASA and NSF. And so you're not, of course, going to have a whole diatribe on the NASA space science portfolio because it's only a small fraction of the overall portfolio.

But when it is mentioned, it's mentioned in the context of the outcomes they're looking for are expanding economic activity in low earth orbit and protecting national security. The planetary exploration piece, the pushing the bounds of what we're capable of doing on the surface of Mars. It's not really discussed as a primary outcome. It's very focused on, as I think with the rest of the administration, very focused on economic principles and that national security, and probably maybe national security underscored a few times in terms of its overall outcome priorities.

Zach Pirtle: In the last few years, there's been increasing interest in meta sciences. What has previously been discussed as science of science policy and trying to collect data and information about how we can better manage and fund science to get better outcomes. So this is tied to grants. What are the best ways to evaluate and get information and how should you scope a grant so that people would be more likely successful? This can also apply towards management.

The Science and New Golden Age Report does call for the creation of meta science units at agencies across the federal government, and that agencies should use and collect information that can help them manage better. In theory, if that's done well, it could help NASA science to provide better outcomes there. There's been a lot of research in recent years re-describing what meta science should be. The Institute for Progress is a think tank that's been thinking through a lot of these issues especially. And so we'll have to see what happens there.

Casey Dreier: They kind of tentatively liked what they saw in this, if I remember correctly, right?

Zach Pirtle: Their co-founder, Alec Stapp, noted a number of points about the report that they thought were good, but I'm not sure. I think they just noted points in which they agreed with.

Casey Dreier: That they liked. Yeah. And let me just list a few that I like, and then we'll go into maybe what we don't like so much about this or this context. There are, maybe it's just a sign of the times, but just any report from the White House that opens with science remains essential and that it's incredibly important to the health of a nation. There's just a lot of good, I'm happy to see it.

Maybe that's a low bar, but I think it's important and it's welcome to see that emphasized that science should be and remains a critical aspect of what a nation does. There is a lot of really interesting stuff I think too that you touched on a little bit, Zach, about the application of just running and managing science through the federal government. They talk about reducing bureaucratic burdens to scientists, to not have to file so much paperwork, to waste so much time keeping up with requirements and reporting and so forth.

They talk about providing faster turnaround in terms of awarding grants. They talk about, I'll have to be careful how I say this, but this kind of peer review is not the only way of awarding funding, but some sort of merit-based process that takes slightly more risk, longer term grants. These are all coming out of this pool of this kind of progress of science and application meta-science study that you mentioned.

I like the idea of integrating more experimentation, integrating access to facilities, integrating skills and technical aspects at various levels in terms of not just have to have a PhD, but bringing in skilled technicians into these processes. I think that's all really interesting stuff to experiment with. There is an acknowledgement that scientists are burdened by a lot of paperwork, that it's hard to get grants. And when you do, they're only for a couple of years.

There's institutional preferences and incentives that trend towards conservative small board scientific results, fixation on publications as a means to getting tenure. All these things I think are broadly understood. And maybe that's one of the reasons I want to highlight it is that if there are things we don't like about this report even or where it's coming from, no one wants to be on the side of yay more bureaucratic requirements for scientists, particularly scientists themselves. And I think that's important to maybe at least acknowledge.

Zach Pirtle: Yeah, that sounds right to me, and that's a good summary of it. I do find the call to diversify funding mechanisms. We shouldn't be solely focused on grants, we shouldn't be solely focused on contracts, be they from fixed price or cost plus, but they talk in here about advanced market agreements. And so if someone can provide a capability that they can develop it on their own funds, that then the government would agree to purchase it in advance and that through Operation Warp Speed was shown to be very effective a few years ago.

The ability to use prizes, to have fast grant proposals that can award funding very quickly, I think all that's quite good. The focus on different institutional models I think is also quite insightful. Institutions Shape the science that you do and shape what outcomes you get from it. And the ability to explore more agencies like ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, for defense or for health, there are various ones of the ARPAs now, but being able to experiment in those ways I think is interesting. Now, all of that comes at a cost if you've got a limited science budget and whether-

Casey Dreier: Or a shrinking science budget.

Zach Pirtle: Yeah, and trying to assess what are the best ways to actually use our general amounts of money and funding. But again, I'm focusing on this as a matter of policy. We're trying to think here about from an analytical lens, trying to rise up of the politics about what the right thing to be done are. And I do think the conversation and this better way of thinking about mechanisms to actually do some of the internal machinery of science policy at the federal agency levels I think is interesting.

Casey Dreier: We'll be right back with the rest of our space policy edition of Planetary Radio after this short break.

Kirby Runyon:

Hi, I'm Kirby Runyon, Planetary Geologist at the Planetary Science Institute and Founder of Planetary Experience Consulting. Think of your favorite photograph from the Moon or Mars. Have you ever wanted to read the stories recorded in those rocks? You can learn how.

This October, I'm co-leading a three-day expedition to some of New Mexico's finest planetary geology analog sites. And I'd love for you to join me. From October 15th through 19th, we'll explore tube-fed lava flows at Carrizozo. Soak in the volcanic desolation of Kilbourne Hole Volcanic Crater and stand at sunset over the sublime White Sand National Park.

These are some of the same landscapes where Apollo and Artemis astronauts have trained. We'll also visit Spaceport America, the New Mexico Museum of Space History, and the Las Cruces Challenger Learning Center. Space is limited to just 20 people. And for every person who registers, the Planetary Society will receive a donation. Head to planetary.org/travel to learn more and save your spot. I hope to see you there.

Casey Dreier: Let's turn to critiques of this and dive into this context, Jack, that I know you know very well. We all know even listeners to the show know quite well. But let me start with this with a quote from a commentary piece in Science, the magazine, the journal, writing about this by Derek Lowe. And I'll quote selectively here.

It says, "The Trump administration hates academic science funding full stop. They hate where the money goes and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all of that money for themselves to hand it out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and steer yet more money and more power back into their hands." That's it. That's the story.

They're not naturally putting in those words, but instead talking about gold standard science. This is all BS. And I'm sanitizing a bit there and it's important to realize that. So that's his response and it goes on to this report. Jack, is that a reasonable response for a scientist to have right now?

Jack Kiraly: I think after the damage done over the past 18, 19 months, I think it was a very natural reaction to see something that proclaims to compare itself to Vannevar Bush's, the original science mythos, to have a pretty serious knee-jerk response. It's totally natural. There's plenty of people and a lot of reporting when this first came out from even some of the most closely watched news articles and blogs where instantly whatever the White House put out is terrible and wrong and anti-science.

And I think there's nuance that is missed, but it is also a situation in which the administration in particular Director Vought from the Office of Management Budget who has made no qualms about discussing his disdain for institutions of higher learning and the sort of academic elite that he proclaims to be rallying against. If this was a memo that came out before the president's budget request last year, I think that would've been an unreasonable response.

That would've been certainly one that is knee-jerk entirely. But after the year and a half that the US science community has had 4,000 people from NASA no longer work at the agency, I think the number is 15,000 or 20,000 PhDs have left the federal government. Some recent reporting from Association of American Universities shows that enrollment in graduate programs is down for the first time in a long time in the United States.

And just anecdotally, people I know are leaving for institutions overseas because there's been this cultural shift, political cultural shift in the support for science that it has become highly partisan and highly polarized. And so to have that response I think is completely rational given the year and a half, almost two years since the FY26 budget came out.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, I mean you're seeing this in the context of National Science Foundation. The number of new grant awards are down by half this year. NIH, National Institutes of Health have serious decline in grants as well. NASA is down by 20%. They're proposing cutting these scientific institutions literally in half, if not by more. Thousands of scientists has left you said. And then of course the Office of Management and Budget put out this broad proposal to fundamentally shift and change control over grants that fund the actual science and explicitly add, this is what was strange to me.

The OMB is out there proposing rules that explicitly add regulatory burdens, add paperwork, add bureaucracy clearly intentionally or seemingly intentionally as a means to make it just harder to do these scientific. They're adding levels of reporting. They're adding onerous requirements in terms of spending money. If you want to publish a paper, go to a conference. Even you have to ask for permission to spend the money you're already awarded now.

And of course that adds requirements at the program officer level within these agencies themselves. And I'd say politically, even beyond targeting specific NSF grants, obviously there's the whole equity and DEIA aspect of this that's specifically targeting grants for that. It's not a source where a scientific community is going to be kind of just excited to see this new policy and say, great, let's welcome this new mythos. They see, I think correctly, an attack on the institution as they have grown into it or professionalized into it as it has been basically in this country for a long time. And that's what is such a strange.

I'm trying to understand, and if either of you have thoughts on why do you think this report is saying this then? If that has been the outcome or what we've actually seen in terms of practice, why are they coming in and saying science remains essential? We need to invest in things like the NSF postdoctoral grants that are portable five-year grants, very popular, that were cut by a third last year in 2025. It makes no sense to me.

Zach Pirtle: I think that OSTP and the Office of Management and Budget, they represent different sides of the House in terms of any executive branch administration. OMB sets the budget and works on that. And then OSTP often will help set the policy goals and directions that then get flowed down to agencies and what they work on.

I think there are parts, especially at NASA still today, where being able to excel in scientific excellence. The administrator Jared Isaacman's been very vocal about his excitement for several NASA missions that help enable American leadership on scientific endeavors and scientific excellence. The proposed budget reductions to science, those can be challenging to a scientific community. It's often difficult. There could be limited in competing funds.

There's a lot of political views there that it's very difficult to have a ... Especially if you know people who've been impacted, it can be difficult to react towards that in an objective way, but I do think budgets are often where there can be a really tough pinch point that gets emotional and personal and livelihoods are disrupted, but there's not infinite money. And so that sometimes these budget conversations really matter.

I think that because OSTP is really, it's this different side of the house that reflects this vision, and it has the ability to suggest changes more to the practice of how science is done. I think aspirationally, and again, viewing this from a policy lens and trying to steer clear of the politics, I think the ability for OSTP to be signaling that this indeed is a presidential priority to have this scientific excellence and to enable it and to further enhance it through some of these different funding mechanisms, institutional approaches, and just a different broader mythos for how science works, I think is interesting.

And I do think that even if, by the way, if one is being optimistic and the role of groups like the Planetary Society and others and the ability to advocate to protect things that people find to be important in the budget, maybe we might end up in a situation a couple of years from now where budgets continue to go up or the Congress finds some way to save some of these science programs.

If such a scenario occurs, it still matters to influence what happens in a policy document like this because regardless of whatever happens on the budget, there will be people inside the federal government who are helping to set policy, who are working on these grants, who are working to figure out what are the lower level details of how we should build a moon base or for the National Institutes of Health to work on different types of disease.

And there's lots of decisions that will be made by engineering and science staff on how they implement a policy like the Science and New Golden Age Report that will matter. And so this stuff, trying to, if there's a way to ensure that you're still having a thoughtful science policy and to move towards that and to steer that science policy dialogue towards better ends, and even while there's all this chaos about the politics of the budget process, that's why there could be good things coming out of that.

Casey Dreier: Jack, how do you see this from a White House perspective? How do you square this circle?

Jack Kiraly: Well, I think Zach paints a very clear picture. These are two very different sides of the White House. And I think timing matters, the context matters, this document alone, although there's, and certainly we can, I think there's a lot of good in the document. There is some bad in the document, but the whole thing is then tainted by this exterior context and history.

And again, if this was something that came out in July of last year or in March of last year, not so you can rush the compilation of a document as comprehensive as this, because I do feel, and this is maybe a conversation we've been having time and time again in recent months, is as much as we've circled the wagons and said it's time to defend science, there has been this understanding that, "Okay, maybe the way that we do science, the delays in getting funding out the door, the institutional biases, the structural problems, there have been problems."

But at the same time, it's like this proposal has to exist within this context where you have an OMB, a very strong OMB, that doesn't just look at the budgeting process, but with the uniform guidance proposal is attempting to rewrite grant-making rules. And agencies are already implementing some of these rules to varying degrees. I know folks who have won contracts and grants from NASA to do work this year still haven't gotten the first check even after meeting the initial milestones because there's these now new levels of political review.

Each agency is being empowered to take more ownership over the activities that they fund. And so there's not this inter-agency relationship that has existed in the past that OSTP is largely led in previous administrations, including the previous Trump administration where you had inter-agency working groups and efforts. Everything is kind of these fiefdoms of activity, and they're all being driven by documents like this and the budget request and the uniform guidance. All the good that this document puts out kind of gets undercut by the fact that it does exist in a pretty bad context that's created by other members of the administration.

And we see this with NASA too, where Administrator Isaacman, with the ignition plans, puts forward this really ambitious vision, the acceleration of the Artemis program, the Moon Base that could have science integrated into every element of it. Implementation has not 100% been there, but we're still very early in the implementation phase of a lot of these programs. Be completely undercut the next week when the FY27 budget request came out.

And so you're kind of having to keep these multiple realities in mind in working in the policy process as it relates to science in 2026, looking forward to 2027 and 2028 fiscal years and talking a little bit more about the hearing. Director Kratsios had a very, I think, positive forward-looking presentation. He clearly knows his stuff, but it was notable that not everyone on the panel, and certainly not even just Democrats who are of course in the opposition party right now, but Republicans too seem to have some questions about the sort of unfunded mandates that creating an environment like this does.

How can you say that you want to get more money in the hands of scientists, but then add all these bureaucratic challenges for scientists? And so there's some inconsistencies across the broad swath of federal policy coming out of the White House when it relates to science.

Casey Dreier: I've described this as seeing an argument spill out into the open in the sense that you have these parallel, and this part of, I think, the president's coalition is pretty fractious really when you step back and you see the different types and different roles that are kind of given quite a bit of independence to move forward as they see fit, then presenting this inconsistent front in terms of what is the priority.

I think at the end of the day, my whole career has been built on, it's the dollars that matter ultimately and not the words because the dollars you can only spend once and words are free and you can say all the nice things you want, but if you cut the budgets in half or by two-thirds, you're not doing much. No matter how good your AI is, you're not going to figure out what the surface of Pluto looks like with an AI.

You have to go there and do something. You see almost a sanitized, somewhat sanitized version of a lot of the other administration's positions incorporated here. And a lot of the stuff, I believe the critiques, some of them are valid in terms of science. Some of them I think are quite overstated. And then others I think are just plain wrong in a sense of the, to me, xenophobic perspective of you have international students coming to learn in the US and then taking all of our ideas and leaving, which is just plain wrong.

And I know personally so many people who come and stay, and I think it's great that our ideas come and spread throughout the world, but that's presented as a problem as if we need to onshore intellect in addition to other types of industrial policy. And that's actually, Zach, I wanted to throw it to you. I know we have to go soon. I almost read this as treating science itself as an industrial.

And this is not just my idea, other people have said this, science as industrial policy, that this is seeing this as it's now an industry and that it has to be applied and serve these purposes, often nationalistic in this framing, but it's to be molded and melded and formed as they see fit rather than kind of running in this, not laissez-faire, but just general somewhat hands-off structure that Vannevar Bush had originally proposed, that the scientists essentially set their own priorities with funding set and approved by Congress.

Zach Pirtle: I think the question of industrial policy and thinking about the full way in which the US federal government can shape and push for success in science and engineering missions is important. I think that's part of the reason why getting away from that linear model of innovation matters. So as you've noted, Vannevar Bush talks about basic science being the linchpin and that scientists would be able in his model, which was not fully accepted, that scientists would be in charge of deciding where that funding would be allocated.

It ended up being a more politically accountable approach with the president appointing the director of the National Science Foundation. But the onus, the sort of impetus of where change would come from would be from this basic science perspective. And so for some people who really take this science analyst frontier narrative to heart, if you have the right pipeline of basic science that's feeding into things, all the other stuff should be easy.

And I'm putting words in their mouth here of science analyst frontier, but this is I think sometimes the received view that some people take away that oftentimes the engineering, as long as you've got the basic science, the engineering stuff will all just be flushed out and expanded and explored. And I think this actually makes the challenging work that NASA and other organizations do in engineering seem a lot more trivial than it is.

I think this assumption that as long as you've got the right science, that the engineering should work its way out. It ignores the fact that in any really complex system, you're going to have emergent things that pop up. You're going to have problems in testing and evaluation that make it really hard. And there's often a lot, there's a big history. Engineering can drive and identify advances that basic science needs to go and answer.

And I think the approach towards industrial policy sort of emerges. Science: A New Golden Age talks about the need for diversifying funding mechanisms, thinking carefully about how program managers, individually, staff members can be empowered to make changes. It talks about the need for thinking about institutions. Those are all things that if you go under this much more simplistic linear model of innovation, you might not be focusing on. And so that's linear model of innovation, that's the old mythos.

It's a relatively easy thing to explain. It's sort of simple. The new mythology is kind of complex. There's a lot to unpack. There's a lot of policy recommendations in there that's hard to make it clear. This idea of this all of government approach towards shaping and steering where science goes, it's hard to give that a sort of punchline summary. I do think the report is interesting because it has a lot of this effectively philosophy and thinking about some of these first principles for how to steer science and engineering.

But the actual work and how do you implement that's going to depend upon a lot, thousands of people across federal agencies that shape the practice of how science and engineering funding and activities and programs get implemented. And you need a lot of those people to become more thoughtful in order to actually get some of these outcomes here. And there's potential there for some of these ideas to be helpful, but it's also pretty hard to embrace a new mythology when it's hard to summarize succinctly.

Casey Dreier: Something else I'm curious about in terms of what it does recommend, I would almost characterize it as a romantic throwback to this idea of a gentleman scientist who sits and tinkers and discovers helium on their own. There's this model of the individual basically and diminishing and breaking people out of the institution. Part of that just does not seem credible.

Parts of it seems fanciful. It can be great for maybe individuals who can do it. I mean, you see the strong Silicon Valley kind of Peter Thiel influence, which is where Kratsios is coming from in this, that the individual agency is the most important thing to invest in. But at the end of the day, there are just some science that just takes a lot of people and a lot of work. Again, like building a spacecraft. I kept reading this and seeing NASA science as almost the antithesis of this concept.

How much has this been thought through? There's initial work on some of these proposed solutions, fast grants or new funding models and so forth, but do we know that they'll work or will they just introduce a host of other problems that just replaces the ones that they identify in this report?

Zach Pirtle: Yeah, we'll have to see how this works in the NASA context. The report does have an implementation direction asking agencies to report back in 90 days from the reports release on how they're going to approach implementing it. I do think that especially for space science where you heavily rely on a lot of principal investigator proposed and merit selected science investigations that are led out of really amazing academic universities in the US, there's a lot there about the role of the university that matters for space science.

And there's been some commentary saying that this report is going to lead to less of a focus on universities and more of a focus on trying to get money to individual scientists. I think the question on how that will work writ large for all of science I think is going to be interesting. As a science policy scholar, I do think that experimentation is good.

Let's fund different types of approaches and see what works and maybe we can make things better. But you also need to make sure that the stuff that works well is still given a chance to succeed. The report does have some kind words in there about universities. So page five talks about universities remain essential for training scientists. And the next page says, "This is not a sign that the academy has become less important, but rather that the scientific world has expanded." So I think the stakes matter a lot there.

One thing that was a bit of concern for me, and so I've articulated that I think it's really insightful that the report seems to move away from this linear model of innovation, but there's some language in the report that actually just reifies that model that sort of just repeats it back. So for example, in the budget memo that's included in the appendix that's co-authored between OSTP and OMB, they call for agencies to prioritize what it calls foundational research.

And that is almost like using the same words as prioritizing basic science that Vannevar Bush used. And sometimes if you prioritize and the SeedCore needs to be focused on the basic or the early stage research, it might, if you take that language literally auger that you need to move away from funding missions and engineering developments that would be doing more exploratory mission activities.

The report also has a sentence at the end on page 71 where it says that science is the pool of knowledge that underlies our technological pursuit, which you could almost find an exact comparable quote back in Vannevar Bush. I don't fault the report too much for having some of this linear model aspects into it. When you're trying to replace a mythology that's as deep as the linear model of innovation, it can be very difficult to not have it still slip the tongue, to have it come into your way of speaking and your parlance.

And this vision of what I think is the alternative of the linear model of innovation, of thinking deeply about institutions, about acquisition and selection mechanisms and thinking about the workforce holistically and trying to train them and to think about the deep interconnections between science and engineering, those are all potentially the makings of a good mythology, but the budget guidance in the back of the document almost seems to revert back to linear model of innovation. So I hope that there's some careful attention there to make sure that they stick with the new mythos.

Casey Dreier: Jack, what's your take so far on how this is being. You talked about a little bit with the hearing, but you're actually calling to us right now from a gathering of scientists. You're in touch quite a bit with obviously a number of our contacts on the Hill and all the professional societies. Can you sum up, is there a general response to what you're seeing? Is it kind of similar to what we're talking about today or is it more negative or more positive?

Jack Kiraly: I think confusion is the one-word description because although-

Casey Dreier: Maybe going to Zach's entire point, right?

Jack Kiraly: Well, when you've been in a survival mindset and scientists are directly affected by the budget cuts and the new bureaucratic procedures. Again, was talking to some folks who had gotten the letter saying that they were going to be funded through one of the science agencies and it's been months and they still haven't seen a dime. And these aren't people that can personally fund their expeditions and investigations.

These are people that their professional gig is to do science and built their entire careers around this. And so as much as we can put out, it could be the best mythos. This document could have no errors, no inconsistencies or inaccuracies. You're still then replacing a system that's been in place and been relied upon by tens of thousands of working professionals, and that can't just change overnight. And so I think there's just a lot of confusion as to what this actually means.

And it's like, okay, some of the words on the page are good, but if we don't see policy change, if we don't see an increase in the speed at which grants are selective, if we don't see an increase in the amount of money that's being allocated for these grants, there's all these indicators that scientists are looking for, that us in the policy world are looking for, to see if the words on the page are true and that the administration is actually working towards certain policy objectives.

And I think there's the long view that we're talking about, about changing how we perceive and how we comprehend science, but then there's the immediate concerns of these things. And I think across the board, folks that I've talked to, there's a lot of wait and see. And so although there's been some initial from some of the news agencies and blog posts and statements that folks have put out, there's these initial reactions.

But I think that the vast majority of people are holding their breath a little bit to see, well, how is this going to. I mean, this is coming off the tails of the uniform guidance where tens of thousands of people, namely scientists, responded en masse in opposition to the uniform guidance proposed changes. We're seeing implementation to acquisition regulation at all of the agencies.

It's just across the board, I think there is just a lot of confusion as to why this is coming out now and how it pairs with everything else that's happening. And so I think maybe the thing to keep in mind, what I've talked to a few folks on the Hill and in the policy world about is we want to see a result now, we're not going to see a result now. What does the FY28 budget request look like? Does it align? Maybe we should do a check. We should plan our check-in March or April of next year when the PBR comes out.

Casey Dreier: If they just recycle these cuts again.

Jack Kiraly: Right. Which would then show a level of the infighting that happens with every White House, but in particular this one. We would show that the infighting that's bubbled up into the surfaces has not been resolved and that OMB is on a completely different plane of existence than where OSTP is, where Director Kratsios is taking this big picture, top level view, long view of what science in the United States looks like.

Meanwhile, you have the OMB taking a scalpel to programs and a sledgehammer to budgets, and that's not a good pairing. These are elements of one White House that should be. There's always going to be this. I'm sure you can talk to any veteran of any administration. There is always going to be daylight between where the principals within the organization live politically and policy-wise. But this is a pretty big gulf between where the budgets go or what the budget proposal is and what these policy suggestions are. And so confusion. And so if you're listening to this and you're also confused about what-

Casey Dreier: Welcome to the club.

Jack Kiraly: ... what this is, it's like we all are because this does exist in this kind of separate lane. And also too, with the 90 days, I guess then October, mid-October, we'll be seeing maybe something out of the agencies as to what implementation of this looks like. Maybe that'll come in the form of new regulatory documents or new acquisition reforms.

But there's a lot of wait and see on this. And so as good as the content of this is on certain elements and the challenges it's trying to solve as it relates to funding and speeding up innovation and science, scientific discovery, there's a lot more that still needs to happen between saying it and it actually getting done.

Casey Dreier: Right. I keep going back to this kind of core idea, which is they identify known problems of the existing system, but then put forward that solution of, "Well, we need to fundamentally change and create a new system." It's almost like a radical document in that sense that we must build a new world with all these new ways of doing things, but we don't know how those will work. By definition, they're new.

So it's a somewhat radical proposal in that sense, particularly given the context of we're slashing budgets in half, so there's no way that this is not additive, this is a replacement. And that seems to be done without a lot of studies or backing to the solutions that are put forward, which are relatively hand wavy in this. And then I think that the fundamental tension though is that there's an effort to both depoliticize and overtly politicize scientific work.

And I don't think you can really have world leading science if you have a sort of Damocles hanging over your head, if you post the wrong thing to Instagram, your funding gets pulled the next day because you're out of step with quote unquote "administration priorities" or whatever they think you said or did. So they're creating this, to put this back in linear models, Zach, it's almost like they're creating a foundational or a pool of uncertainty and fear and then saying, but we'll have endless, innovative and we'll free up the individual scientists.

But there's been this overt effort to centralize control and implement a overtly partisan system, which does not go away if you have a democratic administration, that then you could have by the same fiat, by these standards being set, super DEI or whatever, the opposite of what they want. They've given the tools to kind of have less consistency between administrations by centralizing this from above.

And then this is where I kind of come back to that original question. Can you impose a new mythos on a community that is coming to it with this much hesitation and distrust? And that doesn't seem to be, to me, a successful path. So maybe to wrap up my final thought, and Zach, I'll toss this to you. I opened this discussion intentionally with the things that I think are valuable and important to discuss in terms of the flaws of science.

And I worry that because of all these other things that we finished with, if this gets rejected or if a new administration comes in or a new Congress comes in, that the good stuff kind of gets lumped in with the highly partisan stuff. And I don't want to be on the side of institutional ossification of universities just because I don't want this to be a kind of binary choice.

I want to be able to pull out. Some of these are really important. I do think it's really important to encourage novel use of AI and find other new interesting experimentations to do. So how can we pull out the good stuff and try to dissociate that from the partisan element that's going to make this harder to endure in a long-term application or process to keep science very dynamic and competitive? Simple answer, simple question. I'm sure there's a simple answer for this.

Zach Pirtle: Oh, very simple. Thanks, Casey. There's a lot there. I think culture change and embracing a new mythos is always hard, and it's even harder to change culture when there's a lot of chaos. I think you're very right about that. I do think that regardless of what happens here, there will be some money going out the door. There will be a lot of very passionate scientists, engineers and policy staff across NASA and the space industry that are going to be working tirelessly to get a lot more work done.

I think the invocation that I personally appeal to and why I care about working at the Science Policy Research Center is that being more thoughtful about the nature of how engineering and innovation and science really work together can help us get to better outcomes for society. I think that trying to get people to be more conscious about just how does innovation actually work?

And to break down and move away from this linear model for science, I think is all for the good. I think if you can help scientists and engineers who are in the trenches every day be more thoughtful about staring their work is important. But it's hard to take the time out to be able to reflect, to be able to think more deeply. I think so often people are just pressure, pressure, pressure to hit the schedule, keep moving towards the next milestone.

I would hope that in an ideal world that there continues to be thoughtful science policy discussions that try to help a lot of the science policy and science and engineering leadership that are actually implementing and are pushing and leading these missions across the board right a lot of the time to be more thoughtful. I think the invocation that I make at the end of the article is that this question that I raise about whether Science: A New Golden Age, it's a question mark.

Could it become a better mythology? And I do think that there needs to be a real push to ensure that practitioners who are pushing and implementing and helping to lead all these science and engineering missions, that they actually have that time to think and to really embrace that philosophy. They have to practice what they preach, so to say.

And I think if you could look at a lot of the things that are said in the Science and New Golden Age report, and you could actually hold that as a high standard for how future policy and management of science and engineering across the government should be done there. It does lay a lot of ambitious vision that needs to be met up with reality and it needs to be met up with that. There needs to be time and research on how to think and do these things better.

Casey Dreier: I would recommend engagement with the scientific community too at some point. It seems like a useful thing. Jack, do you want to have the final thought?

Jack Kiraly: We lose a lot when things get ossified, where you have one side versus the other, you have your party line, and you're not able to have those substantive policy discussions. And that's, I think, where process fits into this. And so I do want to note this report and the hearing commentary and recent remarks from the president and other folks in the administration taking aim at institutions like the National Academy of Sciences is also a really dangerous path to go down because these are institutes, in particular the National Academy, established under President Lincoln in the 1860s.

These are institutions that have developed processes and have a lot of tacit knowledge to bring in an earlier term about the way that you come to these decisions. And it is a messy process and it is a long process, but we lose more time with decrees from on high that then change over with the next administration or the next Congress. And so I think as difficult as it can be to accept that process is an important part of the dialogue, I think that that is the piece of the boring, dry conferences and things around a meeting table, the days long PowerPoint presentations.

There's a lot of value in going through that exercise to build the consensus for creating a new method. So again, going back to your point, Casey, that you can't just say, "And we now believe in X." It's like, "Well, you need to socialize it a little bit more. There needs to be a longer conversation." I think that's something across the board that we lose with, I think in particular, the folks that are coming at this from that kind of Silicon Valley model, the Peter Thiels and Michael Kratsios's of the world who've come at this with a like, "Well, why can't we just decide we're doing X now?" Well, you got to get people bought in.

This is a big country. These are big institutions, and it's a lot of money. The amount of money that goes into science across industry and federal government and other institutions, these are big conversations and we should give them the weight that they deserve. And so I think skipping over the process piece, I think as good as the idea can be, if we don't follow that process, if we don't even at least establish a process for building that consensus, it doesn't have to be the national academies.

It doesn't have to be through the old way of doing things, but just coming in and saying the day before you're hearing, "Hey, here's the new vision for science. Give me the thumbs up and we're good to go." It's like that's not how this works, not in the long term. Not to align it with national interests, not to align it with policy priorities or budgets. These are things that do take years. And I know there's an impatience sometimes with discovery. You want it today. We all want it today, but that's what makes the process so important.

Casey Dreier: Good last words, Jack. Very good. We will follow this. I'm sure we'll be talking lots more about this. Until then, gentlemen, Zach Pirtle, Jack Kiraly, thanks for joining me in this special episode of the Space Policy Edition.

Zach Pirtle: Thank you, Casey.

Jack Kiraly: Thanks, Casey.

Casey Dreier: We've reached the end of this month's episode of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio, but we will be back next month with more discussions on the politics and philosophies and ideas that power space science and exploration. Help others in the meantime learn more about space policy and the Planetary Society by leaving a review and rating this show on platforms like Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to this show.

Your input and interactions really help us be discovered by other curious minds and that will help them find their place in space through Planetary Radio. You can also send us, including me, your thoughts and questions at [email protected], or if you're a Planetary Society member, and I hope you are, leave me a comment in the Planetary Radio Space in our online member community. Mark Hilverda and Rae Paoletta are our Associate Producers of the show.

Andrew Lucas is our Audio Editor. Me, Casey Dreier, and Merc Boyan, my colleague, composed and performed our Space Policy Edition theme. The Space Policy Edition is a production of The Planetary Society, an independent nonprofit space outreach organization based in Pasadena, California. We are membership-based and anybody, even you can become a member. They start at just $4 a month, that's nothing these days. Find out more at planetary.org/join. Until next month, ad astra.