White House Seeks to Steer Research Funding Outside Academia

The White House unveiled a new vision for scientific research this week that directs federal agencies to fund more scientific research outside of universities.

The report and accompanying research and development priorities promote the funding of individual researchers doing basic research who choose the institutions where they’ll carry out their work. They also encourage funding bodies to issue multiyear grants, a controversial practice that critics say harms early-career researchers.

“Throughout history, Americans have developed various ways to support scientific progress that depart from the university-based, principal investigator–driven grant,” wrote Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, in the report “Science: A New Golden Age.” In the report, Kratsios—a former Pentagon official, managing director of Scale AI and chief of staff for conservative billionaire Peter Thiel—stresses the increasing complexity of scientific problems and the need for large teams involving multiple disciplines and sectors to solve them.

Previous news coverage reported that the White House intends to redirect billions in funding away from colleges, but the report and budget guidance don’t direct agencies to move specific amounts of money anywhere. It also doesn’t call for a wholesale abandonment of federal funding for universities. Instead, the report praises institutions as part of the federal government’s approach to promoting scientific advancement while also pointing out where they, the private sector and the government allegedly fall short.

“The university laboratory, centered on the principal investigator and a rotating cast of graduate students, excels at curiosity-driven research and at training the next generation within established disciplines,” Kratsios writes.

He calls the R01, the National Institutes of Health’s long-standing major grant to university researchers, “the workhorse of American biomedical research,” but says it doesn’t support all scientific needs.

“It excels at supporting hypothesis-driven science by small teams on tractable questions,” he wrote of the grant. “But over-reliance on this structure creates systematic blind spots. Projects requiring tens of millions of dollars and a team of dozens fall outside the container of what any single investigator can assemble.”

To what extent federal agencies will implement the vision, and how it will further upend the federal government’s long-standing funding partnership with higher ed institutions, remains to be seen.

“It’s a rhetorical device,” Holden Thorp, editor in chief of Science, said of the report. “Whether it has any actual administrative power or not, I think, is debatable.”

“This could end up being yet another D.C. report that just sits on the shelf,” Thorp said. Still, he called it “an excellent window into how the administration is thinking right now.” It’s trying to turn “readers against the universities,” he said, while pushing to revive private speculative research labs, which have declined.

“When I was a graduate student, the best places to do research in the world weren’t universities, they were DuPont CR&D and Bell Labs,” Thorp said. “And those places didn’t make it because investing in basic research if you’re a corporation turned out to be a loser.”

“Really speculative research [projects] that may lead to important advances 20 years from now are not useful expenditures for for-profit corporations,” he added.

In her take on the report, Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for government relations at the American Council on Education, said, “None of this is really new.”

“The ideas being offered in this report aren’t necessarily bad ideas,” she said. “I think the concern is that they’re going to come at the expense of the current processes and that they’re being proposed at a time when we have a lot of chaos happening at the science agencies.”

“Many of these ideas could be tested in, say, a pilot program, or perhaps could be deployed for very specific issues,” she said. “But to try to change our entire scientific enterprise, I think is really going to kind of kill the golden goose. It’s like an answer in search of a problem.”

She said this release, coming after the White House Office of Management and Budget proposed controversial changes to regulations surrounding federal grants—changes that would elevate political appointees’ judgment above peer review—“is very telling that this is an administration that really wants to shake up the scientific enterprise. But I think we’re going to have to wait to see how it will be implemented.”

The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.

The White House’s Research Priorities

A memo from Kratsios and Russell Vought, the powerful director of the OMB, accompanies the report. It identifies the research and development priorities federal agencies must account for, “as appropriate,” in writing their budget submissions. The memo says the government should incentivize new institutional models that “complement” existing academic and industry labs, as well as federal research facilities.

Echoing the OMB’s proposals to shake up peer review, the memo also says the government should “supplement conventional, consensus-driven peer review, which excels at advancing established lines of inquiry, with new review mechanisms that are better suited to recognizing high-risk, high-reward research, early-career talent, or ideas that fall outside established disciplinary boundaries.”

Several of the directives encourage agencies to adopt practices that give individual researchers more autonomy to do basic research. For example, the priorities endorse funding multiple years of a grant up front, which—if funding stays level—means fewer new projects are funded but more money is freed up in out years.

Long-duration grants should last five years or more, the report says, giving researchers time to pursue “bold, ambitious projects.” Up-front funding of these grants will “minimize administrative burdens and reduce pressure for researchers to generate intermediate results to secure continued funding,” the priorities say.

And the priorities say agencies should increase the share of foundational research—research that is more curiosity-driven and often less commercially successful—over later-stage development, whether that research is at universities or outside them.

While the report and priorities stress supporting individual researchers, they don’t include much specific direction on how federal agencies should do this independent of continuing to fund the institutions that employ them, such as universities. The priorities say, “Programs should provide individuals flexibility to choose their research institutions, supervisors, and topics” and “prioritize programs that distribute funding directly to students and researchers, similar to NSF’s [National Science Foundation] Graduate Research Fellowship Program.”

The memo identifies which disciplines agencies should prioritize in their funding of foundational research, including physical sciences, computer science and “engineering and mathematical disciplines, especially within national security–relevant research portfolios.” They should also favor “biological sciences over the life sciences, a broader category not focused on foundational research.”

Though the guidance directs agencies to align their investments “with the Administration’s national missions,” including AI, semiconductors and more, it warns them against using AI arbitrarily. And given the private sector’s investment in AI development, the White House advises researchers to pursue projects that industry is unlikely to focus on.

In a nod to indirect rate costs, the priorities say, “Agencies should assess scientific infrastructure needs deliberately rather than treating them as a residual claim on research grants.”

Kratsios’s report also calls to “rein in indirect cost recovery that supports administrative bloat,” but doesn’t suggest how to do this. Courts rejected the administration’s previous efforts to set a 15 percent cap on reimbursement of indirect costs in universities’ federal grants, such as physical lab materials and support staff salaries.

The report should be read in the wider context of the administration’s cuts to federal research funding and policy changes, said Matt Owens, president of COGR, an organization that advocates for researchers and universities on the federal level and goes only by its acronym.

“If enacted, the report—together with the accompanying FY28 priorities for federal science investments, the recent OMB proposal on the Uniform Guidance, and actions over the past 18 months by the administration to reduce federal research investments and terminate research projects—would effectively raze the incredibly successful 80-year partnership between the federal government and academic research institutions,” he said.