In her fourth Expert Voices column for Science, Shobita Parthasarathy, Ford School professor of public policy and director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy (STPP) program, discusses the Trump administration's new science policy strategy, which aims to address declining public trust in science by replacing universities in the federal research and innovation ecosystem with private sector entities. She argues that instead of expanding the responsibilities of the private sector, federal policymakers should explore alternative paths to restore public trust in scientific research, including by limiting private sector monopolies, establishing data and intellectual property protections, and supporting research not already funded by industry.
In case you missed them, her first three columns can be found below:
- "‘Sacrifice subjects' and a proposal for people-first technology regulation"
- "Repairing trust in science requires a more inclusive understanding of innovation"
- "Beware the drive to scale technology"
Escaping a downward spiral for science and public accountability
By Shobita Parthasarathy for Science
In late July, Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), released Science—A Golden Age, setting forth a strategy to revitalize US research and innovation for the 21st century. The report is a response to what it calls "a systematic breakdown in the lines of accountability that align the scientific enterprise with the public interest." The pace of innovation in the United States is too slow, it argues, harming the country's economic growth and competitiveness. In what it characterizes as the artificial intelligence (AI) "race," in particular, the report observes that China is uncomfortably close. It asserts that the federal funding infrastructure is beset with administrative burdens like commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion, which constrain investigators and prioritize the wrong values. Meanwhile, universities, which the report deems "legacy institutions," are too ossified to meet the nation's innovation demands. Rather, they are "entrenched interests" that are no longer sufficiently accountable to the public interest.
The Kratsios report aims to solve these problems by expanding industry's role in the US innovation ecosystem. It envisions a private sector that is not just unfettered by regulation, but also sets government funding priorities and guides research. It aims to replace university responsibilities across domains, establishing industry-led consortia instead of academic collaborations, diverting PhD and postdoctoral training funds toward industry, and allowing the private sector to use government facilities while prohibiting access to university researchers. It expects federal science agencies, from the National Science Foundation to NASA, to respond with plans to implement these priorities within 90 days.
While science and innovation, and the institutions that support them, are certainly experiencing a decline in public trust, this report misunderstands the problem. As a result, the solutions proposed are likely to further damage both accountability and science. Ultimately, the report's proposal to delegate more authority over science and technology to industry will exacerbate distrust while continuing to leave large segments of the American public underserved.
Science—A Golden Age was written in the style of the famous 1945 report Science—The Endless Frontier, written by Vannevar Bush, director of the US Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II. After science had enabled US success in the war, Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Bush how to sustain this record in peacetime "for the improvement of the national health, the creation of new enterprises bringing new jobs, and the betterment of the national standard of living."
The Bush report became the blueprint for federal research funding and innovation policy in the United States after World War II, including the development of the National Science Foundation and expansion of the National Institutes of Health. The US Congress and science agencies also extended Bush's ideas to facilitate the commercialization of federally funded research. In 1980, for example, the US Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed universities and small businesses to own patents on research funded by the government.
Together, these policies led the United States to become the envy of the world in terms of its scientific discoveries, its innovations, and its economic growth. Brilliant people from Europe, India, Latin America, and Africa, among others, sought to study at the country's top universities, which became gateways for them to settle down and contribute to the country for decades to come. Other countries mimicked this approach. Their governments began sponsoring early-stage research, creating analogs to the Bayh-Dole Act, and encouraging the construction of innovation parks near college campuses.
But in recent decades, cracks have appeared in the accountability systems underlying the social contract with science. Starting with opposition to how government-sponsored science fed the Vietnam War, citizens have questioned whether scientific priorities are aligned with their own. In the years since, advocacy groups concerned with a range of issues—from women's health to the environment to HIV/AIDS—have been frustrated by the dearth of research into topics that concern them.
Further, taxpayers have observed that the economic growth and competitiveness stimulated by innovation often do not translate into social benefits. They worry that the increasingly intimate relationships among government, universities, and industry have increased research secrecy and technology costs, and created unethical incentives for researchers to commodify personal data.
Industry incentives push university scientists—even those funded by government—away from studying topics such as rare diseases that affect smaller communities, because they limit markets. Indigenous knowledge becomes patented inventions, with little credit or compensation flowing back to the original innovators. Social and behavioral science research into the impacts of generative AI and social media are simply impossible to pursue because the data are proprietary and may yield inconvenient findings. Instead of funding investigations that could benefit a broad swath of the public—into environmental causation or infrastructure solutions—the government frequently invests in commercializable inventions such as drug discovery. Sadly, many of the resulting technologies are unaffordable or unavailable even though they were funded by the public. Meanwhile, the NIH has even begun to deprioritize studies dedicated to informing policy decisions.
Relying on industry to provide solutions has enhanced public mistrust in scientific institutions, and even in certain types of science itself. Members of the "Make America Healthy Again" movement, and vaccine skeptics in particular, cite commercialized health science as a major justification for rejecting expertise. Many farmers have become disillusioned by the power of Monsanto and other agricultural giants. And there is now enormous skepticism of the big tech companies, which has likely exacerbated the great antipathy toward AI; in the United States and Italy, 50% of the population is "more concerned than excited" about the technology, compared to 45% in Canada and 39% in the UK. These frustrations have only grown as tech company CEOs become increasingly wealthy and powerful, while socioeconomic inequality increases.
Given this context, tying government research more closely to industry and focusing on macroeconomic—at the expense of the social—benefits, as the Kratsios plan aims to do, seems extremely misguided. Although other science agencies, for example in east Asia, have close relationships with industry, these countries enjoy greater social trust, a wide range of government-sponsored health and social services, and a strong regulatory apparatus. The United States has none of these. Further, the plan does not acknowledge any of the concerns I have articulated above. As a result, it is likely to push science and innovation further out of step with the public. Both will become less responsive and useful, which will increase public alienation. Ultimately, US science will lose legitimacy while the public loses potential benefits.
Private-sector translation of government-funded research is necessary to disseminate many important innovations, particularly in engineering and in some parts of medicine. But the best way to improve accountability is to address the challenges posed by this relationship head-on, in at least three ways.
First, the government must take steps to limit private-sector monopolies, especially those based on the results of federally funded research. Today, the private sector, and to a lesser extent, academia, uses both patents and technology platforms to restrict follow-on innovation and increase costs for the public. There are already some tools available to address this problem, including a provision in the Bayh-Dole Act that allows the government to "march-in" and require non-exclusive licenses to a patent if an inventor is not commercializing it in the public interest. This would enable multiple entities to develop an invention, and the resulting competition would lower prices. While this tool has never been used, it could be invigorated with new criteria. The government could also require non-exclusive licensing of patents resulting from federally funded research; some universities already only grant non-exclusive licenses to inventions that will be commercialized in low- and middle-income countries, to lower costs and facilitate access. The government could also require private-sector innovators to make the details of their technologies more widely available, by strengthening rights to repair and requiring data and model transparency for AI. This could foster more innovation, particularly outside of "legacy institutions."
Second, the government needs to establish, and enforce, laws that protect both data privacy and intellectual property. This would include updating research ethics policies to reflect public understandings of, and attachments to, their personal information. But this must be balanced with keeping the public domain open to enable the right kinds of innovation to flourish.
Finally, the government would be wise to focus its financial bets in areas that are not already well-funded by industry. This would include curiosity-driven research that may not produce any marketable technologies but would expand human understanding of the universe. Or, it could fund the growing number of grassroots-driven data collectives developing AI models to address the challenges communities face, while protecting the knowledge and priorities of their populations. And, it might support research that explicitly seeks to enhance the benefits of science and technology for society, rather than simply assuming that innovation always contributes to the public good.
A serious and comprehensive plan to stimulate a golden age of science in the United States would take public mistrust and accountability seriously and foster changes across the government's research and development portfolio accordingly. The provisions I have offered aim to address these challenges, while increasing innovation across a range of organizations. Ultimately, this will enhance democracy, and the place of science and technology within it.
