Jonathan Wosen , 2025-05-19 17:37:00
President Trump’s science adviser, Michael Kratsios, called for a return to reproducible and transparent research to kickstart what he characterized as years of stalled scientific progress, in his first detailed public remarks on science policy since taking office in March.
Kratsios, who heads the Office of Science and Technology Policy, said on Monday that biomedical research budgets have risen sharply since the 1990s and contributed to breakthroughs such as CRISPR, a gene-editing technology that’s now the basis for a sickle cell therapy. But he also said that this increase in federal dollars hasn’t led to an overall rise in new drug approvals, adding that studies have found that scientific advancements have become increasingly incremental.
“This evidence of a scientific slowdown should spur us to experiment with new systems, new models, new ways of funding, conducting, and using science,” Kratsios said during a speech at the National Academy of Sciences. “Spending more money on the wrong things is far worse than spending less money on the right things.”
He attributed the problem to researchers deviating from what he called gold-standard science. Such work, Kratsios said, “is structured for falsifiability, subject to unbiased peer review, accepting of negative results as positive outcomes, and closed to conflicts of interest.”
He added that promoting such research will be a point of emphasis for OSTP during his tenure, though he did not describe specific steps the office will take. Kratsios did say that OSTP will work to reduce the administrative burdens federally funded researchers deal with to free them up to focus on science rather than “bureaucratic box checking.”
Kratsios’ remarks come during a time of unprecedented disruption for the scientific community, with the federal government freezing funding to some universities, terminating grants that it deems in conflict with its political agenda, and laying off thousands of employees across scientific agencies such as the National Institutes of Health.
As OSTP director, Kratsios’ tasks include offering input on the federal research budget and coordinating the scientific activities of various government agencies. The Trump administration recently requested a 26% cut to the Department of Health and Human Services’ discretionary budget, including an $18 billion cut to NIH. When asked about the proposed reductions by National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt after his remarks, Kratsios stressed the importance of spending federal dollars wisely.
“I think we’re at a very important moment in time where we need to be sort of resetting the way that we think about spending in a lot of these science agencies. And what [the U.S. DOGE Service] has been able to show and reveal is that there have been large amounts of money that has been spent on things which are clearly not in the national interests,” he said.
Kratsios pointed to research related to diversity, equity, and inclusion as an example, arguing that such work “represents an existential threat to the real diversity of thought that forms the foundation of the scientific community.”
He also suggested that private funders of science could play a larger role in supporting basic research as the federal government looks to tighten its belt. For instance, he said, industry could help fund the construction of research facilities at universities. That’s a sharp contrast from the arguments of many academic institutions, which have stressed that the federal government’s role in covering facilities and administrative costs is irreplaceable, and that the administration’s plan to cap such payments at 15% would grind scientific progress to a halt.
While Kratsios did not point to specific examples of what gold-standard science is, he highlighted examples of what it isn’t. One was a 2009 Nature study co-authored by Marc Tessier-Lavigne, at the time a top researcher at Genentech, which described an interaction between two proteins that causes neurons to die or lose their connections with one another.
The widely cited finding fueled hopes for new ways to treat Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases, but in the ensuing years, other researchers were unable to replicate key experiments and scientific sleuths found that the study contained manipulated images. The study was retracted in 2023 after a Stanford investigation found that Tessier-Lavigne, the university’s then-president, had not engaged in research misconduct but failed to “decisively and forthrightly” correct this study and others.
Kratsios did not name Tessier-Lavigne, but the reference was unmistakable. The OSTP director noted that the 2009 paper “racked up over 800 citations, misdirected huge quantities of money, and helped the researcher become the president of a premier university.” He added that this “painful episode” underscored the importance of ensuring that published science is reproducible, and he implied that this would be a funding priority going forward.
“If the government funds more reproducibility research, there will be more reproducibility research,” said Kratsios, who also called for a broader change in the culture of science away from solely rewarding researchers for publishing splashy findings in top-tier journals.
Since Franklin D. Roosevelt, nearly every president has had a science adviser with a research background. Kratsios is an exception. Before joining the administration, the 38-year-old technologist was the managing director of Scale AI, a Bay Area company that creates data for training large language models. In the lead-up to Trump’s inauguration, science policy experts had a concern: Whether Kratsios could be an effective and strong advocate for the needs of the biomedical research community.
But Kratsios, who was confirmed by the Senate in March by a 74-25 vote, has drawn bipartisan support and is seen as relatively uncontroversial among Trump’s appointees. During the president’s first term, he served as the administration’s chief technology officer and was mainly focused on artificial intelligence and quantum computing policy. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, he spearheaded the White House’s formation of a network of federal agencies and academic institutions to make supercomputers available to researchers looking to develop treatments and vaccines.
There are growing signs that amid the disruption to research in recent months, some scientists are seriously considering leaving the U.S., including an analysis of jobs-board data by Nature. When asked about whether Trump policies could spark a scientific brain drain, Kratsios was unequivocally optimistic.
“There’s not much I can do for folks exhibiting irrational behavior. But I do believe that the United States, by far, is the best place to conduct research and to ultimately commercialize that research,” he said. “And there is no study in the world that I find is remotely credible that will ever challenge that today. We know we’re best.”
