Remarks by Director Michael Kratsios at the Science: A New Golden Age Summit

Remarks as prepared for delivery

Oct. 8, 2026

Good morning, and thank you all for being here. It has been so encouraging to see “Science: A New Golden Age” receive such a warm reception, and thrilling to see the enthusiasm with which leaders from across government, industry, philanthropy, and the academy are stepping forward to contribute to remaking the American science enterprise for the 21stCentury. 

The American people depend on and deserve a science ecosystem that is bold and ambitious; a science enterprise that seeks to solve grand national challenges; and a science community that is unapologetic in its hope that fundamental discovery will enable new breakthroughs for the improvement of daily life. This summit is an opportunity to share such a vision for the future, and some of the small steps and giant leaps being taken to get there. 

“Science: A New Golden Age” was born of a three-fold tasking from President Trump: to maintain and extend American technological leadership; to ensure all Americans enjoy the benefits of rapidly advancing emerging technologies; and to revitalize America’s research enterprise by empowering America’s scientists to do their best work. 

The world in which science is conducted today has been radically transformed since Vannevar Bush pointed us toward the Endless Frontier in 1945—in large part by his program’s successes. Now more than eight decades on from Bush’s project, the U.S. research ecosystem stands in need of an update, and the Federal Government can help lead the way.

Today, the private sector and philanthropy play a much larger role in American basic science, and technologies have transformed the way research is done. Over the past two decades the share of private funding dedicated to fundamental research has grown by a factor of five. And while Bush’s program assumed an essentially “linear” model of innovation—in which government-supported university research led sequentially to industrial development and commercialization—the reality of today’s innovation cycle is one of iterative, continuous, and recursive discovery. Meanwhile, the rise of super intelligence now presents a new revolution in the conduct of research across every scientific discipline. 

It is out of recognition of a changing landscape and the need to mark new trails that “Science: A New Golden Age” emerged. And since even before its public release in July, my team at the White House has been driving a whole-of-government effort to fulfill the president’s mandate along the lines sketched out in the report. We’ve already accomplished a lot I’m very proud of.

In May, NSF announced $1.5 billion over 10 years for X-Labs, novel research organizations focused on pressing scientific challenges and breakthrough discovery. “Golden Age” emphasizes the need for new institutions of discovery, experimenting with not just how we fund, but what we fund.

Our goal is to empower young scientists to do their best work, and this spring saw NSF’s largest Graduate Research Fellows Program cohort in history, expanding a talent-development program that can claim 50 Nobel laureates as alumni. This funding is portable, giving promising young Americans maximum flexibility as they launch their careers in science.

Ph.D. programs have been designed to train for academia even though 60% of graduates do not pursue careers in the academy. We are tackling this reality, too. In July, NSF announced a $47 million investment for a novel four-year Ph.D. to give more than 250 doctoral students hands-on experience in industry. 

Even as we update our organizational and institutional forms for the 21st Century, “Golden Age” upholds the American 20th Century’s defining push to accomplish grand national missions. 

Our flagship whole-of-nation effort is The Genesis Mission, America’s super intelligence for science initiative. In July, the White House announced the expansion of the mission from the DOE to a mobilization of more than 15 federal agencies, and committed $5 billion to solving National Science and Technology Challenges. 

The President has also set ambitious goals for quantum, including the production of a scientifically relevant, fault tolerant quantum computer by the end of this term. 

In space, the Artemis Program will put Americans back on the lunar surface and the first nuclear reactor into orbit in 2028, and will plant the first elements of a moonbase by 2030. 

And in energy, our fusion roadmap has set a goal of commercial fusion activity by mid 2030s, and the President’s nuclear EO’s have laid the foundation of a renaissance in advanced reactor development and the buildout of atomic energy infrastructure.

Our ambitions to meet grand challenges extend beyond our borders, and we continue to restore American scientific leadership through joint work with trusted international partners. The Kyoto Vision for a Golden Age of Science, endorsed by 17 countries last week, demonstrates the international enthusiasm for the spirit of the “New Golden Age” report, and makes renewing national science and technology enterprises a shared diplomatic priority.

But from X-Labs to the Kyoto Vision, those initiatives have just been the start of restoring scientific greatness, and barely scratch the surface of our ambitions for America’s science enterprise. 

Over the course of this summit today, we are launching the most comprehensive and far-reaching suite of science initiatives by America’s partnership of government, the private sector, and universities since the Second World War bound them together in the first place. It is my privilege to announce some of these initiatives now.

Super intelligence promises to be the greatest accelerant of scientific progress in human history, if we match its capabilities with an ecosystem adapted to keep up with its speed and scale. In the age of super intelligence for science, you can’t do frontier science without access to frontier compute. That’s a scarce resource in even shorter supply in an academic or public laboratory, limiting researchers’ ambitions. So I’m very proud to announce that Genesis Mission industry partners are committing $2.4 billion in compute, frontier SI for science models, and other tools for researchers.

In parallel, the NSF and DOE are launching a $100 million investment in developing the instrumentation needed for autonomous, SI science, and a nationally integrated research system in which anyone can send their experiments to programmable cloud labs. In a world where robotic experimental loops are possible the biggest limit on our ambitions will be good data. To help address this problem, I am proud to announce the DOE will be federating 190 key datasets across 14 federal agencies through its American Science and Security Platform. And yesterday, DOE and NIH announced a $1.8 billion dollar partnership with Biohub to develop the SI-ready data needed to build predictive models for biology and medicine.

In fact, every level of government—federal, state, and local—and every part of the national research ecosystem—the academy, philanthropy, and industry—are coming together to support researcher access to compute and SI for science infrastructure. The U.S. Southeast in particular is stepping up. Today, I am pleased to announce that 14 institutions in 10 states are launching the Southeast Regional AI Computing Consortium; in North Carolina, UNC Chapel Hill, Duke, NC State, Clemson, and the Research Triangle Institute are launching their own compute hub; and Georgia Tech and Emory University are investing $1 billion in frontier compute and frontier SI tools to equip and empower Georgia’s researchers and workforce to thrive in an SI-driven world. 

Just as science itself advances with the refinement of methods and the update of old models, so too does the scientific enterprise. As I emphasize in the “Golden Age” report, revitalizing America’s science enterprise requires us to institutionalize continuous improvement.

This means experimenting with how we fund science, how we judge results, how research institutions are formed, and how science is conducted—applying, through metascience, the principles of the scientific method to every part of our work. And this means committing to and enforcing gold-standard scientific conduct—showing the reproducibility, transparency, impartiality, integrity, and humility that the public expects, and which forms the foundation of trust on which the scientific enterprise depends.

To operationalize practical improvements in how NSF funds and supports America’s researchers, the NSF is launching its Office of Metascience with its first two experiments, focused on Golden Tickets and distributed review, to encourage funding more outside-the-box research proposals. NASA, too, is launching a new metascience initiative in its Science Mission Directorate, with its own new double-blind peer review experiment in research-merit review. And today the DOE is launching a Golden Tickets metascience experiment of its own, to encourage support for high-risk, high-reward proposals. 

As I said, last week I had the privilege of announcing the Kyoto Vision for a Golden Age of Science in partnership with 17 countries committed to the spirit of this report and summit. Continuing this momentum, I’m pleased to announce the NSF will be partnering with the United Kingdom Research and Innovation’s Metascience Unit, laying the foundation of an international network of metascience units that will share experimental results and best practices. 

But even the conduct of metascience is dependent on the reliability of established findings. That is what makes scientific replication so important. The need is particularly clear in biomedical research. As was announced just last week, the NIH is focused on addressing the replication crisis, launching R3PEATS, a $174 million reproducibility initiative, as well as “linked discoveries,” a tool to determine whether or not research has been replicated or invalidated at scale.

As mentioned, the NSF has committed to experimenting with focused research organizations through its X-Labs initiative. Today, I am pleased to announce establishment of the X-Labs Consortium, with $310 million of private contributions to support X-Labs teams focused on physical SI and quantum technologies. We are bringing together the whole national research enterprise to align private money and public priorities.

As a practice, a tradition, and vocation, science depends on a transmission from one generation to the next. “Golden Age” stresses the importance of supporting early carer scientists, and that starts in K-12 STEM education. 

We have understood the importance of talent development in the past. From 1986 to 1996, the NSF Young Scholars program provided more than 18,000 of our brightest high school students with advanced STEM enrichment programs. I am thrilled to announce that the NSF is renewing the Young Scholars Program in partnership with National Math Stars and Jane Street, to encourage more of our most talented young people to pursue a vocation in science. 

For those students who hear that call, we want to encourage them to begin their serious science studies early and to finish formal training quickly. I’m proud to announce the launch of NSF’s $50 million NextGen Workforce Program, which aims to accelerate formal education for our best STEM talent through an integrated 6-year Bachelor to Ph.D. program, so they don’t have to wait to make a serious contribution to human knowledge. 

This is in line with our accelerated, NSF 4-year Ph.D.s launched soon after Golden Age’s publication, which represent an innovative partnership with universities and industry. Today, I’m thrilled to announce DOE is launching its own $100 million 4-year Ph.D. program, the Genesis Mission Fellowships, which will culminate in young scientists spending a year in National Labs and industry.  

One of the biggest obstacles to good work for a young scientist is paperwork. It’s hard for people outside the sciences to understand what researchers go through to get funding. As the National Academies have found, researchers spend as much as 45% of their time working on administrative and regulatory tasks instead of in the laboratory. To help address this terrible waste, NSF and NIH are launching an initiative to convert more than half of their conventional funding application forms to a “just in time” approach that only requires the paperwork be submitted as a proposal moves forward in the approval process. 

We are also taking steps to better cultivate American talent in biomedicine, where the premier research institution remains the NIH. The NIH offers support for extramural research through grants, and is itself a home for highly prestigious intramural work. But these important research opportunities, both extramural and intramural, are increasingly out of reach for young scientists. We have to free more young scientists to do more ambitious work at the most ambitious point of their life.  

In the 1980s, the share of first-time NIH grant recipients who were under the age of 35 was 22. By 2025, that same proportion had dropped to 1.3%. This year, I am pleased to announce NIH is funding its largest cohort of extramural early-career investigators in history. And perhaps more exciting—in light of estimates finding the median age for intramural researchers at NIH is 71 years old—today I am thrilled to announce the launch of NIH’s Generation Discovery, bringing a hundred exceptional early-career scientists into the institutes’ celebrated Intramural Research Program. 

In the partnership of government, academia, philanthropy, and industry that forms America’s research enterprise, it is the government’s unique contribution to set clear goals and priorities for the nation. As a people, our proudest technical achievements have been accomplished because political leaders identified national priorities and coordinated the resources required to achieve them. 

Today, America’s science enterprise faces a transforming world, increasingly defined by technological change at home and competitors abroad. We must respond by planting the flag and choosing to lead, continuing to labor in whole-of-nation efforts that unite us in the work of discovery. Together, we can unleash a Golden Age of Science in America. 

Thank you so much for joining me.