White House Report Outlines Bold Reforms For Science Funding And Institutions

Surreal endnotes section to have in an official government report

There are some exceptionally good ideas here for reforming and accelerating science. Some of my favorite proposals: Apply the scientific method to science funding (track applications, reviewers, funding decisions, and outcomes, then experimentally test which grantmaking methods actually produce breakthrough work) Build a portfolio of funding mechanisms instead of treating peer review as universal (fast grants, long-horizon funding, golden tickets, regranting, prizes, and advance market commitments) Create organizations between the university lab and the national lab (Focused Research Organizations and X-Labs built for time-bounded, engineering-intensive scientific missions) Turn federal scientific infrastructure into a true research commons (open national-lab facilities, compute, cleanrooms, instruments, testbeds, and technical expertise to startups and outside researchers) Use precompetitive consortia and grand challenges for shared bottlenecks (Human Genome Project-style efforts to build datasets, standards, tools, and infrastructure no company would build alone) Elevate technicians, makers, and tacit technical knowledge (fund apprenticeships, technician fellowships, machine-shop training, practitioner residencies, and nonacademic pathways into scientific research) Treat AI-for-science as a full stack, including verification (models, curated data, negative results, compute, interoperable instruments, robotic labs, replication, and machine-auditable evidence) Reform publication around research objects, not papers (publishing datasets, code, protocols, null results, methodological notes, and evolving “dynamic papers") Disagree with some of it -- mainly the overtly political bits -- but overall an excellent blueprint!