The tech-broification of American science has officially begun

The Trump administration rolled out its first Genesis Mission grants this week, pushing $5 billion toward 278 AI-driven science projects picked from more than 5,000 applications. The White House isn't shy about the comparison it wants: officials have likened the effort to the Manhattan Project. Around the same time, science adviser Michael Kratsios was pitching Congress on a companion vision, a manifesto promising a new golden age built around AI, robotics, and nuclear energy, with life sciences pushed to the margins.

The Energy Department led this funding round, framing it as a way to unite national labs, industry, and universities around what it called breakthroughs in energy dominance and national security. Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are chipping in compute and AI credits. Kratsios has tied the grants directly to his broader manifesto, describing Genesis Mission as the culmination of reforms he's been selling on Capitol Hill. He's styled the document as a successor to Vannevar Bush's 1945 report that shaped postwar American research funding — except this version shifts money away from institutions and toward individual researchers, gives private companies more say in what gets studied, and lets political appointees block grants they don't like.

Researchers who spoke to The Verge see something else entirely: a Silicon Valley operating manual grafted onto a system it was never built for. Claes de Vreese at the University of Amsterdam put it bluntly — you can't force breakthroughs with venture capital logic while already trying to sell the patent. Basic research doesn't work on startup timelines. It can take decades to matter, and some of its biggest payoffs come from scientists chasing an entirely different question and stumbling onto something bigger. Jason Shepherd at the University of Utah said some of the manifesto's ideas, like cutting red tape and speeding up peer review, have real appeal. But he also said the document reads like it was drafted by political appointees with no real input from scientists, and that treating academic research like a VC-backed startup misreads how either one actually functions.

The skepticism runs deeper than tone. Harvard's Jeffrey Flier called the plan's grasp of how science works essentially nonexistent, and labeled it a major threat aimed at politicizing research rather than improving it. Andreas Karch at UT Austin pushed back on the core assumption that tech breakthroughs and scientific ones are interchangeable, warning that AI-generated science right now is mostly what he called slop, and that human oversight is essential — oversight trained by the very universities facing funding cuts. Shepherd also flagged a glaring contradiction: the plan wants to slash support for life sciences while boosting funding for foundational biological research, categories that overlap heavily, without ever defining where the line falls.

All of this lands while federal funding is already being slashed and grants canceled across universities and agencies nationwide, a reality several researchers say makes the golden age branding hard to swallow. Carl Bergstrom at the University of Washington argued the plan misunderstands what funding agencies actually do — not just chase applications, but sustain an entire STEM ecosystem — and warned the fallout could ripple through the economy for years. De Vreese was more pointed still, suggesting this golden age might shine brightest for one crowd in particular: tech companies and venture capitalists already closest to the administration's ear.