Ari Schulman: Ian, you’re part of what we might loosely call the “science reform community.” Tell us what that means and what your specific focus is in your role at the Foundation for American Innovation.
Ian Banks: At FAI, I run the Science and Innovation team, which encompasses federal R&D as well as related efforts including biotechnology and biosecurity, weather and atmosphere policy, and landscape and technology issues such as de-extinction or insect elimination. In this capacity, I help develop and support the enactment of policies on federal science and related issues.
I would certainly consider myself a member of the science reform community, insofar as it constitutes a community. By this I mean that I am working alongside others in an effort to study, describe, and address various problems and difficulties in the practice of science. For some members, this may be called metascience, or the science of science, in which the methods of the sciences, especially social sciences and economics, are used to study scientific research and researchers in a seemingly objective way. I generally avoid the label metascience for what I do (though I have previously advocated for a “virtue metascience”), because my work encompasses more methods than metascience and has a focus on the entire U.S. research and development enterprise beyond just research itself, even though that is the core interest of mine. I would call myself a reformer because I think science is in the midst of a reformation and I am trying to do my part to direct changes in productive directions that further the goal of a flourishing scientific enterprise. There are a raft of concerns about the current state of science that will be familiar to most readers of The New Atlantis, partly because it has published some key pieces over the past two decades: Daniel Sarewitz on the crises of science, an excellent series of reporting on Covid, and the use of “science” as a political shibboleth.
Schulman: You are one of the biggest optimists I know about science reform under the second Trump administration. What has you in a good mood?
Banks: Well, a buoyant disposition probably, but also the release of a new report from Michael Kratsios, the Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, called Science: A New Golden Age, the most comprehensive account of federal science policy and science reform since Vannevar Bush’s Science — The Endless Frontier in 1945. This is a monumental achievement and will be an essential part of the science policy canon for decades to come. It is not the same vision-casting document Bush authored but a manual of sorts for reformers and administrators to look to as they seek to improve science.
I would add that my optimism of the past 18 months is likely also a result of deeper-set concerns about the status quo than many of my peers have. I am very worried that our institutions have gone monstrously adrift and that their focus on the external goods of science have crowded out or disordered the goods of discovery and truth-seeking that are essential to the scientific life. It is this pessimism about our institutions that has fueled some optimism about disruption. Science policy advocates have long discussed valuable reforms to the enterprise but have been drowned out by status quo partisans. Now in the disruption and chaos of the last 18 months, we have a chance to rebuild and redirect our institutions onto a better path.
Schulman: Thank you for noting that The New Atlantis was saying much is broken in the scientific establishment before it was cool to say it! Considering that, I know very well what an expansive question this is, but: What do you think had gone monstrously adrift?
Banks: It is an expansive question, but what’s adrift is the aim of the practice of science. Most scientific institutions are no longer aimed at pursuing truly excellent and revolutionary discoveries but at perpetuating themselves and their environment. I think that there are several crises that have intersected in the past handful of years to create this particular drift. These crises may be split into two different but deeply interrelated categories: those internal to science and those external to it. Internal to science are the replication crisis and the crisis of burnout. External to science are the crises of administrative burden, race-based hiring, and the collapse of trust (and trustworthiness) in elite institutions, notably including universities and research agencies. Our scientific institutions have been largely focused on maximizing revenue. While it is essential for them to work to secure funding for scientists to be able to pursue great science, most of the burden of actually trying to secure funding falls on the scientists themselves, heaping hours of grant administrative tasks onto researchers every week. Scientists are expected to be both fundraisers and geniuses, both creative explorers and market-savvy entrepreneurs, both expert administrators and faithful mentors. These combine to direct the practice of science toward a form of grantsmanship and away from the ideal — necessarily an ideal and not the lived reality but a valuable ideal nonetheless — of the scientist pursuing true and astonishing and beautiful experiments. There is much more to be said about each of these pitfalls and the issues and underlying crises that have given rise to this drift, but this offers a sketch of how they fit together.
Schulman: So we’re speaking in very broad terms here, about a lot of sins of commission (things science did) and also sins of omission (things science failed to do). Let me ask you to focus in on the latter, because every science reformer talks about it, but I think it doesn’t have nearly the same purchase for the public as the commission part, meaning mainly DEI and Covid. Perhaps that’s just for the obvious reason that it’s easier to be angry about things that happened than things that should have happened but didn’t. What’s a single vivid example that you think about of something that ought to have happened in science over the last few decades but hasn’t? Is it a cure for cancer? A rate of economic impact per research dollar that kept pace with the post-World War II golden age of science? A manned mission to Mars?
Banks: This is a good and hard question. First, it is challenging to think of vivid examples of sins of omission, generally. As an aside, this is in fact the power of the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10, a vivid and compelling story of the sin of omission of the respectable people in society. It is much harder to remember the homeless man I scorned than my unkind words in a recent argument.
But to interrogate the sins of omission of science, I think there are a number of technological advances that have been overpromised and have remained undelivered, for example those that J. Storrs Hall writes about in Where Is My Flying Car? These certainly could be considered “sins of omission.” In reality, as the book also details, many technological promises remain undelivered not for technical failures but for cultural and political reasons, many very important ones. Instead, the vivid omission I want to draw attention to is the failure of scientists to discover fundamentally transformative frameworks in their field. This is the lack of examples of what Thomas Kuhn would call “revolutions,” or Michael Polanyi would refer to as “conversions.”
In the physical sciences, we largely operate with the same fundamental theories that we had in 1950. In biology, new instruments (and a very dedicated funder) enabled the formation of the field of molecular biology, but even the faithful injection of funds into large efforts like the Human Genome Project have not led to the systemic shifts that one would look for in a scientific revolution.
We can see this poignantly and painfully in biomedical research. In 1998, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich initiated a five-year effort to double the budget of the NIH to $27 billion. This massive injection of funding has not led to the raft of transformative discoveries that we would have hoped for. While we have GLP-1 agonists, new peptides, and mRNA vaccines for Covid, the flu, and now maybe even for some cancers, these have not noticeably increased human life expectancy in the United States, and health care costs continue to balloon ever higher — though GLP-1s should hopefully improve both in the next few years by decreasing rates of diabetes and obesity.
Schulman: Broadly speaking, Michael Kratsios, Jay Bhattacharya, and other reformers in the administration are not the first major public figures to be worrying about the stagnation in breakthroughs in fundamental frameworks in the sciences, or to be promising a sea change in federal involvement that will help get things unstuck. Newt Gingrich’s work to double the NIH budget is a now-famous example of where this was tried before and failed. How much influence do you think federal policy has had over this kind of failure? What could the new class of science reformers do to help spur new fundamentally transformative frameworks that leaders were unable or unwilling to do under the previous administrations?
Banks: Absolutely, this is correct. The Trump administration, in both iterations, the Biden administration, and, yes, the Obama, Bush, and even Clinton administrations were concerned with the state of the scientific enterprise for reasons of stagnation and otherwise. The interest in reform is not new at all, and moreover there is some reason to doubt that federal policymakers are able to substantially improve the drift I described earlier. A core reason for the doubt is that policymakers are constrained by the political situations they are in, including which administration is in the White House, which party and faction controls the House and Senate, and how constituencies in their policy domains feel about a particular issue. In science policy, the relevant constituencies — research universities, science associations, publishers (or association–publisher arrangements like AAAS/Science), and to some extent scientists themselves — are strongly, maybe even extremely, averse to large-scale change in their policy space. They enjoy a significant amount of freedom, large amounts of government funding, and the status quo treats them quite nicely in terms of external goods, particularly money, prestige, and power. Scientists themselves are more often interested in reform, but for many of them concerns about research funding, which pays their salary, dominate over interest in seeing policy changes. And so most major policy change attempts become, in time, a way to increase budgets and build a new program, office, or directorate onto an existing agency in an attempt to address whatever is the complaint du jour. The Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships directorate, which has turned out to be a wonderful experiment in institutional dynamism, had its own beginnings in this way in the course of passing the CHIPS and Science law of 2022. So yes, a degree of pessimism about the capacity of policymakers to realistically make significant improvements to the enterprise is warranted, and I share some of it.
There are two things that give me a bit more hope for reform in the current moment than some years ago when I was on the Hill first growing concerned about the state of science. Today, the awareness of the ills and rot in parts of science is greater than ever. The replication crisis is well-enough known that the vice president can invoke it when speaking to non-experts; there is widespread awareness of the toll of administrative burden, and concerns about stagnation are common, even if not universal. The need for reform is great and the general population of scientists is more reform-interested than ever before, even if institutions and associations may lag in places.
Second, the disruption wrought in the beginning and middle of 2025 has been an unlooked-for opportunity for reform and repair. As I alluded to earlier, many of our scientific institutions and universities have been allergic to reform and entrenched in their interests even as the course of science has drifted. Yes, there are still amazing discoveries regularly, but a deep and widely felt sense of malaise affects scientists from undergraduate through post-doc and tenure. The light and joy of the scientific life fades into dusk for so many idealistic students who enter the churn of academic science, and instead they look to industry as the greener pastures of better hours, better pay, and the chance for some sense of life outside of work. The institutions that have been tasked to safeguard the practice and traditions of the scientific life have not stewarded it well. The disruption of the last 18 months is the first significant groundswell of complaint and counter-reaction that these institutions have experienced, insulated as they were by the sacrosanct status of science prior to the second Trump administration. That status has been lost, sold out in a misguided series of political endorsements and activities in the height of Covid as the last gasp of the old order. And now universities and scientific institutions are no longer shielded.
This disruption has caused tremendous pain and destruction to many lines of research and the careers of many scientists. Its intent has not been to end American scientific dominance; instead, the idea was to take any step necessary to curb the federal deficit, which has now crossed $40 trillion dollars, and return power to the people in some form. In a world where that disruption has already happened, we must look toward rebuilding and reconstructing. And so, regardless of the willingness of past reformers and leaders, this current slate and the next slate of leaders — the directors of the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the NIH, the Under Secretary of Science at the Department of Energy, and the Director of the National Science Foundation, Jim O’Neill, if he is permitted to serve out his full term once confirmed, have an opportunity to conduct institutional reform, transformation, and reinvigoration at a scale unimaginable since the formalization of NSF and NIH research funding in the early 1950s.
To say just a word on what reformers can do: My chief hope is for reformers, both this slate and the next, to build dynamism into our scientific institutions. We need institutions that preserve the best of the tradition of the scientific life, this hallowed vocation that is at least medieval in origin, but that are also prepared to update themselves as the ground and landscape shift around them. If we are blessed with even a small part of the transformations from AI that are promised, then that alone will necessitate such dynamism, to say nothing of the vast demographic and cultural-political shifts that have begun and will continue for decades to come. So dynamism is my first core hope for things to build.
Schulman: An obvious question is whether this story of reform — roughly, that we need a lot of chaos to clear out the old order before a new order can emerge — is really a wise prescription, and I want to get to that. But before we do, I want to ask you if it’s even the right description of what’s happening. You describe the disruption of the early months of the administration as an “unlooked-for opportunity for reform and repair.” What you’re notably not saying here is that the disruption was a deliberate, coherent strategy to shake up science. But that is exactly what major members of the administration, and its intellectual defenders, have argued. That is, they say the picture you’re offering here is a causal one.
The alternate, realist explanation is that what we’re seeing is a factional conflict inside the administration. One camp is chiefly concerned with clawing back power from the deep state, making it much more responsive to White House directives, or just making it less powerful. It’s on a similar campaign against para-governmental institutions, including universities and other grantees, to make them more subject to political control. And, at least rhetorically, it’s saying it wants to crack down in a major way on the federal budget. Two of the main figures leading that effort have been Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget and Elon Musk at DOGE. The other camp are the idealistic reformers whose main priority is restoring American science to its true principles and former greatness. Two of the major figures there are NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and Michael Kratsios, presidential science advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
On that reading, the “destroy to create” narrative, although there is a logic to it, is largely a rationalization after the fact by science reformers in the administration to try to make the struggle between these two camps look like a single joint effort. And, on that same reading, it seems like the first camp doesn’t have as much gas in the engine right now as it did in the early months of the administration: the NIH’s crackdown on indirect costs ultimately failed, DOGE is closed and doesn’t seem to have major defenders of its legacy, the administration’s multiple proposals to slash federal science funding by up to around half across several agencies have been rejected by Congress, the use of the science grants portfolio to crack down on Harvard and Columbia seems like it was largely a success in the administration’s terms, but it’s hard to see whether it’s led to any kind of paradigm shift in the science ecosystem, or that it was meant to.
I don’t know that this account is right, but it’s one you hear. What do you make of it?
Banks: Thank you for this helpful and clear description of this prevalent account of the reform story. I don’t take tremendous issue with most of it. Every presidential administration is factional and this one is no different; this is true across agencies and within the White House. I have been quite careful to not make the claim that this has been a well strategized and deliberate attempt to destabilize and then rebuild the American scientific system. I think there is quite a lot of strategy behind what the Trump administration does, and the president and his appointees are very intelligent and often underestimated. But I also think that the administration’s strategic objectives have largely been focused on issues unrelated to science, often superseding them. The Trump administration is far more focused on trying to restrict immigration, stop wokeness, energize the economy, and, it seems, secure peace in the Middle East through a new war. AI, scientific advancement, and space travel are all exciting points of interest and progress in this administration but do not rise to the same level of apparent priority. This means that policy actions that have a significant effect on science, including many of the destabilizing ones, are pursued by parts of the administration for the purposes of other goals — such as stopping the horrible increase of antisemitism on university campuses. Similarly, some of the most disruptive policies for the scientific enterprise have not been the proposed funding cuts and reforms but immigration policies and the restrictions of student visas and the detainment of students — whether illegal immigrants, immigrants, or citizens. The restriction of science funding (well, all federal grants and contracts) to Harvard and Columbia, at least in the rhetoric from some of the people who were its architects, was about many different cultural objectives. Scientific excellence is sometimes mentioned, but it usually does not rise to the highest level of priority.
I do not know most of these individual actors at more than a cursory level and I cannot speak to motivations or goals for many of them, so these are all just general reflections. There are individuals, including those with substantial power, in the Trump administration who see these painful steps as important contributions to a flourishing scientific enterprise, others are rationalizing post-fact, and maybe others don’t really care one way or the other. I am standing on the outside and saying: “The hand that American science has been dealt is thus in 2026. Let’s play it as it is and leverage the opportunity to revitalize where we can.” I cannot claim any greater degree of explanatory power than that.
Schulman: All this candor is really helpful.
I am split about how to respond to where things are now, and what is called for. When I hear panic from the old guard about the chaos the Trump administration has been wreaking in science, I argue something much like what you’re saying. The panic we’re seeing about the present moment almost always cashes out in, at least tacitly, asking the public to believe that nothing was seriously wrong with the status quo; that the only possible way to believe major change was needed is that you are misinformed or anti-scientific; and that the public owes things to science, not science to the public. That is an anti-democratic and even anti-scientific view.
On the contrary, I tell people stuck in this view, scientific culture and institutions really are rotting, and you have to look at the long view of how major institutional and political shakeups happen. American history offers a lot of success cases, and they rarely look neat and rational in the early going. Simply breaking up the belief that the public cannot ask science to atone or reform is a major achievement, on science’s own terms and on democracy’s.
But when I look at where things stand, it’s easier to see the pessimistic case. The reason is not mainly the substance of what has been happening but the spirit of it.
Here’s a case study. Last fall, Jay Bhattacharya and Matthew J. Memoli wrote an article in City Journal called “NIH Directors: The World Needs a New Pandemic Playbook.” They argue that the standard approach — sampling viruses from the wild, gain-of-function research, and shelling out Americabux to pay Big Pharma to develop and stockpile vaccines and therapeutics in advance of an anticipated pandemic — is at once “fraught with risk and danger,” “utopian,” and corrupt. I have sympathy with each part of this argument, so I read with curiosity to learn what their alternative would be. Here it is: people should eat better and exercise more, and they’d be less likely to die in a pandemic. Now, that is true! It’s true for just about all illnesses. You’re likelier to stay healthy if you start healthy. There are bad ideological reasons exercise and nutrition aren’t part of the public conversation about pandemic preparedness. But healthy people get sick too, we will always in fact need hospitals in addition to Whole Foods and the YMCA, and there is no mention in this article of any, well, medicine that should be deployed to prevent or treat infectious disease. Innovations in rapid testing, improved building ventilation, making it a norm to open windows during local flareups of flu — give us something else if not the standard playbook! But there is nothing.
There are many examples like this. When I interviewed Bhattacharya last year, he offered a very savvy argument that public trust on vaccines closely tracks the strength of available research, and so the answer to vaccine hesitancy is more, higher-quality research. Shortly after that, he wrote in the Washington Post on why HHS was discontinuing funding for research on mRNA vaccines against pandemic illnesses: because, even though they’ve saved millions of lives, there are major scientific questions remaining about them and the public doesn’t trust them. So: do research to develop trust — unless trust is lacking, in which case, we shouldn’t do the research.
The rhetoric of creation and renewal of science is there, coming from high levels of the administration, and often deftly stated. But the constituency for that language seems to me to be a few hundred elites, many of whom you and I know personally. The number who live outside of D.C. or Silicon Valley or Atlanta is close to zero. Meanwhile, the rhetoric of punishment and illegitimacy of science is vast on the right, and its constituency is basically the president’s entire base and a lot of the country besides that. If you are a political operative on the right, yes, you’re being given options on how to deploy renewal language. But it is strictly that — optional. Meanwhile, the requirement to endorse the chaos, and really believe in its goodness, is powerful enough that even the chief speakers for renewal seem to me to be in many ways beholden to it. How does a new social contract for science emerge out of all this when that is the case?
Banks: The focus of much of science has been on left-wing political priorities, not on the science itself. Science has been harmed by administrators or even researchers themselves tightly linking their scientific work to the causes de jure. This is perhaps particularly true for public health and the public health establishment, which is the focus of many activists and the narrow focus of the Bhattacharya–Memoli article.
I strongly endorse their call for a healthier, more physically active, nutritionally better-served public as a method of preparing for the next pandemic. Unfortunately, that is not going to cut it if the next pandemic is substantially worse than Covid, which is likely. The pandemic playbook that Bhattacharya and Memoli and many right-wing activists rightly disparage was inadequate and misguided and at times destructive of basic rights and democratic norms. But we have had nothing to replace this fractured regime.
To the narrow question of a social contract: I am actually maybe most optimistic about the development of a new social contract, even more than the revitalization of federal science. This is for two reasons.
First, the disruptions of the past year represent one of the first times that ignoring their recalcitrant critics has led to negative consequences for the establishment. The more powerful force in driving the disruptions to research funding is usually not the instinct of revitalization but other objectives — owning the libs, ressentiment against elite institutions, stopping woke, stopping immigration, etc. But I am optimistic that in this episode, the establishment institutions will see at least some of the folly of ignoring a substantial portion of the population and their very normal views on policies largely unrelated to research and science (such as on gender transitions, abortion, or large-scale immigration). The next social contract will be formed by institutions much more aware of their vulnerability, and so I hope it will emerge as a form of moderation of the academy on social issues toward the right, leading to a more durable and productive social contract, and indeed, a more moral scientific enterprise.
The second reason I am optimistic about the social contract is that we have the opportunity to reengage the question of the value and purpose of science. I am hopeful that we can recover a vision of the practice of science that is oriented toward seeking truth and beauty for their own sake and defending the intrinsic value of discovery. There are obvious limits on how much public support this can or should command, but it ought to be a foundation for scientific inquiry on which further mission- and ends-directed science can be pursued. I am hopeful that scientists and institutions can recover some of that idealistic and teleological orientation — the orientation that has characterized science from its origin as the discipline of natural philosophy.