Michael Kratsios: Trump's Science Agenda, Anti-Science Claims, Fauci's Damage, DEI & China

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

In this episode of All-In, Michael Kratsios, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, defends the current administration's pro-science stance against accusations of

Key takeaways

• Science should be driven by inquiry and skepticism, not authority or dogma.
• The politicization of science, especially during COVID-19, led to anti-science outcomes when dissent was labeled as opposition.

Main topics

• Science policy under the current U.S. administration
• Critique of politicization in science (especially during COVID-19)

Notable quotes

If you didn't agree with what he said, then suddenly you're anti-science. And to me, I think that is the most anti-science conclusion you could ever make.

The idea that science is authority is almost antithetical to the basis of the scientific method, which is constant inquiry.

Conclusion

Kratsios argues that the current administration is not anti-science but rather committed to restoring scientific integrity by

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Is this administration anti-science? We Speaker 1 (0:02) want to essentially double the scientific output of the United States. Speaker 2 (0:05) Did we lose it or did it lead to moments where you have like Fauci? That's Speaker 1 (0:10) a great question. Speaker 2 (0:10) Are we in this moment, this populist moment right now in the West where science and technology is viewed as a tool of the elite and therefore it must be broken and destroyed? That's what's most tragic. That is a crazy, crazy fact. Has science stagnated in America? What the heck is going on? Speaker 2 (0:44) Michael Kratios, welcome to the All In interview. Thank Speaker 1 (0:46) you for Speaker 2 (0:46) having me. Excited to be here. So you are the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy here at the White House. Can you just tell me a little bit about what that role is? What do you do here? Speaker 1 (0:55) Yeah, so the Office of Science and Technology Policy was created in the 60s to coordinate science and tech policy across the administration. Very unique to the U.S. is that we don't have an agency that does science and technology. We have lots of agencies that do pieces of the science and technology enterprise. We have a National Science Foundation that does basic research. We have a Department of Energy that runs our national labs. The Department of War has extensive R &D. programs like DARPA, for example. So the one office in the White House or in the administration broadly that's able to coordinate all those efforts is the office that I run called OSTP. And we try to do is work with the president to set the national S &T agenda and then ultimately implement that across all of our agencies. And you had this role before, is that right? So last administration, I was the chief technology officer of the United States. So if you think about OSTP, it does science and it does tech. And in Trump 1, I ran the tech portfolio for the president. Speaker 2 (1:55) So let me kick off by asking you, is this administration anti-science? It Speaker 1 (2:00) is not anti-science. I think one of Speaker 2 (2:02) the Speaker 1 (2:02) things that I'm most proud of is the release of a new report a couple weeks ago called Science, A New Golden Age. And I think anyone who reads that report, I think what we'll most likely see is an administration that deeply cares about the American science and technology enterprise. We really want the U.S. to be the home for the next great scientific discoveries. We want to empower young scientists. We want to create an ecosystem that allows our greatest scientists to work on the hardest problems everywhere in the U.S. And to us, we're doing everything we can to align all of our agencies, like I just mentioned, to be able to help that make a reality. But Speaker 2 (2:33) going back, there's a poll I'm going to give you from Nature, which is one of the scientific journals. They polled 2,000 of their readers, which are all scientists. 86 % supported. Kamala Harris in the election, according to the poll, and Donald Trump polled at 6%. Why is that? What is going on with the perception of the president and this administration as being anti-science? Speaker 1 (2:59) To me, I think the scientific community has lost its way over the last few decades. I think America has been the place of some of the most amazing scientific transformations in history, and the government has played an important role in a lot of them. If we look back and think about the Manhattan Project or Apollo, these are sort of seismic events that only the U.S. government could bring together the ecosystem to achieve. And to be honest, I think over the last 15 or 20 years, I think science has been deeply and deeply politicized. And we no longer are asking sort of the very hard and important questions of, what is a scientific method? How should we be approaching it? Should we be questioning some of these conclusions? And rather, I think it's been dominated by kind of this dogma. And I think it really crescendoed and peaked in COVID, where suddenly, you know, there was a certain individual that if you didn't agree with what he said, then suddenly you're anti-science. And to me, I think that is the most anti-science conclusion you could ever make. And I really think we have to return back to the basics and that's what we're trying to do in this administration. Speaker 2 (4:08) Yeah, I mean, at the basis of what you call the scientific method for many people here who might be watching that aren't familiar, it's like you ask questions. The process of science is a process of asking questions and inquiry. And that inquiry leads to experiments which collect data. And that data is what informs your view. And then you continue to ask questions. The idea that science is authority is almost antithetical to the basis of the scientific method, which is constant inquiry. Is that? I Speaker 1 (4:40) could not agree more. And I think what we. as a government for many, many decades have hadn't taken the effort or the time to do is to apply those same principles of the scientific method to the way that we as a government approach science policy and the way that we approach research and development. Right now, if you talk to your median lobbyists for the science community, the only thing that they are fixated on is singularly is the research and development budget. If the number doesn't go up, then they haven't done their job and they haven't quote unquote supported science. And to me, that's a question. But the more important question that every scientist should be asking is, is the way that the US government spends a $200 billion in S &T funding every year, is it actually driving the best breakthroughs and biggest breakthroughs of American people? Are there other ways that you could be deploying that capital in different to different organizations, to different scientists? through different time horizons. There's so many questions we should be asking, which we're not. And that is what Science New Golden Age tries to bring to the front. So Speaker 2 (5:45) I've heard this a lot from my friends who are scientists, who are researchers, who work in both the academic community, private industry, and elsewhere, that there's a perception that this government, this administration, is cutting science funding. And it sounds like what you're saying is that there's an allocation of resources. perhaps away from some things into other things as kind of the way that you're viewing Speaker 1 (6:10) this? Yeah, I think the most important thing that people should initially sort of table set is that there's a distinction between a proposed budget and the dollars that are appropriated by Congress. So Congress controls the purse strings. They're the ones who say how much science funding there will be. And they've consistently continued to fund science over the last decade plus. But I think, you know, The more sort of policy question to think about is, and the way I view it is, spending more money on the wrong types of things is not the right policy action. What's an example of that? So to me, I think- I'm sorry, because Speaker 2 (6:45) I'll just say like in 2025, this administration disrupted, froze, or terminated $3 billion in unspent funds on active grants. Yeah. And so you terminated grants that scientists or labs had received or gotten approval for. And so maybe you could just give us an example. What were those $3 billion and what were some of these other things that the administration would say are not really the right place to allocate capital? That's a good point. Speaker 1 (7:07) To me, I think the best example is the National Science Foundation. And for some of the listeners, the NSF is essentially the premier funder of extramural basic research in the United States. So they have about $8 to $9 billion a year where most of that money is given to academics at universities who do research on all sorts of basic science domains. Speaker 1 (7:27) Senator Ted Cruz and the committee in the Senate did an analysis of the grants that were given during the Biden administration. And they found that roughly one quarter, or 25 % of grants at NSF during that time period, went towards DEI-related, quote-unquote, science. And if you think about that, that's an astronomical amount. That is roughly $2 billion a year times four years. That's $8 billion of science funding that went to these DEI-related initiatives. And that isn't science. And that shouldn't be. And that's a pure manifestation of the politicization of science, where you had the Biden administration stand up and say, oh, you know, if you want to win a grant, you have to make sure that you talk about some DEI-related factor in your application. That's the only way we're going to give you money. And that obviously is not the way we should be doing it. And that is not gold standard science. There Speaker 2 (8:15) was also cuts to climate science research. And this is one that's been deeply criticized in media and by... broad kind of scientific community representation, journals, associations, and whatnot. Can you just frame up the administration's view on how settled is anthropogenic climate change, meaning the climate is changing because of human action and releasing carbon into the atmosphere, and the criticality of that? Is it a climate emergency? And what do we know? What do we not know? And why are dollars being redirected away from those research efforts? Speaker 1 (8:49) Secretary of the Right has been has been very vocal on this and kind of serves as the belly button for a lot of these issues of administration. And what he has advocated for very publicly and has said many, many times is that, yes, the climate is changing. And like, yes, you know, humans have burned fossil fuels over the last hundred years, and that has contributed to CO2 in the environment. The thing that is not true and what the data does not support is that it is a climate emergency. And I think one of the best examples of that is what's happened with these the RCP 8.5, they call it. So these are scenarios that climate scientists try to estimate kind of the impact of this quote unquote climate change will have on the world. And this was the most extreme scenario that had been in numerous or national climate assessments and run by the IPCC as well. And ultimately they determined a few months ago that They could not, with any scientific integrity, substantiate continuing to have this scenario play out. So they had to pull it down. So to me, I think what- And this Speaker 2 (9:48) is Speaker 1 (9:48) what Speaker 2 (9:49) a lot of media and a lot of coverage and a lot of re-reporting was based on, and a lot of funding was based on, this simulation of the future that did not come to bear, that did not happen. Speaker 1 (10:00) Precisely. And I think it's this crazy narrative that kind of spun around where, you know, they threw in this extreme scenario, which- most people believe would never happen. And now this year proven that it will never happen because they even removed it from all the predictions. Yet every media report of every climate assessment over the last 20 years has always focused on the extreme example. That's the one that the media fixates on. And that's what sort of like captivates the attention of all these folks. And I think that's kind of a real disservice to science. So over the Speaker 2 (10:29) last decade to two decades, 15 years or so, is that why a lot of... funding has rolled into climate research, climate science and terminating grants, reducing budgets is kind of a rollback. Is that the way to think about? Speaker 1 (10:44) I think the way we like to view it is that, you know, we want to be investing in the technologies and the science which are ultimately going to create abundant energy for Americans. Something that you advocate a lot for and you talk about, we have to win and we have to win this fusion race. We set a target for 2035, for example, for that. We have been one of the most forward-leaning administrations in the history of this country on nuclear energy. And we're trying to get that up to speed and running and supplying energy for Americans as soon as humanly possible. So to us, I think technology is what's going to have the biggest impact for everyday Americans. Speaker 2 (11:17) Yeah, I mean, I would make two arguments. One is China's output of carbon into the atmosphere eclipses the rest of the world. And so plus or minus 50 % in the U.S. doesn't really move the needle. So then there's arguably a question like, is it worth the economic cost, particularly because it mostly impacts the poorer communities than the wealthy communities can afford alternatives, but poorer communities that lose access to certain sources of energy. Absolutely. Absolutely. I think Speaker 1 (11:46) the numbers that I've seen, you know, roughly, you know, two billion people around the world use sort of this very dirty fuel for cooking in their homes, things like wood or dung or charcoal. And this leads, I mean, the U.N. has reported leads to roughly three million. deaths every year because of this. And these are the people where clean fossil fuel could make a huge difference in their quality of life and overall. And Speaker 2 (12:10) so if we can accelerate through to alternative energy sources, which arguably you don't necessarily need the government to make happen. In some cases, you need to have technical breakthroughs like fusion, but solar, battery backup, I mean, there's such a strong economic incentive. It's cheaper, it's easier. it's deployable, that the market is kind of getting us in that Speaker 1 (12:32) problem on its own. That's what Speaker 2 (12:33) matters in solving. You can believe that carbon going into the atmosphere can cause climate change. You can believe that the world is getting warmer. But you can also argue that the best way to solve that problem isn't necessarily to go backwards by 30 years or 40 years, but to go forward with new technology that replaces carbon rather than forcing and making things more expensive, which makes it very hard. for people to adapt. Speaker 1 (12:58) Absolutely. And I keep going back to your point about China. I mean, any of these sort of extreme policy reactions to this sort of perceived problem would inevitably hurt Americans the most and not actually solve the problem, whether you believe it's happening or not. So Speaker 2 (13:13) let's talk about NIH. I want to talk a little bit about the stagnation of scientific progress in the United States. It's easy to look around and say we've got AI. We've got gene editing. We've got an understanding of the genome. We've got flying cars. I mean, all of this stuff came from the United States. So I think it would be easy to argue we are making great progress as a nation. We have made great progress as a nation. But if you look at NIH funding, 1998, $14 billion, 2003, $27 billion, 2024, $47 billion. So the budget has more than tripled since 1998, but there has not been a proportional rise in breakthrough treatments coming out of that funding. Arguably, people call it Arum's Law. It's like Moore's Law in reverse. It's fallen roughly 80-fold since 1950 in terms of outcomes per dollar spent. And it halves every nine years. So every nine years, we get half as efficient as we were at getting a return. on the investment we're making. And I think this comes from your report or it's published. So has science stagnated in America? What the heck is going on? I Speaker 1 (14:33) think generally our argument is it has. And I think that's one example. I think the one that a