The White House OSTP released "Science: A New Golden Age" (SNGA), positioning the Trump administration as poised to fix US science despite proposing crippling funding cuts and enabling political appointees to terminate merit-based grants. The report frames itself as successor to "Science, the Endless Frontier," but presents a contradictory mix of real problems, political grievances, and Silicon Valley perspectives from OSTP director Michael Kratsios, formerly with Peter Thiel.

SNGA identifies genuine issues like researchers' excessive grant-writing burden but offers no specific regulatory reforms. It ignores how the administration's haphazard grant terminations and massive budget cuts create the very uncertainty it decries. The report praises the Human Genome Project as a model of government-driven science while overlooking its international collaboration and open data sharing—policies the administration actively undermines.

On innovation, SNGA treats contested metrics of declining transformative research as settled fact, proposing alternative funding models including reduced peer review—single-individual reviews that may fund fringe ideas. It also oversimplifies science-commercialization cycles, ignoring that basic research like quantum mechanics took decades to yield applications, and offers no method to identify promising innovation cycles early.