WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump on Thursday will unveil a $250 million initiative to help the next generation of researchers tackle new scientific challenges, The Daily Wire can first report.
The president will announce the effort at a summit on “A New Golden Age” of science, which will bring together top scientists to “catalyze whole-of-nation efforts to empower American scientists to do their best work, enable transformative discovery, and position the United States to lead the super intelligence-driven scientific revolution,” a White House official told The Daily Wire.
The center of the initiative will be a $250 million investment in federally funded, independent research organizations called X-Labs. These labs, part of a public-private partnership launched in May by the National Science Foundation, are designed to give scientists and engineers the resources needed to anticipate and solve coming scientific challenges.
“Developing new organizational models to meet scientific gaps require a whole-of-ecosystem effort, which is why we are excited to announce industry and philanthropy commitments to support federally funded X-Labs,” a White House official said. “Metascience, the science of how we fund and conduct science, will be critical to evaluate the effectiveness of new models like X-Labs so that we can scale what works and pivot what doesn’t.”
Energy Secretary Chris Wright, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios, President Donald Trump, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought.
Thursday’s event builds on White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios’s efforts to conduct “the first comprehensive rethinking of the U.S. science and technology enterprise” since World War II, the White House official added.
The National Science Foundation on Thursday will also announce a new effort, along with NASA and the Departments of War and Energy, to “inform how they fund and conduct science.” These agencies will run experiments and data analysis to better “identify exceptional ideas, empower talented researchers, reduce unnecessary friction, and accelerate the pace of discovery.”
The administration will also launch a metascience partnership between the United States and the United Kingdom: the National Science Foundation and the United Kingdom Research and Innovation Metascience Unit will form a new partnership to conduct “joint metascience experiments, share experimental results and best practices, and lay the foundation for an International Network of Metascience Units.”
Kratsios had announced the “Kyoto Vision for Golden Age of Innovation” at a forum in Kyoto, Japan, on October 4, essentially getting 16 other countries to sign on to an international version of the policy ideas that the Trump administration will be promoting at Thursday’s summit. Those countries include Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, South Korea, Italy, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, and others.
