Is this administration anti-science?
We want to essentially double the scientific output of the United States.
Did we lose it, or did it lead to moments where you have like Fauci?
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?
Michael Kratsios, welcome to the All-In Interview.
Thank you for 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?
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 US 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 Defense 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. What 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. If you think about OSTP, it does science and it does tech. And in Trump 1, I ran the tech portfolio for the president.
So let me kick off by asking you, is this administration anti-science?
It is not anti-science. I think one of the things that I'm most proud of is the release of a new report a couple weeks ago called "Science: A New Golden Age." I think anyone who reads that report will most likely see an administration that deeply cares about the American science and technology enterprise. We really want the US 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 US. To us, we're doing everything we can to align all of our agencies, like I just mentioned, to be able to help make that a reality.
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?
To me, I think the scientific community has lost its way over the last few decades. 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 seismic events that only the US government could bring together the ecosystem to achieve. To be honest, I think over the last 15 or 20 years, science has been deeply, deeply politicized, and we no longer are asking the very hard and important questions of what is the scientific method, how should we be approaching it, and should we be questioning some of these conclusions. Rather, I think it's been dominated by this dogma. I think it really crescendoed and peaked during COVID, where suddenly there was a certain individual that if you didn't agree with what he said, then suddenly you were anti-science. To me, that is the most anti-science conclusion you could ever make. I really think we have to return back to the basics, and that's what we're trying to do in this administration.
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.
I could not agree more. What we as a government for many decades 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 lobbyist for the science community, the only thing that they are singularly fixated on 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." 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 $200 billion in S&T funding every year actually driving the best and biggest breakthroughs for the American people? Are there other ways that you could be deploying that capital 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: A New Golden Age" tries to bring to the front.
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. It sounds like what you're saying is that there's an allocation of resources perhaps away from some things into other things as the way that you're viewing this.
Yeah. I think the most important thing that people should initially table-set is that there's a distinction between a proposed budget and the dollars that are appropriated by Congress. 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 the more policy question to think about, 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? Sorry, cuz I'll just say like in 2025 this administration disrupted, froze, or terminated $3 billion in unspent funds on active grants.
And so you terminated grants that scientists or labs had received or gotten approval for. Maybe you could just give us an example. What were those three billion, and what were some of these other things that your administration would say are not really the right place?
That's a good point. To me, I think the best example is the National Science Foundation. For some of the listeners, the NSF is essentially the premier funder of extramural basic research in the United States. 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. 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." 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. That isn't science, and that shouldn't be. That's a pure manifestation of the politicization of science, where you had the Biden administration stand up and say, "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." That obviously is not the way we should be doing it, and that is not gold-standard science.
There was also cuts to climate science research, and this is one that's been deeply criticized in media and by broad 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? What do we know, what do we not know, and why are dollars being redirected away from those research efforts?
Secretary Wright has been very vocal on this and serves as the belly button for a lot of these issues in the administration. What he has advocated for very publicly and has said many times is that, yes, the climate is changing, and yes, humans have burned fossil fuels over the last 100 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. I think one of the best examples of that is what's happened with RCP 8.5, as they call it. These are scenarios that climate scientists try to estimate the impact that climate change will have on the world. This was the most extreme scenario that had been in numerous national climate assessments and run by the IPCC as well. 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. To me, I think—
And this is what a lot of media, a lot of coverage, and a lot of 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.
Precisely. It's this crazy narrative that spun around where they threw in this extreme scenario, which most people believed would never happen, and now this year proved that it will never happen because they even removed it from all their 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 captivates the attention of all these folks. I think that's a real disservice to science.
So over the 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 or reducing budgets is kind of a rollback? Is that the way to think about it?
I think the way we like to view it is that 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 talk about: 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. To us, technology is what's going to have the biggest impact for everyday Americans.
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 US doesn't really move the needle. So then there's arguably a question: is it worth the economic cost, particularly because it mostly impacts the poorer communities? Wealthy communities can afford alternatives, but poorer communities that lose access to certain sources of energy have to pay the most.
Absolutely. The numbers that I've seen: roughly two billion people around the world use very dirty fuel for cooking in their homes, things like wood, dung, or charcoal. The UN has reported that leads to roughly 3 million deaths every year because of this. These are the people where clean fossil fuel could make a huge difference in their quality of life and overall.
And 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, there's such a strong economic incentive, it's cheaper, it's easier, it's deployable, that the market is kind of solving that problem on its own.
Solving that problem on its own.
That's what matters. 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.
Absolutely. I keep going back to your point about China. Any of these extreme policy reactions to this perceived problem would inevitably hurt Americans the most and not actually solve the problem, whether you believe it's happening or not.
So 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." 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, and 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 Eroom'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. I think this comes from your report or it's published. Has science stagnated in America? What the heck is going on?
Generally, our argument is it has. That's one example. The one that a lot of Americans see, feel, and notice quite obviously that I always like to talk about is the speed of flight. In the 1990s, you could fly on a Concorde, and now you can't. We're flying slower than we were 10 or 20 years ago. I think we can do much better. The question we always ask is, why is this happening in the context of government funding? You could say, "Look, all the easy problems have already been solved, the low-hanging fruit has been picked, so it's harder to solve the next thing." Sure, but broadly the issue is we have not been innovative in any way on the way that we actually conduct the science. Whether it's at NIH or NSF or any of our other science agencies, the answer has always been: let's just keep doing the same thing, but add more money and hope that we get more outcomes proportionally, rather than asking the harder questions about whether there are other ways that we could be conducting the science, other types of scientists that could be getting the funding, or other institutions that could be getting the funding. Those are some of the questions that we start to bring up in "A New Golden Age" about how we should really be looking in the mirror and asking ourselves, are we spending money in the smartest and best ways?
Why weren't we doing that along the way? And as you pour more money in, where does it go that makes the overall outcome less efficient?
There's no incentive to do that. I think the incentive on the Hill oftentimes is to just keep increasing budgets that ultimately flow down to particular districts or particular states. On the government side, there's no incentive to check your homework and reveal that what you're doing is not actually working very well. It's always easy to take a headline that you're increasing funding in XYZ domain. The work is actually quite hard. It's not easy to go through $47 billion worth of funding and figure out what's working and what isn't. I think that's what we try to introduce. There's this concept of metascience that's introduced in the report, where we're setting up metascience units both at NSF and at NIH where we're actually going to start running experiments. Maybe there are different ways that we should be doing funding, and then we can analyze those and course-correct and direct money towards places where innovation is actually occurring.
So you're going to start doing your own experiments on how you're allocating money to see what has the highest return. How do you measure that?
Well, you start by figuring out what experiments you want to run. Take, for example, in the National Science Foundation, almost all the grants are done in a very standard, typical format. There's a set of peer reviewers that do this merit-based review. It's maybe three or four people from a particular field. They take all the applications, review them, and select the ones as a group they believe are most meritorious. One could argue that it is merit-based, of course, but it also many times incentivizes scientists to not necessarily propose crazy, bold, innovative, out-of-the-box ideas. They tend to want to propose ones that are in the strike zone that the board, for example, will all support. One thing that we're going to be testing at the National Science Foundation is a concept called "golden tickets," where each of the evaluators are going to be given one, two, or three golden tickets. This was initially tested in Denmark and some other places. The theory is that the reviewer will then be able to unilaterally, without the rest of the committee agreeing, make a selection of a particular grant, so you incentivize folks to have more interesting grants. What's also kind of cool about this concept is that you're actually incentivizing better people to participate in the boards because they have a golden ticket now and they're more likely to want to participate. We want to run that experiment and see what kind of applications actually get approved and what kind of science gets done.
It creates an incentive for scientists to propose wild and crazy ideas. The way scientists typically get a research grant—which is what they need to do because that's their living, literally getting a grant to pay for your salary and the salary of the people in your lab—is you go and submit an application for a grant that looks like the kind of thing that you think will get approved. Typically that's low-risk, because if something is likely to happen, the review board would say, "Okay, great. We're giving that grant because we feel confident that money is well spent." But the reality is, in venture capital, which you and I know well, you're going to have one out of 10 things work. It's a power law; that thing's worth 100x. And you want to have nine out of 10 failures because that means you're taking a lot of risk. That's really how you push the envelope and discover new things and make big breakthroughs—you've got to take risk, which means failure.
That's exactly right. Another example of this is, typically, most NSF grants are roughly 18 months, and that's just become a natural equilibrium that NSF has come to, given where the academic calendars are. But all research ideas don't require 18 months. Some of them require three months or six months; some of them require five years. Another thing we're going to be testing and proposed in "A New Golden Age" was this idea of different durations of grants and allowing there to be opportunities for people to try fast-track grants, where they have an idea that can be done in six months and if it works then they can apply for a longer grant. Or you may have longer-dated ideas that you would need three, four, even five years to work on that we would be evaluating. At its core, at almost every turn, what "Golden Age" tries to do is meet scientists where they are. There are some ideas that require 18 months; there are other ones that require six months. We want to make sure that there are opportunities for them to at least propose their ideas for evaluation.
Well, besides funding ideas, an alternative model is to fund individuals.
This has been strongly advocated for, as you and I both know.
Like in the venture capital world, you find great entrepreneurs, and they may have a crappy idea, but because they are who they are, they eventually make something amazing work. I was just reading again about Stewart Butterfield, who started Slack. He was working on a totally different business, he had $3 million left, and he told the investors, "Should I give the money back? By the way, we built a communication tool that we use in our engineering team." And they're like, "No, go ahead, pivot. Make that the business." And then it turned into Slack and they sold it for $30 billion. So the idea in science may be the same, which is you find great people, you give them significant funding, and you let them decide how to spend the money rather than have some overlord that scrutinizes every dollar they're spending and every action they're taking. Get out of their way and say, "I trust that you're going to get somewhere. Here's a whole bunch of money, a lot more than you're asking for. Here's a whole lot of time. See you in 10 years. You'll figure something amazing out."
One manifestation of that is the way that we think about some of these early-career fellowships. GRFPs are kind of the flagship fellowship you have at the National Science Foundation, where we give roughly 2,600 of these to the smartest and best aspiring PhDs in the country. The idea there is we will give you this money to go pursue your PhD, but it's totally portable, so you can take it anywhere you want. You can have universities compete for you, and ultimately you'll end up in a place where you're comfortable and you can do your best research. That's where, again, rewarding the scientist and the individual gives them an opportunity to pursue their studies.
And then the alternative is to go after big projects: the Human Genome Project, Manhattan Project, Apollo moon mission. China seems to be exceptionally good at this in the central planning context. They have these big objectives they want to achieve, and then they organize resources and allocate significant capital to achieve that objective. Is that an alternative funding model? And if so, how do we organize and execute in a world where you've got small labs, everyone's kind of working on their own, maybe people are even competing with each other for grants, and you've got private industry doing their thing? Do we have the capacity as a nation to tackle big, meaty projects that can really make incredible breakthroughs for humanity, but require significant capital, time, and a long-term commitment?
The short answer is yes. What we advocate for and argue in "Science: A New Golden Age" is that we have lost our way on doing that. Going back to even what I mentioned earlier, most Americans look back favorably on things like the Apollo mission. It kind of brought the country together. There was a discrete goal of something you were trying to accomplish, and only the federal government could marshal the resources to do that. We advocate in "Golden Age" that we have to return to that. Not that that's the only thing we should do, but that should be one of the things we do along with everything else I just mentioned. A couple examples of what we're doing in that domain: the first is around space. The president very boldly said in the first Trump administration that we're going to go back to the moon, and we're almost there. We're going to have American boots back on the moon in '28. We said we're going to have a nuclear reactor in space by '28. We're going to have the first elements of a moon base by 2030. These are big, bold bets that take a decade to accomplish, and we're going to do it. The second is around quantum computing. The president signed an executive order just last month launching a new National Quantum Initiative, and one of the key goals there that we're trying to do is create a scientifically relevant quantum computer by 2028. This was a directive to the Department of Energy, and we're going to be working very hard to make sure we can hit that pretty crazy timeline. In your camp, we really want to get to fusion by 2035, and we're trying very hard to get the resources allocated at DOE, combined with all the private-sector investment, to get there. The last one, which is our big flagship project for the whole administration, is called the Genesis Mission. That is where we want to essentially double the scientific output of the United States by applying AI to our hardest scientific challenges and endeavors. We fundamentally believe that AI is going to be the biggest unlock to scientific discovery in the history of the world. Whether you're in materials science, whether you're in chemistry, whether you're in math, whether you're in physics, applying AI to your discipline is going to fundamentally change the way that you can do your science and accelerate the way that it's done. We launched an initiative late last year to do that, and now we have pretty much all of government working towards that effort.
Let me just break this down and try and understand the selection process, because some things you could argue can be funded by private industry and they will be, because there's hundreds of billions of dollars of capital flowing into AI. There's a natural market incentive for individuals to use AI because it makes them more productive. Do you really need the government to fund things like quantum computing and AI in science when those things are getting hundreds of billions of dollars of private capital, versus funding things that are not going to be found in the private capital markets, like deep space research, understanding the origins of the universe, pure physics—looking at these more fundamental scientific breakthroughs that everyone kind of waves off? We always find that in those fundamental understandings of our universe emerge some application years down the road that we weren't even thinking about. How do we make those selections?
No, that's a great point. Something that we've advocated for quite aggressively is we have to return the primary focus of government-funded research to basic, early-stage, pre-competitive R&D. This discovery science is an area where the private sector is not incentivized to participate, and only the government can do that. At the same time, having these big, bold ideas only government can do is also very important for our enterprise. If you think about the urgency to create a scientifically relevant quantum computer by 2028, there's lots of activity in quantum going on throughout the private sector, but to them it's for commercial applications. We want to create an instrument that can be used for scientific discovery that will pay huge dividends across all the ecosystem. With AI for science, the nuance there is we're not spending money on the science that the private sector is doing around AI. There is more compute and more money going into AI than anything you could ever imagine today, and the government's not trying to compete in that space. What it's trying to do is say, "Look, if you are doing basic research on all the things that you mentioned are so important, you should be considering how AI is going to impact or accelerate the work that you're doing, and we want to help you along in that journey."
I always felt like so much of the challenge with government is the complication. It's like entropy over time. You have all these different agencies, all these different groups, all competing for budget, and everything balloons. Is there a rationale for consolidating so many of our agencies into a single science and technology agency and being better organized and prioritized and allocating capital to the most important things?
It's a perennial debate, and as I've reflected on it for many years working on it, I honestly think it's a feature and not a bug. The alternative to an extreme is kind of what the PRC or China is doing. There you have a top-down directed, single-agency entity that sets priorities and tries to execute. They have been trying to essentially figure out how to do EUV lithography since we put the export controls on in 2019. No breakthrough has happened. There's nothing more important to their economy than solving that scientific problem, and they haven't been able to do that. To me, I feel like one of the most special features about our system is we do have people competing. This sort of free-market approach to innovation is a huge feature of our ecosystem and one that I think is an important reason why we've succeeded.
have all these breakthroughs. So that's critical for our success fundamentally, I think.
So I think, you know, the fact that the DARPA people and the people working on national security-related R&D are sitting at DOD and not sitting at some science agency, I think makes their work much better and more relevant to their mission. So before we get to China and talk about the great race that's underway across every domain, I don't talk to anyone in industry, government, or elsewhere that isn't acutely experiencing this kind of competitiveness with China at the moment. But I just want to talk about how we allocate capital because NIH, NSF, so much of the money flows either to a government agency or to a university. And it seems to me that there are probably four channels, and you might have your own kind of rubric for this, but a government agency can take the money and go do research.
A university can take the money and the lab is at the university, and the university administers the lab, and it's all done on campus at a university. And we can talk about the challenges with that, which I think is really important to highlight. And then there's industry—companies that have an economic incentive that can do research and have breakthroughs and get money from the government to help them. And then there's these kind of independent organizations like Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Mayo Clinic. In Europe, there's like Max Planck. I mean, there's these sorts of institutes that are not a government, not private industry. They're sort of like a nonprofit, if you will. How do we think about allocating capital amongst those four channels? Why they're good, why they're not good, and how the balance needs to shift over time for us to get better ROI on our science dollars?
Yeah. So, what you're bringing up here is one of the big reasons why we even wrote the Golden Age report. So, if you kind of rewind history back in 1945, World War II was ending. Vannevar Bush, who was sort of the science adviser—had my role for FDR—received a letter from the president that asked him, you know, what do we do with the science enterprise post-World War II? And Vannevar Bush wrote his response that became *Science, the Endless Frontier*, which is kind of the seminal work in the way that the US government should interface with the science community and has served as sort of the North Star for how we think about science funding for the last 70 years.
And what Bush proposed was essentially the system that we have today, where the government funds basic research primarily at universities. And it set up this enterprise where all this research kind of sprung up in the post-war era, and we were able to do this great basic research. And in parallel to that, all the national labs that had helped build the nuclear weapons of World War II and so on sort of sprung up to do the intramural work that you were talking about. So there you had sort of two pieces: you had government and you had academia.
And why that was so important in that era was, at that time, the vast majority of science funding was done by the federal government. Roughly 70% of R&D was paid for by the US government; about 30% was in the private sector. What has happened over the last 70 years was there's been this dramatic shift: now roughly 70% of R&D is done by the private sector and 30% is funded by the federal government. And as you mentioned correctly, new institutions have sprung up—things like philanthropies that fund focused research organizations, things like Howard Hughes, Max Planck Institute, and so on.
And the question now is, is that model that Bush pushed forward and promulgated, and actually led to the great discoveries of the last 50 years, is that still as relevant today as it was then? And our answer is it's not, and we need a refresh. And that is why we wrote *New Golden Age*. And for us, the first basic question we always ask ourselves is: is the government spending on something that the private sector or others in the community, like philanthropy, are not incentivized to do? And that should be your first cut at all points.
And then you should ask yourself kind of what are the most important priorities for the United States. And I think that is something that sometimes almost is like a tension with the science community. Many sort of people believe that all discovery science is good and you should have no opinion about what's important, and I think we would say, no, we disagree. The government is a set of elected individuals, Congress has a very strong opinion about where we should spend money and they direct science funding all the time through their appropriations, and the executive branch should have some sort of thesis about what's important for the country. I know we'll talk about China in a second, but we have to win on things like AI, on quantum, on nuclear, on bio. And I think there can be an overlay of kind of what are the biggest priorities for the US government and make sure that the gaps—places where the private sector and philanthropy and others aren't able to fill the need—the government can step in.
Yeah. So what is going on with university funding? There's this administrative charge that universities have. You changed that. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that. And what is this administration's view on universities taking capital that's been allocated for scientific research, getting an administrative fee, and where does that money get used in ways that may be counter, or that this administration views being counter? Because some people have made the case that this administration is being political with the changes that they're making in how they're allocating capital, because they don't like the politics or the social views of university administrators.
My view as a science adviser is that we should meet the best scientists wherever they are. If they're at a university, we should fund them. If they're at a focused research organization, we should fund them. If they're on their own in their garage doing incredible work and can pass a merit-based review panel, we should fund them in their garage. And to me, I think the idea that we are open to funding scientists outside of universities has been sort of twisted by the academic community to believe that we're somehow anti-academic scientists. We are pro-scientists, and we don't care where they are. And I think that's a core tenet of *Golden Age* that we're going to be pushing for the next few years.
Okay. So, let's talk about the great race with China. In the year 2000, China was spending $33 billion a year. In 2021, $670 billion. So, China increased spending by 19x. Over the same time period, the US increased spending by roughly 3x. There's a statistic I'll quote—it's going to be hard to verify, but I've estimated it—that about a decade ago, the US published roughly twice as many papers in scientific journals as Chinese labs and academics and scientists did. And today, China is publishing roughly 50% more in nearly every domain with the exception of some life sciences.
