Will US’ shift away from university-based research catch on?
The US’ proposal to shift research funding to focus on its national priorities – often bypassing universities – may embolden those in the UK who support a similar approach, a former research council leader has warned.
Publicly funded research agencies in the US have been tasked by the Donald Trump administration with creating a new “golden age” for science, which includes a restructure of the nation’s funding system to drive technological progress.
The US’ main basic research funder – the National Science Foundation (NSF) – has issued a 10-page memo, signalling a shift away from its traditional role in giving grants to individual researchers, often in universities.
The NSF will instead channel more funding to Trump’s research priority areas through initiatives such as X-Labs – a $1.5 billion (£1.1 billion) pre-existing initiative focused on developing new organisations to tackle technological challenges in artificial intelligence and quantum.
Speaking to Times Higher Education, John Womersley, a former adviser to the US Department of Energy, said that the shift in the US could influence those in the UK who support the idea of directing most of the resources towards tackling government priorities.
On 4 October, the UK joined countries including Germany, Italy and Japan in support of the “Kyoto vision for a golden age of science”, a document distilling the US’ plan to experiment with new ways of organising research for the age of AI.
Last week the NSF and UKRI also announced they have pledged to collaborate on metascience – the study of research on research – in areas that include looking at improving funding and measuring productivity and impact, citing similarities in the field between the memo and the UK agency’s 2026-31 strategy.
Compared with what is happening at the NSF, Womersley said: “We’re seeing the exact same questioning of the way it has always been done in UK Research and Innovation.”
UKRI’s budget has been reorganised under chief executive Ian Chapman into areas supporting government and societal priorities and supporting companies to grow, as well as funding basic research.
The similar thread is “the idea that some of the research funding ought to be tied to priorities that are endogenous to the research system and not just coming up from individual researcher’s curiosity”, Womersley, also the former chief executive of the Science and Facilities Council – part of UKRI – said.
However, he said a key difference is the Trump administration’s “ideologically driven attack” at the NSF, where hundreds of grants have been slashed “in an attempt to purge the NSF of the kind of ideology that they don’t want to see supported” – in areas such as supporting equality and diversity.
On the other hand, “there’s a pragmatic approach that even a government with a different ideological flavour could well be implement[ing] and supporting”, he said, such as establishing initiatives similar to the X-Labs.
Keiron Flanagan, professor of science and technology policy at the University of Manchester, disagreed with Womersley that the US shift could influence officials at UKRI.
He told THE: “The UK has long been an international outlier in the extent of its concentration on basic research, and it doesn’t need any US precedent to justify making a correction.”
For Flanagan the challenge for the UK now is “not whether it is right or wrong to do more publicly funded applied research but rather how to achieve that whilst avoiding causing damage to the…capacity of the UK research base”.
Meanwhile, Neal Lane, who was director of NSF from 1993 to 1998, was far more critical of the new direction in US science. Speaking to THE, he warned that he expects the trend towards funding government-directed research “to continue in the US, UK and Europe”.
He sees the trend being driven by AI, despite being “a huge unknown”, noting that “it is very likely to determine what research gets done and how”. Given the huge amount of money involved, he expects the funding “to be directed toward markets” and, crucially, away from universities.
The other factor driving the trend for Lane is “it is not clear how new security concerns require research investments” – although he has admitted that “cybersecurity, AI and quantum may be exceptions”. He added that the US is currently prioritising the physical sciences.
More broadly, Lane said he has “deep concerns” about the current administration’s “golden age of science” as he perceives it as “placing political review over scientific merit review, at the level of individual grants, opening the door to ideological control and corruption”.
“It replaces traditional excellent academic research with applications-directed research at institutions close to industry,” he said.
Lane, now a senior fellow in science and technology policy at Rice University, warned that this will inflict “serious damage to American higher education”.
frances.jones@timeshighereduction.com