Federal R&D needs sustained funding, OSTP head warns incoming Trump admin

During an outgoing speech at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine on Tuesday, OSTP Director Arati Prabhakar stressed the need for federal funds to continue supporting innovative public discoveries at a time when “too many myths and misunderstandings are swirling around the science and technology enterprise.”

Prabhakar’s remarks come as President-elect Donald Trump has made cutting federal spending a top priority. Trump previously announced the creation of an advisory body — called the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, and led by billionaire Elon Musk and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy — to recommend federal cost saving steps.

Prabhakar alluded to Trump’s cost-cutting efforts, saying in part that “with the new administration coming in, bringing change and uncertainty, it's also an important time to get ready for the future.”

“Today, we're at a pivotal moment for federally-funded R&D,” she said, noting that many Americans “don't often think about how we're living lives that were created and made possible by those prior investments.”

Prabhakar pointed to the fact that federal funding helped to drive the development of GPS, the internet and new cancer treatments, and it has also provided researchers and the public with a more complete understanding of the Earth and climate. 

She warned, however, that misinformation and an erosion of trust in public institutions “are threatening to break public R&D rather than build it.”

These myths, she said, have positioned efforts to bring STEM-skilled immigrants to the U.S. as a false binary choice between attracting talent from other countries or expanding technology and science opportunities for Americans.

Prabhakar also said that private entities are rightful drivers of innovation — which she stressed is “great news for our country” — but that efforts to curtail public R&D funding in favor of these firms fails to account for the needs of the public at large. 

“We can't kid ourselves that companies are going to make the investments in R&D for public purposes,” she said. “These are the responsibilities that government has for national security, the responsibility we have in health, the responsibility for energy and the environment and agriculture, for space and for education and for transportation and more.”

Prabhakar also warned, more broadly, that hesitancy around vaccines and doubts about the veracity of climate change, as well as a push to weaken guardrails around the use of artificial intelligence, “attack scientific integrity” to “support certain pocketbooks or support certain fears and fantasies.”

She said these types of attitudes could lead to a future where public health is jeopardized and medical advances are stalled, where efforts to study and curtail climate change are limited and where AI makes things more efficient but “every worker, every move, every click is being surveilled.”

To push back against the likelihood of this reality, Prabhakar challenged the scientific and research communities to present their facts and findings to the public “clearly and with context, with humility and with error bars and without bias,” and to use their discoveries “to change what's possible so that we can move beyond today's constraints into a different tomorrow, a better tomorrow.”