“Bet on people, not just projects, by expanding portable graduate fellowships like the National Science Foundation (NSF) Gradu- ate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP), backing early-career indepen- dence, and scaling long-horizon grants for the best and brightest modeled on National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's Pioneer Award.” (p. 13)

“Examples include "golden tickets" that empower individual reviewers to champion ambitious proposals, fast grants that deliver rapid funding decisions, prize challenges and advanced market commitments that pay for results, and regranting models that delegate funding authority to scientists to draw on distributed expertise.” (p. 13)

“The recently launched X-Labs can assemble agile, time-bound teams of professional scientists and engineers to break specific bottlenecks. Advanced Research Projects Agencies (ARPAs) can empower individual program managers to make bold bets and curate researchers to execute them. Curiosity-driven institutes can give our best minds the stability needed to pursue funda- mental questions over long time horizons.” (p. 13)

“Compress review cycles, eliminate duplicative reporting, and rein in indirect cost recovery that supports administrative bloat, redi- recting that money to real scientific infrastructure.” (p. 13)

“Extend the President's reforms in nuclear, pharmaceuticals, and drones across other sectors. Weigh benefits alongside risks, streamline permitting, and use regulatory sandboxes to test new technologies under controlled conditions.” (p. 14)

“Broaden industry access to America's laboratory research infrastructure, including at Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratories, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) centers, and Department of War (DOW) facilities. Consider innovative potential alongside scientific merit in use approvals, streamline Cooperative Research and Development Agreements (CRADAs) and licensing, further leverage Other Transaction Authority (OTA) to enable private-sector engagement in co-designing research directions” (p. 14)

“Expand agency-adjacent foundations, focus Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs to build strategic capabilities, and support joint centers among industry, academia, and federal facilities. Scale industry Ph.D. and postdoc fellowships that move talent fluidly between sectors” (p. 14)

“Leverage grand challenges that pull breakthroughs forward, and create moonshot-scale missions for issues of national importance. Support industry consortia and use federal resources to break shared engineering bottlenecks in foundational areas, as Extreme Ultraviolet Lim- ited Liability Company (EUV LLC) did for semiconductor lithography.” (p. 14)

“Sup- port state-led experimentation, partner with the jurisdictions that move the fastest, and let localities compete to support regional innovation.” (p. 14)

“Stand up an empowered meta- science unit in federal science agencies, reporting directly to the director, with authority to run controlled experiments on review and funding mech- anisms and to drive change across the organization.” (p. 15)

“Require universities and community colleges to embed practical technical training and externships into STEM curricula. Let hands-on experience and industry credentials count toward degrees. Reform accreditation, admissions, and tenure to reward real-world technical work alongside academic publication.” (p. 15)

“Establish national fellowships for skilled craftspeople, practitioner-in-residence programs embedding machinists and technicians alongside Ph.D. researchers, and portable industry-recognized credentials in advanced manufacturing and lab techniques.” (p. 15)

“Extend registered apprenticeships into science and technology fields. Adopt pay- for-performance funding models, scale Workforce Pell Grants, and back com- munity colleges as regional hubs of scientific and technical talent.” (p. 15)

“Expand regional innovation hubs, manufacturing institutes, and defense industrial base centers to anchor regional ecosystems. Drive coor- dinated efforts with local universities and national laboratories to build specializations and workforce pipelines. Pair these efforts with the reshor- ing of advanced manufacturing” (p. 15)

“Fully fund and expand the Gen- esis Mission as America's flagship AI for science initiative, integrating su- percomputers, AI models, scientific instruments, and datasets across national laboratories to double the productivity and impact of U.S. science within a decade.” (p. 17)

“Enforce reproducibility, trans- parency, data sharing, and falsifiability across all federally funded research through the Restoring Gold Standard Science Executive Order, creating a trusted foundation for AI-powered discovery.” (p. 17)

“Invest in AI- enabled verification systems, open standards, and continuous replication mechanisms. Set standards to enable the development of machine- auditable replication packages, and reward those who replicate or disprove influential scientific results.” (p. 17)

“Focus investments in robotics and automated laboratories, leveraging industry demand and federal R&D to ensure our scientific equipment industrial base is built on the world's best hardware and software and leads the charge in the coming scientific revolution.” (p. 18)

“Begin the transition to AI-native institu- tions, including through faster and more open forms of scientific publica- tion, more granular credit attribution, and new market mechanisms that direct resources to problems where breakthroughs matter most.” (p. 18)

“In May 2025, the President signed four executive orders overhauling Ameri- ca's nuclear regulatory framework: imposing an 18-month deadline for the NRC to revise its regulations, capping licensing timelines for new construction appli- cations, creating expedited approval pathways for reactors already tested by DOE or DOW, and directing the NRC to weigh the benefits of nuclear energy to eco- nomic and national security in its regulatory decisions. Companion orders direct DOE to facilitate five gigawatts of power uprates to existing reactors, begin con- struction on ten new large reactors by 2030, and invoke Defense Production Act authority to secure domestic nuclear fuel supply chains.” (p. 55)

“The Executive Order establishing the Mission directs DOE to build the American Science and Security Platform, which will connect our most powerful supercomputers, AI systems, and scientific in-struments and datasets into a single discovery engine designed to double the pro-ductivity and impact of American science and engineering within a decade.” (p. 80)

“The Mission has therefore directed DOE to identify at least 20 science and technology challenges of national importance, spanning advanced manufactur-ing, biotechnology, critical materials, nuclear fission and fusion, quantum information science, and semiconductors. Challenges will be reviewed annually to reflect both scientific progress and national priorities.” (p. 80)

“The American Science Cloud, a cornerstone of the Mission's infrastruc-ture, will empower the National Labs to curate and distribute DOE's AI-ready scientific data for the broader research community and unlock data hidden be-hind government bureaucracy.” (p. 81)

“The Mission will address this directly, creating new funding op-portunities for dataset curation and building new incentives to partake in these curation efforts across our science agencies.” (p. 81)

“In May 2025, the President signed an executive order, Restoring Gold Stan-dard Science, to begin addressing this dysfunction. The order establishes prin-ciples to govern all federally funded research: reproducibility; transparency; communication of error and uncertainty; collaboration across disciplines; skep-ticism of assumptions; falsifiability of hypotheses; unbiased peer review; accep-tance of negative results; and freedom from conflicts of interest.” (p. 83)

“This means establishing open APIs and interoperability standards that allow verification capabilities to plug into journal submission systems, grant re-porting platforms, and private-sector AI research tools; standards for replication packages that ensure computational research arrives in machine-auditable form; and prizes for successfully replicating or disproving influential papers.” (p. 84)

“Rising to this moment of need, NIH has launched a new, agency-wide initia-tive to elevate replication and reproducibility studies, identifying critical research and infrastructure needs to advance rigorous findings that are verifiable and transparently shared.” (p. 84)

“In their FY 2028 budget submissions to OMB, agencies should seek to increase the share of foundational research relative to later-stage development.” (p. 105)

“Agencies are encouraged to pri-oritize both the absolute level and the relative share of funding directed within budget guidance levels to the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, materials sci-ence, space science, etc.), computer science, and supporting engineering and mathematical disciplines, especially within national security-relevant research portfolios.” (p. 105)

“Fusion: Demonstration of commercial fusion power in the United States by the mid-2030s, following the Department of Energy's Fusion Science & Technology Roadmap; • Space: Return of Americans to the lunar surface by 2028, the construction of a lunar base, the National Initiative for American Space Nuclear Power, and the development of a responsive and adaptive national security space architecture, pursuant to Executive Order 14369;” (p. 108)

“Agencies should propose investments that support domain-specific scientific foundation models that enable high-fidelity simulations of natural phenomena and accelerate scientific discovery across Genesis Mission's National S&T Challenge areas, including advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, critical materi-als, nuclear fission and fusion, quantum information science, and semi-conductors, and coordinate with other agencies as applicable.” (p. 109)

“Agencies should build on the Genesis Mission by proposing investments in robotics, automated laboratories, modernization of user facilities to operate within closed-loop AI scientific workflows, and autonomous control of large-scale experi-ments in which AI systems generate hypotheses, conduct experiments, interpret results, and iterate in real time.” (p. 110)

“In particular, agencies should propose investments in mid-scale instrumentation, fully funded within a fiscal year and aligned with Ad-ministration priorities, given it has historically been underfunded relative to its scientific importance; advanced compute; and sustained operating support for user facilities and shared platforms.” (p. 111)

“Agencies should prioritize funding for manufacturing R&D across strategic technologies with the goal of building domestic manufacturing capacity and supply chains to produce the next generation of semiconductors, advanced ma-terials, biotechnology, nuclear technologies, and robotics.” (p. 112)

“Agencies should develop proposals for the FY 2028 Budget that would expand the number of long-duration grants, ideally lasting five years or more, that give our best researchers the time and autonomy to pursue bold, ambitious proj-ects whose most important results may take years to emerge. These awards should be fully-funded in year one, with all resources earmarked upfront” (p. 114)

“Agencies should consider establishing or expanding, where authorized and consistent with available resources, flexible, low-friction "fast grants" to support prelimi-nary research, exploratory projects, and time-sensitive work. These pro-grams should feature simplified applications requiring just a few pages of writing, rapid review timelines of under one month” (p. 114)

“Agencies should expand their use of prizes and challenges to advance national missions. To maximize partici-pation from nontraditional teams, agencies should emphasize outcome-based goals rather than prescribing specific methods. Prizes should target at least a 3:1 leverage of private to Federal investment” (p. 114)

“Agencies should therefore anchor selec-tion processes in criteria predictive of STEM success, such as reasoning assessments, domain competitions, engineering portfolios, and technical work, rather than relying on self-selection, essays, institutional referrals, or polish and credentials. Agencies should leverage merit-based identifica-tion mechanisms that cover as many people as possible (e.g., SAT scores or other standardized quantitative assessments) to find overlooked talent.” (p. 116)

“Where appro-priate, agencies should support K-12 STEM enrichment opportunities, such as residential math and science programs and Olympiad-style com-petitions, that immerse high-ability students in advanced S&T environ-ments and direct their ambitions to the hardest open questions.” (p. 116)

“Agencies should establish meta-science capabilities that evaluate what programs actually work and drive organization-wide reforms. Core responsibilities should include conduct-ing research on how factors such as funding mechanisms, peer review, and publication practices affect scientific outcomes; piloting novel funding mechanisms and institutional models; and evaluating pilots and informing agency-wide portfolio management.” (p. 118)

“In collaboration with industry, academia, and philanthropy, agencies should maintain "gap maps" that identify unmet needs, duplicated efforts, and emerging opportunities. Gap maps should directly inform portfolio construction” (p. 118)

“Agencies should reduce administrative burdens in the grantmaking and research process to maximize the impact of taxpayer-funded science. This includes clarifying requirements for the research community and eliminating overcompliance beyond what Fed-eral regulations and statutes require.” (p. 119)

“Agencies should structure funding opportunities, within existing resources, to prioritize support for initiatives that incorpo-rate meaningful non-government cost share from industry, philanthropy, State and local governments, or international partners.” (p. 120)

“In addition, within 90 days of this memorandum, the head of each agency with $3 billion or more in FY 2026 budget authority for R&D shall submit to the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (APST) and Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB Director) an action plan describing how the agency intends to implement the program implementation guidance set forth in the "R&D Priority Practices" section of this memorandum.” (p. 122)