The Trump administration announced the first round of 'Genesis Mission' grants on Thursday, pumping $5 billion into 278 AI-driven science projects across fields like drug discovery, energy, and robotics. The White House described the effort as 'comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project,' which is a bold comparison given that the Manhattan Project actually produced a working atomic bomb and not, say, a chatbot that can write mediocre poetry.

At roughly the same time, Trump's science adviser Michael Kratsios - a man whose scientific credentials consist of working at a Peter Thiel hedge fund - was on Capitol Hill selling lawmakers on 'A New Golden Age' of American science. This golden age, apparently, involves prioritizing artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuclear energy while telling life sciences to take a hike. The vision is laid out in a lengthy policy document that positions itself as a modern successor to Vannevar Bush's 1945 report 'Science, the Endless Frontier,' which helped create the postwar federal research system. But where Bush championed open-ended basic research, this new manifesto favors a 'goal-oriented and results-driven approach' that sounds a lot like a Silicon Valley pitch deck.

Researchers are not impressed. 'You cannot use venture capital to force breakthroughs while virtually already selling the patent,' said Claes de Vreese, a professor at the University of Amsterdam. The plan proposes shifting support from universities to individual scientists and giving private companies - including Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, which are chipping in compute and AI credits - a larger role in directing research. Political appointees would also get more power to block grants they disagree with, which seems like a great way to ensure that only politically convenient science gets funded.

Critics point out that the agenda is riddled with contradictions. For instance, it calls for radically reducing support for 'life sciences' while increasing support for 'foundational research in the biological sciences' - two categories that, as anyone who has taken Biology 101 can tell you, overlap quite a bit. The White House has not defined either term, leaving researchers to guess which fields will get the axe.

Then there's the AI focus. 'Right now the problem is that most science done by AI is absolute slop,' said Andreas Karch, a physics professor at UT Austin. He warned that we could end up with 'a few major insights buried under mountains of slop, and the number of people with the experience and knowledge to tell the two apart may rapidly dwindle.' That's a problem, because those people are trained at the same universities whose funding is being slashed.

Jason Shepherd, a neurobiology professor at the University of Utah, acknowledged that some proposals - like reducing administrative burdens and speeding up grantmaking - have broad appeal. But he said the document looks like it 'was written by political appointees without any real consultation with scientists.' Harvard's Jeffrey Flier was blunter: 'This is completely insane as an approach to reforming US science funding.'

Meanwhile, the grants arrive amid sweeping cuts and institutional upheaval across the federal funding system. Researchers say it's hard to square the promise of a 'golden age' with the reality of cancelled grants and dismantled agencies. 'This looks like a golden age for specific groups and likely for tech and venture capitalists,' de Vreese said. For everyone else? Not so much.

As Carl Bergstrom, a biology professor at the University of Washington, put it: 'This plan undercuts much of that role, and will have disastrous effects that will ricochet throughout the US economy in years to come.' But hey, at least the AI will be very busy generating slop.