How to Rebuild US Science and Technology Policy From the Rubble of Trump 2.0

People and processes drive policy. This is the whole ballgame. It is the central acknowledgement of both Project 2025 and Year Zero: The Five Year Presidency. Process mastery is how the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) carved their way through the government in a matter of weeks at the beginning of the second Trump administration. Wonky policy regulations that rewrite how agencies and universities operate is how OMB Director Russell Vought plans to end American science as we know it.

The story of the 47th presidency is less about the specific policies DOGE wanted to enact and more a question about who owns what processes, what they want, and what they intend to do. Once you understand that, it’s relatively easy to understand how the current system functions and guess at its future trajectory. That same level of wonky process understanding is necessary for whoever intends to clear away the rubble and build something new.

During the Biden administration, I served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) as Assistant Director for International Science and Technology and later as Assistant Director for Research Security and Infrastructure. Shortly after accepting my position in 2021, I met with one of my European counterparts to discuss science diplomacy efforts in a new administration. The conversation was cordial, but their key message was one of urgency. A new White House would only have about ten months of working time before international partners started to prepare for the worst.

It had already taken about several months just to move officials into place. Fourteen months into a presidential administration, the political calendar takes over. As the primary season begins for midterm elections, legislators turn their attention away from governing and toward fundraising and winning their respective elections. Losing Congress would effectively grind new legislation to a halt, and officials shift their attention to protecting the continuity of their work, avoiding Congressional inquiries, and trying to keep things on the rails.

In its early months of the Biden administration, the White House faced additional challenges righting the ship, one of the most significant being a legacy of hard compromises that took hold in career government officials. They believed the actions that they took from 2017-2021 were not only necessary to protect their agencies, but also the right thing to do. This was especially true, they believed, if the previous administration were to return to power, and to protect themselves from far right attacks. A small handful of officials who developed the policies of the first Trump administration were called back into key White House roles, leading to further policy entrenchment. Such officials shouldn’t be blamed for doing what was necessary and right in extreme circumstances, but a new government must be able to turn the page toward a better future.

The stakes around getting process design right are much higher than they were in 2021. Under Trump, many government, scientific and technical agencies are in some state of ongoing collapse. Critical systems are failing to function. This is explicitly by design. If a new White House attempts to arrive and replicate the systems that were in place in 2009, 2017, and 2021, the next presidency is likely going to try to task agencies to do things that they’re currently incapable of doing, setting up that administration for even greater failure.

Unlike the Republican Party of 2021, there is no heir apparent for leadership of either party in the 2028 election, making it harder to predict what campaign and transition staff might favor. Rather than doing this behind the scenes, my team and I are choosing to do this in the open. We hope that others will read this and recognize the magnitude of the problem. By creating structures that can evaluate problems and troubleshoot solutions fast, it may be possible to set both the tone and pace for future recovery efforts. Nowhere is this more important than in many of the highly specialized technical functions within the US government.

Translating process into policy

Any new administration taking the reins in 2029 is going to have to deal with the above political realities and implementation constraints. If a Democratic administration (or a more national security-focused Republican) wins, there will be a strong impulse to restructure and re-organize the White House in a way that’s consistent with their prior experience, which centers power, placing much of process control in the office of the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (the National Security Advisor, or APNSA). A memorandum establishes the National Security Council and Policy Coordination Committees (PCCs, or IPCs in the Obama and Biden Administration). These committees coordinate policy at lower levels before moving them to deputies and principal officers for decisions.

PCCs and IPCs tend to take on lives of their own. For White House staff, the amount of coordination needed to launch one of these processes can take a significant amount of time and effort (unless there is already unanimity about the need for the activity). White House components like OSTP or the Council on Environmental Quality need to carefully navigate the other components to elevate their particular issue, or look for opportunities for other policy processes to act as delivery vehicles for their thoughts and ideas. Agencies quickly learn which White House components hold real power, and civil servants who are resistant to change often elevate their concerns directly to the more powerful components, stalling processes until officials figure things out.

In practice, the fact that these policy coordination processes are frequently owned (or at least blessed) by the APNSA means that national security matters are the controlling interest in most activities undertaken by the White House. This might be good policy if the government believes its highest priority is reordering society for a possible war with China as early as 2027, but it’s extremely bad policy if you’re trying to initiate a government-wide rebuilding effort after a prior administration tried to gut the government. It’s exceptionally bad policy if you’re trying to restore civil rights, which are frequently treated (at best) as nuisances by members of the national and homeland security establishment (often, and for good reason, referred to as “the Blob”).

To put it bluntly, if one White House component is unable to initiate a process because its staff can’t get a meeting with the APNSA due to ongoing crises or lack of subject matter interest, then their ability to initiate a process that will result in a consensus decision among agencies, like a presidential memorandum or an executive order, is limited or nonexistent. For science, this means that the controlling interest for getting a policy underway is the ability to establish proximity to security concerns—particularly China—and frequently at the expense of other important human and civil rights considerations. In other parts of the government where such concerns are more limited, and in constituent populations where skepticism of the military industrial complex is higher, this can also lead to policy ideas quickly being dismissed.

Other rate-limiting factors

It is tempting for a political appointee to assume that by virtue of their position and title that they will be able to bend the government to their will through their voice and direction alone. This gets much worse if you have political appointees with similar portfolios distributed throughout the White House and constantly bumping into one another. Herein lies the strength of consensus processes: there is very little that such an individual can do if the rest of the government won’t respond to your emails or show up to your meetings. In such circumstances, the most common objection offered by government officials is that proper policy and process isn’t being followed. The individuals whose voices are more controlling are frequently given greater deference by agencies. After all, those are the people who can order their bosses into a room to make decisions regardless of their level of subject matter expertise.

The way that the current administration, under Vought, has supplanted this is by dismantling other processes while centralizing ones where OMB has primary authority, backed up by its control over apportionments, spending plans, information collections, the federal acquisition regulations, and regulatory review. The concentration of this power in a single individual, particularly one whose primary objective is to traumatize and break the function of the rest of the government, is definitely something that will need to be addressed in future legislation with robust oversight and enforcement, ideally originating outside the Executive Branch. Giving Vought control of all federal grantmaking goes far beyond legislative intent, and presents a persistent danger to the independence of knowledge-producing institutions.

Enhanced implementation through delegation

It’s fair to say that many of the processes that were initiated in 2021 could have happened much faster with enhanced process knowledge, delegated authority, and a mandate to manage potential spoilers. This is not the fault of the officials selected for the effort, but rather an outcome of how the administration chose to organize itself and the timeline associated with the project’s leaders assuming office.

In early 2021, individuals involved in the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) recognized the degree to which the concentration of policy processes under the National Security Advisor meant that papers developed in previous administrations had trouble getting in front of the President in a timely fashion. They developed a proposal that would give the OSTP Director, now a cabinet member, the authority to turn the NSTC into a policy committee with the ability to convene principals and deputies, independently launch policy processes, and get decisions in front of the president for ultimate approval.

The concept did not exclude other White House components—in fact it sought to incorporate them into the processes but not necessarily grant them a controlling voice. Unfortunately, the concept fizzled because the OSTP director failed to recognize the value of forcing agencies into a system that they already understood.

A proliferation of process centers does not necessarily mean increased chaos or confusion. With adequate attention to process design, delegating authority to distinct power centers with deep subject matter expertise that can quickly troubleshoot problems is extremely desirable. Consider the clearance process within agencies.

In agencies where authority is centralized and designed to be focused under particular individuals, process choke points mean that individual approvers can become overwhelmed with the number of processes that they need to undertake. This slows clearance processes in those agencies to a crawl. Yet in the State Department, despite its much-maligned clearance process, I was able to complete policy pronouncements involving dozens of offices up to an approver in about a day for internal clearances, within a week if I needed other agencies. This was because subject matter experts were trusted to move between bureaus quickly in order to respond to global emergencies.

As an aside: the State Department’s demarche and cable-writing process can serve as a shadow White House policy process in that it (by necessity) requires the input of stakeholders throughout the government with the goal of getting agencies to speak to international actors with one voice. Granting that level of authority to a relatively junior officer at the State Department is perhaps not ideal, but recognizing the potential of such systems to quickly bring the rest of the government into alignment with a policy idea that can be communicated externally is something that should not be ignored.

In fact, I used such mechanisms to build support within the government for multibillion dollar projects and initiatives proposed under US, European, and Japanese science policy processes. The hope was that once sufficient political support had been aggregated through government agencies using a coherent set of talking points, then legislative, budget, and executive implementation policy processes could begin to move into place. The fact that such delegations to junior officials are possible (when backed by a strong governing vision, which we will address in a future paper) suggests that certain policy processes needn’t be centralized.

Final musings

No matter what policy prescriptions are developed for 2029 by a future administration, most are destined to fail without sufficient attention to rapidly and relentlessly managing interagency processes and implementation. Process improvement—particularly with respect to getting agencies to make concessions and surrendering power in the interest of protecting human rights and democratic values (in addition to building better services) is necessary if this country is going to chart a pathway out of its current madness. Worse, if the American science and technology policy communities develop their own playbook for 2029 and then see none of their ideas manifest in public policy, that will serve to further undermine their trust and faith in government and they will be less willing to participate in positive future change.

A future administration should recognize the advantages offered by effective delegation of decision-making authority to individuals throughout the government, avoid the trap of placing a person responsible for government-wide policy in every department and agency, and place trust in those who are motivated to effectuate positive change. There is extraordinary value in government agencies receiving high-level directives from the White House, especially as a new administration attempts to effectuate a better vision of a world that should be. Rebuilding science and technology policy after Trump 2.0 is going to require a lot more than describing finished systems. Policymakers are going to need tools to rapidly clear the rubble and build a better foundation for policy formulation upon which the future can be built.