Michael Kratsios: Trump's Science Agenda, Anti-Science Claims, Fauci's Damage, DEI & China

**David Friedberg** (0:00)
Is this administration anti-science?

**Michael Kratsios** (0:02)
We want to essentially double the scientific output of the United States.

**David Friedberg** (0:05)
Did we lose it, or did it lead to moments where you have Fauci?

**Michael Kratsios** (0:10)
That's a great question.

**David Friedberg** (0:11)
Are we in this moment, this populist moment right now in the West, where science and technology is viewed as a tool of the elite, and therefore it must be broken and destroyed?

**Michael Kratsios** (0:19)
That's what's most tragic.

**David Friedberg** (0:21)
That is a crazy, crazy fact. Has science stagnated in America, and what the heck is going on?
Michael Kratsios, welcome to the All-In Interview.

**Michael Kratsios** (0:46)
Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

**David Friedberg** (0:48)
So you are the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy here at the White House. Can you just tell me a little bit about what that role is? What do you do here?

**Michael Kratsios** (0:56)
Yeah, so the Office of Science and Technology Policy was created in the 60s to coordinate science and tech policy across the administration. So very unique to the US is that we don't have an agency that does science and technology. We have lots of agencies that do pieces of the science and technology enterprise. We have a National Science Foundation that does basic research. We have the Department of Energy that runs our national labs. The Department of War has extensive R&D programs like DARPA, for example. So the one office in the White House or in the administration broadly, that's able to coordinate all those efforts is the office that I run called OSTP.
We try to do is work with the president to set the national S&T agenda, and then ultimately implement that across all of our agencies.

**David Friedberg** (1:41)
You had this role before, is that right?

**Michael Kratsios** (1:44)
So last administration, I was the Chief Technology Officer of the United States. So if you think about OSTP, it does science and it does tech. And in Trump won, I ran the tech portfolio for the president.

**David Friedberg** (1:55)
So let me kick off by asking you, is this administration anti-science?

**Michael Kratsios** (1:59)
It is not anti-science. I think one of the things that I'm most proud of is the release of a new report a couple of weeks ago called Science, A New Golden Age. I think anyone who reads that report, I think what we will most likely see is administration that deeply cares about the American science and technology enterprise.
We really want the US to be the home for the next great scientific discoveries. We want to empower young scientists. We want to create an ecosystem that allows our greatest scientists to work on the hardest problems everywhere in the US.
And to us, we're doing everything we can to align all of our agencies, like I just mentioned, to be able to help that make a reality.

**David Friedberg** (2:33)
But going back, there's a poll I'm going to give you from Nature, which is one of the scientific journals. They polled 2,000 of their readers, which are all scientists.
86% supported Kamala Harris in the election, according to the poll, and Donald Trump polled at 6%. Why is that? What is going on with the perception of the president and this administration as being anti-science?

**Michael Kratsios** (2:59)
To me, I think that scientific community has lost its way over the last few decades. I think America has been the place of some of the most amazing scientific transformations in history, and the government has played an important role in a lot of them. If we look back and think about the Manhattan Project or Apollo, these are sort of seismic events that only the US government could bring together the ecosystem to achieve. And to be honest, I think over the last 15 or 20 years, I think science has been deeply and deeply politicized, and we no longer are asking sort of the very hard and important questions of, you know, what is the scientific method? How should we approach it? How should we be questioning, you know, some of these conclusions? And rather, you know, I think it's been dominated by kind of this dogma, and I think it really crescendoed and peaked in COVID, where suddenly, you know, there was a certain individual that, if you didn't agree with what he said, then suddenly you're anti-science.
And to me, I think that is the most anti-science conclusion you could ever make. And I really think we have to return back to the basics, and that's what we're trying to do in this administration.