ASU center committed to advancing New American University’s model for science funding in US

In Washington, D.C., a new movement is taking shape — one aimed at reimagining how America funds its scientific future.

At the forefront is Arizona State University's Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes, leading the charge to strengthen research and development nationwide.

“Right now, there’s a crisis in science,” said CSPO Associate Director Mahmud Farooque in an interview following the consortium’s first workshop in the “Rethinking America’s Social Compact with Science” series.

A lively crowd of science policy experts from federal agencies, think tanks, foundations and universities filled the second-floor room on Nov. 4 at ASU's Barrett & O’Connor Center in D.C. to discuss innovative ways that the country could continue to pay for the R&D that has made America the most powerful economy in the world.

“ASU is trying to respond to that with an idea of a 'New American Science,'” Farooque said.

The event explored the “social contract” of science — the implicit agreement that defines the rights, responsibilities and balance of power between science and society in a democracy. For decades, scientists have received public funding and a degree of autonomy in exchange for delivering social benefits. But this arrangement has recently come under intense scrutiny. 

There have always been opposing views on what science should be concerned with, what kind of science should be funded, and even who would own the patents that would result from scientific discoveries.

G. Pascal Zachary, biographer and historian of Vannevar Bush, an American engineer known for his role in the Manhattan Project and the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II, reflected on Bush’s thoughts on the social contract with science and the former president's legacy that laid the groundwork for the National Science Foundation.

“Perhaps Bush's most durable invention, and this does derive a bit from World War I, was the research contract, whereby scientists and technologists were judged by government accountants, most importantly, not on their outcomes but on their efforts,” said Zachary.

For Bush, the quality of the people doing the work trumped any models they developed and any process design when it came to the structure that creates science policies.

“That was the linchpin of Bush’s NSF. He did not trust the generals and the admirals to do it, and, in a revealing personal ambition, after the creation of the Department of Defense in 1947, Bush asked to become the Secretary of Defense,” Zachary shared. “He did not ask (President) Truman to become head of NSF, since his passion was for military research. Of the two, he thought military was more important and where his talents would be best applied.”

Bhaven Sampat, an economist of innovation policy at Johns Hopkins University, spoke about the somewhat different perspective of Harley Kilgore.

Kilgore, a U.S. senator from West Virginia and “self-proclaimed ignoramus about science,” was primarily concerned about the economic consequences of scientific research and about the potential for scientific breakthroughs to concentrate wealth and power in monopolies and big firms that could afford to underwrite research on their own.

“His initial work, even during World War II, was about monopolization and its negative effects on wartime production, rather than wartime research,” Sampat explained.

For Sampat, there were five key differences between Kilgore and Bush:

• Planning: Kilgore wanted to target research to specific socioeconomic outcomes to solve problems, whereas Bush considered basic research to be too unpredictable to focus on specific outcomes and thought that science contributed to human freedom and creative expression.
• Related control: Kilgore wanted external control of science because it served the public interest. Bush argued that scientists themselves should be in control.
• Funding: Kilgore believed in funding not just basic research but client research and wanted to guarantee broad geographic distribution of NSF funding through formula-based equations. Bush’s scale of enterprise was much smaller and more focused on basic research.
• Social science: Kilgore advocated for supporting social science research, while Bush viewed social science more skeptically and believed in focusing more on “pure” science.
• Patents: Critically, Kilgore believed that patents resulting from public-sector funding should be held by the public. Bush believed that these patents should be held by government contractors.

“But we need to go beyond the Bush-Kilgore divide,” Sampat stressed. “The question is: What have we learned in the last 75 to 80 years?”

As policy director for the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Dahlia Sokolov helps lead the legislative and oversight strategy on federal research and innovation policy for agencies including the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

With more than 21 years on the committee, Sokolov has seen firsthand the evolution in how policy is developed — witnessing who is “at the table” during hearings and how that has changed. In 2020, she helped play a role in the NSF for the Future Act, which proposed creating a new directorate at NSF and more than doubling funding through fiscal year 2026.

“As we were trying to think about our own reauthorization bill for the National Science Foundation, we agreed it was time, in fact, to take a step back and reassess,” Sokolov said. “Not just do the same old thing with the usual suspects in terms of what an authorization will look like, but take a step back and reimagine what we want out of the National Science Foundation during this century.”

Sokolov observed how geographic distribution is critically important in the growth of scientific investment among various innovation hubs across the country and how this investment powers regional economic growth.

“When we talk about geographic distribution, it doesn't mean that every institution in every state across the country is going to be an MIT. I think it's about building regional capacity based on regional strengths, regional needs, regional workforce and so on,” Sokolov said.

Looking back at the origins of the social compact and American science funding, the consortium’s director, Arthur Daemmrich, traced how the government’s role has evolved when it comes to centralizing oversight and efficiency.

During and after World War I, most of the government funding came through contracts given to a highly trusted community. But as science quickly evolved, this funding arrangement became inadequate for the task.

“Starting in the early 1800s, government funding was turnkey for new technologies, including canals, the telegraph, a national rail network and rural electrification,” Daemmrich said. “But the government historically was not as involved in diffusion and uptake of new technology as we see today.”

For Daemmrich, these lessons in history shed light on some of the recurring challenges the government faces today — ones that the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes want to face head-on through its “Rethinking America’s Social Compact with Science” series.

The newly launched series will include expert dialogues that engage federal agencies, research institutes and think tanks to reexamine the way institutions fund research and translate discovery into a national benefit.

CSPO then aims to host parallel sets of community-based conversations utilizing this same dialogue model in Arizona, West Virginia and Massachusetts.

“The first step to design what we call a large public forum is listening,” Farooque said when describing plans for summer 2026. “Then we are going to start sharing out the outcomes to see different possible ways forward.”