Conservative Group Unveils Sweeping Blueprint to Overhaul U.S. Science Policy

A conservative higher-education watchdog has released a wide-ranging manifesto calling for the federal government to rewrite how American science is funded, taught, regulated and litigated — from capping university overhead charges to eliminating the EPA’s authority over climate change.

The report, titled The Prometheus Program: How to Improve American Science, was published April 21 by the National Association of Scholars (NAS), a New York-based nonprofit that has spent nearly four decades criticizing what it views as ideological drift in higher education. Authored by NAS director of research David Randall, the document consolidates years of the group’s smaller, issue-specific reports into a single reform agenda spanning ten policy areas, including university finances, K-12 science standards, artificial intelligence, nuclear energy, genetics and mental health.

“American science has entered a troubling period,” the report states, arguing that fields long considered the “healthiest sector of the academy” are now vulnerable to the same ideological pressures NAS says have damaged the humanities and social sciences.

What the report recommends

The document is organized less like a research paper and more like a legislative wish list, pairing diagnosis with specific “policy priorities” in each section. Among its headline proposals:

• University funding. NAS wants Congress to cap university indirect-cost reimbursement rates at 10% of direct research costs — down from the 50-90% range it says many universities currently charge — and to eventually shift federal science funding away from institutional grants toward direct awards to individual researchers, modeled on an existing National Institutes of Health fellowship program.
• Reproducibility. Citing the well-documented “replication crisis” across fields from psychology to epidemiology, the report calls for federal agencies to fund only publicly accessible, preregistered research and to penalize disciplines that produce implausibly high rates of positive results.
• Depoliticization. The report urges the government to bar federal science agencies, and universities that receive federal grants, from maintaining diversity, equity and inclusion policies, arguing these have suppressed research findings that cut against DEI orthodoxy.
• Climate and environmental science. NAS calls for statutorily stripping the EPA of authority to regulate greenhouse gases and for barring the use of “social cost of carbon” analysis in federal cost-benefit reviews — reflecting the group’s broader argument that mainstream climate science research is insufficiently falsifiable and has been captured by activism.
• National security. The report proposes limiting universities’ dependence on foreign funding, targeting China specifically through restrictions tied to Confucius Institutes and China’s Thousand Talents recruitment program, and requiring that at least half of graduate students in fields like computer science and electrical engineering be U.S. citizens.
• Bioethics commissions. For fast-moving fields like gene editing, artificial wombs and “transhumanist” life-extension technology, the report calls for presidential commissions modeled on the George W. Bush-era Council on Bioethics to weigh in before policy is set.

Why it matters

The report lands at a moment when federal science policy is already in flux. NAS notes that the Trump administration had, by the report’s writing, already moved on several fronts it recommends — including a 2025 executive order on “Restoring Gold Standard Science” and administrative attempts to cap indirect-cost rates, some of which are tied up in federal litigation after universities sued to block them. The report frames itself as intellectual scaffolding for that broader push, explicitly stating it was drafted to extend and systematize reforms the administration had begun.

That timing is central to the document’s significance. Indirect-cost reimbursements alone represent billions of dollars a year in university revenue, and a permanent statutory cap — rather than an executive action vulnerable to court challenges — would represent a fundamental restructuring of how American research universities are financed. Similarly, the push to strip EPA authority over greenhouse gases would formalize, in law, a rollback of a regulatory foundation dating to the agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding.”

The report is also notable for what it reveals about the intellectual framework animating parts of the current push for federal science reform: a fusion of longstanding conservative critiques of academic bureaucracy and funding structures with newer culture-war fights over gender, DEI, and climate science, all packaged under the banner of restoring “objective,” falsifiable inquiry.

A contested framework

NAS presents its recommendations as an effort to protect empiricism and depoliticize science. But the report’s characterizations of settled scientific questions — describing mainstream climate science as failing basic tests of falsifiability, or advocating that gender dysphoria be treated purely as mental illness rather than through current clinical frameworks — align closely with positions disputed by many mainstream scientific and medical bodies. Critics of the reproducibility-crisis framing more broadly have also cautioned against conflating legitimate methodological reforms with wholesale defunding of research areas, such as environmental epidemiology, that inform public health regulation.

The full 100-plus-page report, along with links to NAS’s earlier, more narrowly focused publications on university finances and the replication crisis, is available on the organization’s website.