President Biden promised to reinvigorate American science. After a tumultuous four years in which a populist upsurge, a bombastic president, and the worst public health crisis in a century had pushed the social contract between science and the public to the breaking point, he pledged to restore science to a place of preeminence in the federal government. Yet now, barely over a year into the Biden administration, the president’s science policy agenda is imploding. And it’s not — or not only — because of COVID-19, but because of poor leadership.
In the beginning, there were grand aspirations. Once in office, Biden unveiled a budget that would inject hundreds of billions of dollars into U.S. federal scientific institutions. He announced a “cancer moonshot.” He proposed two new federal science agencies — ARPA-H and ARPA-C, modeled on the Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) — devoted to biomedical and climate research, respectively. And he established a task force to “protect the integrity of government science.”