By Adrian Cho
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is reorganizing its scientific efforts by establishing new offices for types of research favored by the White House. A two-paragraph press release and revised organizational chart issued on 20 November announced the launch of an Office of Fusion and an Office of Artificial Intelligence and Quantum. DOE provided no further details, but the move worries scientists. The new offices could be formed by carving pieces out of DOE’s storied Office of Science, the United States’s largest funder of the physical sciences and its builder of big facilities from x-ray sources to atom smashers.
Observers say the change suggests the Office of Science, which has an $8.2 billion annual budget and funds everything from biofuels research to particle physics, could shrink and effectively become DOE’s office of misfit research. “We can’t abandon the rest of science,” warns one longtime DOE observer who requested anonymity to protect relations with the agency.
On 24 November, President Donald Trump underscored his administration’s emphasis on artificial intelligence by signing an executive order to launch the Genesis Mission, a national effort “to unleash a new age of AI-accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century.” Genesis will be led by DOE Under Secretary for Science Dario Gil. In a four-page open letter to the DOE research community, Gil, a computer scientist, calls for “an integrated science and security platform connecting the world’s best supercomputers, AI systems, and next-generation quantum computers to the most exquisite scientific instruments in the nation” to create “the most complex and powerful scientific instrument ever built.”
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Some observers question how dramatic the reorganization will be. Forming the new offices may be a “performative” gesture designed to show the department embraces the White House’s priorities, says one former Office of Science senior manager. “But on the ground, how much is really going to change?” Still, he adds, “I think the marginalization of the Office of Science is real.”
Indeed, for 80 years, Democrats and especially Republicans have acknowledged the importance of the kind of basic research DOE pursues, says Robert Rosner, a physicist at the University of Chicago and former director of Argonne National Laboratory. The White House’s emphasis on hot technologies such as AI may break with that tradition, Rosner says. “The compact made during World War II that the federal government has to play the leading role in maintaining science in the United States, that’s coming into question,” he says. “And that’s really concerning.”