For nearly eighty years, American science policy has lived under the shadow of a single idea: that scientific progress depends on insulating scientists from politics. In 1945, Vannevar Bush’s report Science, the Endless Frontier argued that if government funded basic research and allowed the “free play of free intellects,” discoveries would eventually diffuse into society and produce public benefit.
That idea built the postwar research system and shaped institutions like the National Science Foundation. But it also created a misleading story about how American science actually works.
Vannevar Bush won the battle. Harley Kilgore won the war.
Kilgore, the West Virginia senator who clashed with Bush over the design of the postwar research system, believed that publicly funded science should serve public aims more directly, such as regional development, industrial innovation, and the widespread distribution of benefits. His institutional proposals were rejected in the 1940s. However, the underlying rationale kept resurfacing, gradually influencing American science policy.
The reason becomes clear when you step back from the post-1945 perspective. The tension between producing knowledge and using it did not start with Bush and Kilgore. It runs throughout the entire history of the American republic. The Constitution itself ties intellectual property to the “progress of science and useful arts.” Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark west not just to explore, but to gather information for governance and economic growth. The Morrill Act of 1862 created land-grant universities focused on agriculture and the mechanical arts. “Science for useful purposes” was not a late addition to American science. It was present from the beginning.
What changed after World War II was not the disappearance of this tension but the way it was managed.
Over time, Kilgore’s logic was reintroduced into the system through a series of reforms. The Bayh–Dole Act of 1980 encouraged universities to commercialize federally funded discoveries in response to economic stagnation and international competition. Engineering Research Centers in the 1980s aimed to foster closer collaboration between universities and industry. The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 once again increased federal science funding but largely framed it around technological competitiveness and national security.
None of these reforms replaced the earlier system. They accumulated on top of it.
The outcome is a path-dependent scientific enterprise that aims to advance discovery, promote commercialization, enhance national security, support regional development, and maintain global technological leadership. Each goal is valid. Collectively, they create a system that is powerful but increasingly challenging to govern coherently.
At the same time, the nature of science itself has changed.
Bush’s model assumed a world of small research groups led by individual investigators. Today’s discoveries come from large collaborations involving universities, corporations, and governments across continents. The CRISPR patent battles—linking UC Berkeley, the Broad Institute, MIT, Harvard, and international partners—show how scientific discovery now happens within a complex ecosystem of intellectual property law, venture capital, and geopolitical rivalry.
As science grew, so did its administrative structures. Each attempt to make science more accessible to society—through commercialization, accountability standards, technology transfer offices, security reviews, and regional innovation initiatives—generated new middlemen. Program managers, compliance offices, and technology-transfer bureaucracies multiplied.
What began as a wall separating science from society gradually became a system of doors.
And every door required a gatekeeper.
Today, those gatekeepers have become the political targets. Critics increasingly depict the scientific establishment as an insulated elite system: culturally narrow, politically aligned, and structurally exclusionary. The populist backlash that has followed is less about democratizing science than about struggling to control its institutional chokepoints. Universities and research agencies now find themselves caught between competing claims about who truly represents “the public.”
Under these conditions, returning to the status quo isn’t feasible. Nor is marginal reform likely to be successful. Rebuilding the same structures, or simply replacing the gatekeepers, will only recreate the same tensions.
To envision a different direction, it helps to look back at a technological debate from ten years ago.
Around 2017, autonomous vehicles were widely expected to replace human drivers entirely. Industry forecasts promised a transformation similar to the shift from horse-drawn transport to the internal combustion engine. However, participatory technology assessment exercises conducted at that time revealed something striking: many members of the public preferred conditional automation—what engineers call Level-3 autonomy. They did not want to give up control completely. Instead, they wanted systems that assisted human judgment while still allowing them to intervene.
Looking back, that preference seems surprisingly foresighted. Fully autonomous vehicles are still out of reach, and transportation systems are shifting toward hybrid setups that blend automation with human supervision.
The future of artificial intelligence may look similar.
AI will not simply replace humans, nor will it leave social institutions untouched. Instead, it will reshape work, governance, and everyday life through a long transition in which human judgment and machine capability coexist uneasily.
Our future may be Level 3.
The challenge for democratic societies won’t be stopping technological change but creating institutions that can manage it. That means building infrastructure for public involvement with science and technology on a large scale, such as participatory science, participatory technology assessment, and processes that let citizens discuss technological futures alongside experts.
There are already signs of what this could look like. In 2014, NASA used participatory technology assessment to involve citizens in discussions about whether the agency should pursue a mission to redirect a near-Earth asteroid. Participants from two locations in the United States debated the scientific, economic, and ethical implications of planetary defense. The exercise did not replace expert judgment. Instead, it complemented it, showing how citizens consider risks, benefits, and public values when faced with frontier technologies.
That type of engagement may become crucial as societies face the governance challenges brought by artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and climate intervention technologies.
If reform is to start anywhere, it might not be in Washington, Boston, or Silicon Valley, the ecosystems that is most deeply connected to the current system. Genuine institutional experimentation could arise at the state level, where science policy can more directly link with regional economies and communities.
Two and a half centuries of American history suggest that the tension between knowledge and use will never disappear.
Bush won the battle. Kilgore won the war.
The next settlement between science and democracy will depend on whether we can build institutions capable of navigating a Level-3 world where expertise and democratic engagement evolve together.
The endless frontier was discovery.
The next frontier is participation.