“Anthony Fauci finally found a camera he didn't like. Under questioning from the Senate Homeland Security Committee on July 29, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and onetime media darling invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid discussing his actions during the Covid-19 pandemic. The last smug gasp of the disgraced administrator startled even prominent Democrats. Sports commentator Stephen A. Smith was so embarrassed by Dr. Fauci's display that he used his show's monologue to apologize to NBA guard Kyrie Irving for having pilloried him for choosing not to take the Covid vaccine. Ashish Jha, President Biden's Covid response coordinator, declared after Dr. Fauci's disastrous Senate hearing that he believed the origin of the Covid outbreak was "more likely to have been a lab leak."
Dr. Fauci's refusal to answer any questions about the pandemic eerily mimics the tactics of his Communist Party collaborators in China, who have repeatedly blocked any international investigation into the origins of the outbreak. His silence denied transparency to millions of people who lost loved ones and livelihoods during the pandemic. In spite of his efforts to shirk accountability, Dr. Fauci has taught Americans plenty with the release of his diaries by Sen. Rand Paul, Homeland Security Committee chairman.
Those diaries show a venal man (who once claimed that to criticize him was to criticize science itself) obsessed with celebrity, his press coverage and his own stature. He complains about Mr. Jha -- "when it comes to things like the White House press conference and the Sunday shows it is very clear that he is promoting himself above me." He gushes about how "charming, natural, fun and amazingly beautiful" Julia Roberts was at a virtual award ceremony. And he makes clear that he viewed the worst pandemic in a century as a well-deserved star turn for himself.
Worse, the diaries reveal Dr. Fauci's partisanship: basking in adulation at Democratic town halls while dripping with disdain for Republicans asking tough questions: "As expected, several Republican senators got a bit snarky with me asking questions about the origins of COVID-19."
These Fauci files provide rare insight into the behavior and mindset of someone at the top of our nation's scientific establishment. More important, they reveal a rot that goes deeper than any one official.
The National Institutes of Health, which Dr. Fauci helped run, spent more than $40 billion on research in 2024 -- the largest source of federal research dollars outside the Pentagon. It employs and supports many talented scientists and dedicated public servants. To restore the faith in this institution, Republicans have a task: Propose solutions that restore dynamism to American science.
This effort couldn't come at a better time, as the ground is shifting under academia. AI models are driving Nobel Prize-winning work in chemistry and cracking advanced math problems. China has built a scientific-industrial establishment that threatens to surpass our own. New technologies from spaceflight and deep-sea mining to quantum computing make inventing and deploying new innovations increasingly critical to the global balance of prosperity and power.
For a reform agenda worth rallying around, look to "Science: A New Golden Age," a report recently released by White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director Michael Kratsios. Advocating an overhaul of America's scientific establishment, the report doubles as a condemnation of the biomedical research establishment: "Despite massive increases in biomedical funding since the 1990s, the rate of significant breakthroughs appears to have slowed and drug approvals have flatlined. Researchers today often spend half their time on paperwork and administrative tasks, a burden worsened by expanding federal and university bureaucracies that further reduce funding available for actual science."
The report catalogs the ways institutions and funding mechanisms aren't fit for 21st-century research and development. It points out the rising age of NIH grant awardees: 51 in 2008, up from 39 in 1980 and well above the average age of Nobel Prize winners, 41, during the same period. It notes that some grantees don't receive funding until 20 months after the application deadline. It condemns how, in debates around Covid-19, scientific officials chose "blind consensus over informed dissent."
Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison and physicist Michael Nielsen have made similar points, positing in a 2018 Atlantic essay that discoveries have slowed because "science has remained too focused on established fields, where it's becoming ever harder to make progress." Mr. Collison, with economist Tyler Cowen, highlighted in 2019 how "present funding mechanisms do not focus enough on research autonomy and risk taking."
Mr. Kratsios seeks to reinvigorate those mechanisms. He advocates new tools such as golden tickets that empower individual reviewers to champion proposals that fail to win consensus support and prizes like the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency challenge that kicked off progress in autonomous driving. He calls for increasing collaboration and talent flows among academia, national laboratories and industry. And he highlights the need to deregulate how breakthroughs -- from new types of nuclear energy to promising medical treatments -- go from projects to products.
Beijing builds nuclear plants at a clip unimaginable in the U.S. and increasingly accounts for more than half of new oncology clinical trials.
Only deregulation can ensure that the future is both invented and built in the U.S. rather than discovered in America but made in China.
The administration should put real dollars behind Mr. Kratsios's proposals.
Announce challenge prizes in critical technology areas: robotics, nuclear power, quantum computing, semiconductors and batteries.
Work with Congress, regulatory agencies and industry to ensure that prize winners can rapidly gain approval for, scale and commercialize their discoveries. Fund runners-up too so they can spend the next decade pursuing research without pandering to government officials. Let the results speak for themselves.
The scientific establishment may react negatively even to a modest version of this plan. That is because deregulation, new funding mechanisms and empowering individual scientists would curb the authority of Dr. Fauci's fellow functionaries, these aging bureaucrats in government and universities who set themselves up as the gate keepers of science.
Removing the gate keepers is the key. As Dr. Fauci made clear in his diaries and with his sullen refusal to answer questions, today's guardians of old paradigms serve their own interests rather than any national interest. Shaking up the institutions that empowered Dr. Fauci would serve the country well, even if it wouldn't get Mr. Kratsios invited to the swanky Washington galas that once showered Dr. Fauci with awards.
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Mr. Gallagher, a Journal contributor, is head of defense at Palantir Technologies and a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute.” [1]
1. How to Salvage Science in Fauci's Wake. Gallagher, Mike. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 10 Aug 2026: A17.
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