The Center submitted a response to the request for information from Senators Heinrich and Rounds on the development of the American Science Acceleration Project (ASAP), a bipartisan initiative focused on accelerating scientific progress by strengthening the structural, computational, and institutional foundations of U.S. research.
To support that mission, we offer six recommendations for policymakers:
- Support Self-Driving Labs (SDLs): To increase scientific productivity, particularly in materials science, Congress should support the deployment of automated research facilities that combine AI and robotics to better support scientific experimentation.
- Redesign scientific workflows around human insight: Rather than focusing on keeping scientists at the center of the scientific workflow, Congress should prioritize the redesign of workflows to strategically offload core scientific tasks to machines, allowing human researchers to focus on designing inquiries, interpreting complex results, and generating new insights.
- Track AI adoption and workforce readiness: Congress should direct the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) to enhance its existing surveys to measure institutional uptake of AI tools and evaluate workforce proficiency in AI-for-science techniques.
- Fund converged knowledge repositories: Congress should support the creation of structured, AI-ready data platforms that integrate raw results, processed insights, and theoretical knowledge, helping both humans and machines access and reason with scientific data.
- Optimize compute resources for research and operations: Congress should go beyond expanding compute capacity. It should empower the scientific enterprise to balance the computing power used to run AI models with the power needed to advance the AI models themselves. Getting this balance right is essential to sustaining innovation for science. Congress should also promote interoperable frameworks that allow models, tools, and data formats to move seamlessly across research and operational settings, enabling faster adoption of breakthroughs and reducing duplication.
- Accelerate where it matters most: To cut time from discovery to deployment, Congress should strategically blend bold, domain-specific moonshots with cumulative gains across faster-moving fields, targeting acceleration where it delivers the greatest public value.
