The American Enterprise Institute has published an essay titled "Science Policy without Science or Policy," a critique that, on its face, targets the two pillars any functioning research enterprise requires: evidence and decision-making discipline. The title itself is the argument. The essay's core claim, embedded in those seven words, is that American science policy currently operates with neither rigorous analysis of what works nor a coherent framework for choosing among competing priorities.

AEI, a Washington-based free-market think tank founded in 1938, regularly publishes on federal research budgets, innovation economics, and the institutional design of agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. For R&D managers, this essay lands in an ongoing and consequential argument about how the United States decides the size and shape of its public research portfolio — decisions that flow directly into grant pipelines, university overhead rates, and the lab budgets of everyone reading this.

What is the critique?

The essay's title suggests a double indictment.

• "Without science": policy choices about research funding rest on assertion and precedent rather than on measured evidence about which investments actually produce returns, whether economic, scientific, or strategic.
• "Without policy": even where evidence exists, no genuine decision mechanism translates it into priorities — budgets increment, programs persist, and nothing closes.

This framing echoes a long-running debate among science-policy scholars. Critics across the political spectrum have noted for decades that federal research appropriations largely follow historical baselines rather than comparative assessments of opportunity. Defenders of the status counter that discovery resists quantification, and that attempts to metricize basic research misread how science produces value.

The AEI essay enters that argument from a market-oriented perspective, one that typically favors portfolio discipline, sunset provisions for underperforming programs, and skepticism toward across-the-board budget growth as a substitute for prioritization.

Why should R&D managers care?

Think-tank argumentation in Washington shapes the intellectual prelude to budget and authorization fights. Essays of this kind from institutions such as AEI, Brookings, or the Information Technology and Innovation Forum frequently surface later in congressional testimony, Office of Management and Budget guidance, or the justification documents that accompany agency appropriations.

For laboratory directors and university research administrators, the practical stakes include:

• Whether federal agencies face new pressure to justify existing program lines rather than only new initiatives.
• Whether overhead and indirect-cost recovery — perennial targets in prioritization debates — returns to the chopping block.
• Whether Congress adopts formal portfolio-review mechanisms that would force sunsetting or consolidation of long-standing research programs.

Each of these possibilities would alter grant planning horizons and institutional budget assumptions that currently extend three to five years in most federal awards.

What we cannot yet tell you

The publicly available summary of this essay contains its title and publication venue but not its full text, authorship, or the specific programs, agencies, or budget figures it addresses. We are not going to reconstruct those details, because inventing specifics that the essay may or may not contain would serve no reader who makes decisions on the basis of sources.

What can be said with confidence is the structural point: a major Washington think tank has put its institutional weight behind the proposition that the process by which the United States allocates public research funding fails on both analytical and procedural grounds. That proposition now sits in the policy discourse, where its traction — or lack of it — will become visible in the next budget cycle.

What happens next

Watch for three signals in coming months: whether the essay's argument appears in appropriations committee hearings, whether allied policy shops cite it in proposals for research-portfolio review, and whether agency leadership responds with defenses of current prioritization practice. If the critique gains traction, the first concrete manifestation would likely be a legislative proposal to require formal evaluation of existing federal research programs.

For now, the essay stands as a marker of where one part of the policy community believes the debate should go.