Pilot microsite
How the United States funds, organises and learns from science is changing faster than the institutions built to do it. This is where FAS's work on metascience, open science and the federal research enterprise comes together.
Read the Metascience initiative on fas.orgFAS is eager to see implementation of metascience to measure what works, promote novel and effective research programs such as the work of the NSF X-Labs program, and create policy that enables the AI-enabled scientific enterprise to reach its full potential, safely.
We’ve identified the key ingredients of successful moonshots that meet the moment, and developed recommendations about what future efforts can and should look like.
Complex systems – from ecological to political to socio-technical – rarely change the way we expect.
The provisions in the proposed OMB rule create conflicts with existing federal requirements, remove the documented, reviewable standards that make termination and award decisions accountable, reduce transparency and…
The United States federal government invests nearly $150 billion annually in research and development. However, the supporting evidence generates wildly different estimates depending on the methods and available data.
A featured chart block, drawn in FAS blue, with the numbers readable as a table for anyone who can't see the chart.
Counted from fas.org's own publication records on 22 October 2026. The 2026 bar (hatched) runs to that date.
| Category | Number of publications |
|---|---|
| 2018 | 162 |
| 2019 | 109 |
| 2020 | 158 |
| 2021 | 169 |
| 2022 | 92 |
| 2023 | 204 |
| 2024 | 268 |
| 2025 | 222 |
| 2026 | 159 |