I'm not opposed to alternative research organizations, funding structures, etc. But this does seem like a fairly direct attempt to shift funding from universities into private firms, a funding structure which IMHO is much easier to abuse.
> Tech Labs will provide entrepreneurial teams of proven scientists the freedom and flexibility to pursue breakthrough science at breakneck speed, without needing to frequently stop and apply for additional grant funding with each new idea or development.
This sounds great, but has a few issues. #1 only funding proven scientists risks destroying the training pipeline which is the crucial edge that the US has over any other country in the world. It's also something that can and should be applied to universities as well. Lab groups or centers should be given much more runway than they are now.
> coordinated, interdisciplinary teams to achieve success
There are two places where this can really happen today: universities and national labs. The NSF should be fostering more cross-disciplinary and product engineering research across different departments at universities which already have deep talent pools across the board.
> The Tech Labs initiative will support full-time teams of researchers, scientists, and engineers
This sounds great, more university labs should have full-time researchers attached. Research Software Engineers are one somewhat common example in the computational sciences.
In general I support the overall mission statement but I am extremely wary of this kind of rhetoric from this government. They have failed to walk the walk on the sciences in any domain. This seems like a Trojan horse to transfer more money from the research apparatus into industry.