The Department of Energy?s (DOE) Office of Science (SC) and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are conducting research into the potential value of applying emerging knowledge discovery and text visualization technologies to enhance the management and assessment of large Federal basic science research portfolios. This research represents the convergence of advances in information technology, new requirements for government accountability, and SC?s abiding commitment to improve the management of its basic science portfolio. Our current research uses SPIRE (Spatial Paradigm for Information Retrieval and Exploration), a suite of software tools developed by PNNL that allows users to identify and explore relationships and trends among documents in very large text data sets. This is a fundamentally new approach to portfolio management that has the potential to enable the user to comprehend the scope and content of a large basic research portfolio while minimizing the need to read individual project descriptions.