Blank Checks for Black Boxes: Bring AI Governance to Competitive Grants
The misuse of AI in federally-funded projects can risk public safety and waste taxpayer dollars.
The Trump administration has a pivotal opportunity to spot wasteful spending, promote public trust in AI, and safeguard Americans from unchecked AI decisions. To tackle AI risks in grant spending, grant-making agencies should adopt trustworthy AI practices in their grant competitions and start enforcing them against reckless grantees.
Federal AI spending could soon skyrocket. One ambitious legislative plan from a Senate AI Working Group calls for doubling non-defense AI spending to $32 billion a year by 2026. That funding would grow AI across R&D, cybersecurity, testing infrastructure, and small business support.
Yet as federal AI investment accelerates, safeguards against snake oil lag behind. Grants can be wasted on AI that doesn’t work. Grants can pay for untested AI with unknown risks. Grants can blur the lines of who is accountable for fixing AI’s mistakes. And grants offer little recourse to those affected by an AI system’s flawed decisions. Such failures risk exacerbating public distrust of AI, discouraging possible beneficial uses.
Oversight for federal grant spending is lacking, with:
- No AI-specific policies vetting discretionary grants
- Varying AI expertise on grant judging panels
- Unclear AI quality standards set by grantmaking agencies
- Little-to-no pre- or post-award safeguards that identify and monitor high-risk AI deployments.
Watchdogs, meanwhile, play a losing game, chasing after errant programs one-by-one only after harm has been done. Luckily, momentum is building for reform. Policymakers recognize that investing in untrustworthy AI erodes public trust and stifles genuine innovation. Steps policymakers could take include setting clear AI quality standards, training grant judges, monitoring grantee’s AI usage, and evaluating outcomes to ensure projects achieve their potential. By establishing oversight practices, agencies can foster high-potential projects for economic competitiveness, while protecting the public from harm.
Challenge and Opportunity
Poor AI Oversight Jeopardizes Innovation and Civil Rights
The U.S. government advances public goals in areas like healthcare, research, and social programs by providing various types of federal assistance. This funding can go to state and local governments or directly to organizations, nonprofits, and individuals. When federal agencies award grants, they typically do so expecting less routine involvement than they would with other funding mechanisms, for example cooperative agreements. Not all federal grants look the same—agencies administer mandatory grants, where the authorizing statute determines who receives funding, and competitive grants (or “discretionary grants”), where the agency selects award winners. In competitive grants, agencies have more flexibility to set program-specific conditions and award criteria, which opens opportunities for policymakers to structure how best to direct dollars to innovative projects and mitigate emerging risks.
These competitive grants fall short on AI oversight. Programmatic policy is set in cross-cutting laws, agency-wide policies, and grant-specific rules; a lack of AI oversight mars all three. To date, no government-wide AI regulation extends to AI grantmaking. Even when President Biden’s 2023 AI Executive Order directed agencies to implement responsible AI practices, the order’s implementing policies exempted grant spending (see footnote 25) entirely from the new safeguards. In this vacuum, the 26 grantmaking agencies are on their own to set agency-wide policies. Few have. Agencies can also set AI rules just for specific funding opportunities. They do not. In fact, in a review of a large set of agency discretionary grant programs, only a handful of funding notices announced a standard for AI quality in a proposed program. (See: One Bad NOFO?) The net result? A policy and implementation gap for the use of AI in grant-funded programs.
Funding mistakes damage agency credibility, stifle innovation, and undermines the support for people and communities financial assistance aims to provide. Recent controversies highlight how today’s lax measures—particularly in setting clear rules for federal financial assistance, monitoring how they are used, and responding to public feedback—have led to inefficient and rights-trampling results. In just the last few years, some of the problems we have seen include:
- The Department of Housing and Urban Development set few rules on a grant to protect public housing residents, letting officials off the hook when they bought facial recognition cameras to surveil and evict residents.
- Senators called for a pause on predictive policing grants, finding the Department of Justice failed to check that their grantees’ use of AI complied with civil rights laws—the same laws on which the grant awards were conditioned.
- The National Institute of Justice issued a recidivism forecasting challenge which researchers argued “incentivized exploiting the metrics used to judge entrants, leading to the development of trivial solutions that could not realistically work in practice.”
Any grant can attract controversy, and these grants are no exception. But the cases above spotlight transparency, monitoring, and participation deficits—the same kinds of AI oversight problems weakening trust in government that policymakers aim to fix in other contexts.
Smart spending depends on careful planning. Without it, programs may struggle to drive innovation or end up funding AI that infringes peoples’ rights. OMB, as well as agency Inspectors General, and grant managers will need guidance to evaluate what money is going towards AI and how to implement effective oversight. Government will face tradeoffs and challenges promoting AI innovation in federal grants, particularly due to:
1) The AI Screening Problem. When reviewing applications, agencies might fail to screen out candidates that exaggerate their AI capabilities—or fail to report bunk AI use altogether. Grantmaking requires calculated risks on ideas that might fail. But grant judges who are not experts in AI can make bad bets. Applicants will pitch AI solutions directly to these non-experts, and grant winners, regardless of their original proposal, will likely purchase and deploy AI, creating additional oversight challenges.
2) The grant-procurement divide. When planning a grant, agencies might set overly burdensome restrictions that dissuade qualified applicants from applying or otherwise take up too much time, getting in the way of grant goals. Grants are meant to be hands-off; fostering breakthroughs while preventing negligence will be a challenging needle to thread.
3) Limited agency capacity. Agencies may be unequipped to monitor grant recipients’ use of AI. After awarding funding, agencies can miss when vetted AI breaks down on launch. While agencies audit grantees, those audits typically focus on fraud and financial missteps. In some cases, agencies may not be measuring grantee performance well at all (slides 12-13). Yet regular monitoring, similar to the oversight used in procurement, will be necessary to catch emergent problems that affect AI outcomes. Enforcement, too, could be cause for concern; agencies clawback funds for procedural issues, but “almost never withhold federal funds when grantees are out of compliance with the substantive requirements of their grant statutes.” Even as the funding agency steps away, an inaccurate AI system can persist, embedding risks over a longer period of time.
Plan of Action
Recommendation 1. OMB and agencies should bake-in pre-award scrutiny through uniform requirements and clearer guidelines
- Agencies should revise funding notices to require applicants disclose plans to use AI, with a greater level of disclosure required for funding in a foreseeable high-risk context. Agencies should take care not to overburden applicants with disclosures on routine AI uses, particularly as the tools grow in popularity. States may be a laboratory to watch for policy innovation; Illinois, for example, has proposed AI disclosure policies and penalties for its state grants.
- Agencies should make AI-related grant policies clearer to prospective applicants. Such a change would be consistent with OMB policy and the latest Uniform Guidance, the set of rules OMB sets for agencies to manage their grants. For example, in grant notices, any AI-related review criteria should be plainly stated, rather than inferred from a project’s description. Any AI restrictions should be spelled out too, not merely incorporated by reference. More generally, agencies should consider simplifying grant notices, publishing yearly AI grant priorities, hosting information sessions, and/or extending public comment periods to significant AI-related discretionary spending.
- Agencies could consider generally-applicable metrics with which to evaluate applicants’ suggested AI uses. For example, agencies may require applicants to demonstrate they have searched for less discriminatory algorithms in the development of an automated system.
- OMB could formally codify pre-award AI risk assessments in the Uniform Guidance, the set of rules OMB sets for agencies to manage their grants. OMB updates its guidance periodically (with the most recent updates in 2024) and can also issue smaller revisions.
- Agencies could also provide resources targeted at less established AI developers, who might otherwise struggle to meet auditing and compliance standards.
Recommendation 2. OMB and grant marketplaces should coordinate information sharing between agencies
To support review of AI-related grants, OMB and grantmaking agency staff should pool knowledge on AI’s tricky legal, policy, and technical matters.
- OMB, through its Council on Federal Financial Assistance, should coordinate information-sharing between grantmaking agencies on AI risks.
- The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) should support agencies by devising what information agencies should collect on their grantee’s use of AI so as to limit administrative burden on grantees.
- OMB can share expertise on monitoring and managing grant risks, best practices and guides, and trade offs; other relevant interagency councils can share grant evaluation criteria and past performance templates across agencies.
- Online grants marketplaces, such as the Grants Quality Service Management Office Marketplace operated by the Department of Health and Human Services, should improve grantmakers’ decisions by sharing AI-specific information like an applicants’ AI quality, audit and enforcement history, where applicable.
Recommendation 3. Agencies should embrace targeted hiring and talent exchanges for grant review boards
Agencies should have experts in a given AI topic judging grant competitions. To do so requires overcoming talent acquisition challenges. To that end:
- Agency Chief AI Officers should assess grant office needs as part of their OMB-required assessments on AI talent. Those officers should also include grant staff in any AI trainings, and, when prudent, agency-wide risk assessment meetings
- Agencies should staff review boards with technical experts through talent exchanges and targeted hiring.
- OMB should coordinate drop-in technical experts who can sit in as consultants across agencies.
- OMB should support the training of federal grants staff on matters that touch AI– particularly as surveyed grant managers see training as an area of need.
Recommendation 4. Agencies should step up post-award monitoring and enforcement
You can’t improve what you don’t measure—especially when it comes to AI. Quantifying, documenting, and enforcing against careless AI uses can be a new task for grantmaking agencies. Incident reporting will improve the chances that existing cross-cutting regulations, including civil rights laws, can reel back AI gone awry.
- Congress can delegate investigative authority to agencies with AI audit expertise. Such an effort might mirror the cross-agency approach taken by the Department of Justice’s Procurement Collusion Strike Force, which investigates antitrust crimes in procurement and grantmaking.
- Congress can require agencies to cut off funds when grantees show repeated or egregious violations of grant terms pertaining to AI use. Agencies, where authorized, should voluntarily enforce against repeat bad players through spending clawbacks, cutoffs or ban lists.
- Agencies should consider introducing dispute resolution procedures that give redress to enforced-upon grantees.
Recommendation 5. Agencies should encourage and fund efforts to investigate and measure AI harms
- Agencies should invest in establishing measurement and standards within their topic areas on which to evaluate prospective applicants. For example, the National Institute of Justice recently opened funding to research evaluating the use of AI in the criminal legal system.
- Agencies should follow through on longstanding calls to encourage public whistleblowing on grantee missteps, particularly around AI.
- Agencies should solicit feedback from the public through RFIs on grants.gov on how to innovate in AI in their specific research or topic area.
Conclusion
Little limits how grant winners can spend federal dollars on AI. With the government poised to massively expand its spending on AI, that should change.
The federal failure to oversee AI use in grants erodes public trust, civil rights, effective service delivery and the promise of government-backed innovation. Congressional efforts to remedy these problems–starting probes, drafting letters–are important oversight measures, but only come after the damage is done.
Both the Trump and Biden administrations have recognized that AI is exceptional and needs exceptional scrutiny. Many of the lessons learned from scrutinizing federal agency AI procurement apply to grant competitions. Today’s confluence of public will, interest, and urgency is a rare opportunity to widen the aperture of AI governance to include grantmaking.
This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.
Enabling statutes for agencies often are the authority for grant competitions. For grant competitions, the statutory language leaves it to agencies to place further specific policies on the competition. Additionally, laws, like the DATA Act and Federal Grant and Cooperative Agreement Act, offer definitions and guidance to agencies in the use of federal funds.
Agencies already conduct a great deal of pre-award planning to align grantmaking with Executive Orders. For example, in one survey of grantmakers, a little over half of respondents updated their pre-award processes, such as applications and organization information, to comply with an Executive Order. Grantmakers aligning grant planning with the Trump administration’s future Executive Orders will likely follow similar steps.
A wide range of states, local governments, companies, and individuals receive grant competition funds. Spending records, available on USASpending.gov, give some insight into where grant funding goes, though these records too, can be incomplete.
Fighting Fakes and Liars’ Dividends: We Need To Build a National Digital Content Authentication Technologies Research Ecosystem
The U.S. faces mounting challenges posed by increasingly sophisticated synthetic content. Also known as digital media ( images, audio, video, and text), increasingly, these are produced or manipulated by generative artificial intelligence (AI). Already, there has been a proliferation in the abuse of generative AI technology to weaponize synthetic content for harmful purposes, such as financial fraud, political deepfakes, and the non-consensual creation of intimate materials featuring adults or children. As people become less able to distinguish between what is real and what is fake, it has become easier than ever to be misled by synthetic content, whether by accident or with malicious intent. This makes advancing alternative countermeasures, such as technical solutions, more vital than ever before. To address the growing risks arising from synthetic content misuse, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) should take the following steps to create and cultivate a robust digital content authentication technologies research ecosystem: 1) establish dedicated university-led national research centers, 2) develop a national synthetic content database, and 3) run and coordinate prize competitions to strengthen technical countermeasures. In turn, these initiatives will require 4) dedicated and sustained Congressional funding of these initiatives. This will enable technical countermeasures to be able to keep closer pace with the rapidly evolving synthetic content threat landscape, maintaining the U.S.’s role as a global leader in responsible, safe, and secure AI.
Challenge and Opportunity
While it is clear that generative AI offers tremendous benefits, such as for scientific research, healthcare, and economic innovation, the technology also poses an accelerating threat to U.S. national interests. Generative AI’s ability to produce highly realistic synthetic content has increasingly enabled its harmful abuse and undermined public trust in digital information. Threat actors have already begun to weaponize synthetic content across a widening scope of damaging activities to growing effect. Project losses from AI-enabled fraud are anticipated to reach up to $40 billion by 2027, while experts estimate that millions of adults and children have already fallen victim to being targets of AI-generated or manipulated nonconsensual intimate media or child sexual abuse materials – a figure that is anticipated to grow rapidly in the future. While the widely feared concern of manipulative synthetic content compromising the integrity of the 2024 U.S. election did not ultimately materialize, malicious AI-generated content was nonetheless found to have shaped election discourse and bolstered damaging narratives. Equally as concerning is the accumulative effect this increasingly widespread abuse is having on the broader erosion of public trust in the authenticity of all digital information. This degradation of trust has not only led to an alarming trend of authentic content being increasingly dismissed as ‘AI-generated’, but has also empowered those seeking to discredit the truth, or what is known as the “liar’s dividend”.
A. In March 2023, a humorous synthetic image of Pope Francis, first posted on Reddit by creator Pablo Xavier, wearing a Balenciaga coat quickly went viral across social media.
B. In May 2023, this synthetic image was duplicitously published on X as an authentic photograph of an explosion near the Pentagon. Before being debunked by authorities, the image’s widespread circulation online caused significant confusion and even led to a temporary dip in the U.S. stock market.
Research has demonstrated that current generative AI technology is able to produce synthetic content sufficiently realistic enough that people are now unable to reliably distinguish between AI-generated and authentic media. It is no longer feasible to continue, as we currently do, to rely predominantly on human perception capabilities to protect against the threat arising from increasingly widespread synthetic content misuse. This new reality only increases the urgency of deploying robust alternative countermeasures to protect the integrity of the information ecosystem. The suite of digital content authentication technologies (DCAT), or techniques, tools, and methods that seek to make the legitimacy of digital media transparent to the observer, offers a promising avenue for addressing this challenge. These technologies encompass a range of solutions, from identification techniques such as machine detection and digital forensics to classification and labeling methods like watermarking or cryptographic signatures. DCAT also encompasses technical approaches that aim to record and preserve the origin of digital media, including content provenance, blockchain, and hashing.
Evolution of Synthetic Media
Published in 2018, this now infamous PSA sought to illustrate the dangers of synthetic content. It shows an AI-manipulated video of President Obama, using narration from a comedy sketch by comedian Jordan Peele.
In 2020, a hobbyist creator employed an open-source generative AI model to ‘enhance’ the Hollywood CGI version of Princess Leia in the film Rouge One.
The hugely popular Tiktok account @deeptomcruise posts parody videos featuring a Tom Cruise imitator face-swapped with the real Tom Cruise’s real face, including this 2022 video, racking up millions of views.
The 2024 film Here relied extensively on generative AI technology to de-age and face-swap actors in real-time as they were being filmed.
Robust DCAT capabilities will be indispensable for defending against the harms posed by synthetic content misuse, as well as bolstering public trust in both information systems and AI development. These technical countermeasures will be critical for alleviating the growing burden on citizens, online platforms, and law enforcement to manually authenticate digital content. Moreover, DCAT will be vital for enforcing emerging legislation, including AI labeling requirements and prohibitions on illegal synthetic content. The importance of developing these capabilities is underscored by the ten bills (see Fig 1) currently under Congressional consideration that, if passed, would require the employment of DCAT-relevant tools, techniques, and methods.
However, significant challenges remain. DCAT capabilities need to be improved, with many currently possessing weaknesses or limitations such brittleness or security gaps. Moreover, implementing these countermeasures must be carefully managed to avoid unintended consequences in the information ecosystem, like deploying confusing or ineffective labeling to denote the presence of real or fake digital media. As a result, substantial investment is needed in DCAT R&D to develop these technical countermeasures into an effective and reliable defense against synthetic content threats.
The U.S. government has demonstrated its commitment to advancing DCAT to reduce synthetic content risks through recent executive actions and agency initiatives. The 2023 Executive Order on AI (EO 14110) mandated the development of content authentication and tracking tools. Charged by the EO 14110 to address these challenges, NIST has taken several steps towards advancing DCAT capabilities. For example, NIST’s recently established AI Safety Institute (AISI) takes the lead in championing this work in partnership with NIST’s AI Innovation Lab (NAIIL). Key developments include: the dedication of one of the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute Consortium’s (AISIC) working groups to identifying and advancing DCAT R&D; the publication of NIST AI 100-4, which “examines the existing standards, tools, methods, and practices, as well as the potential development of further science-backed standards and techniques” regarding current and prospective DCAT capabilities; and the $11 million dedicated to international research on addressing dangers arising from synthetic content announced at the first convening of the International Network of AI Safety Institutes. Additionally, NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) has launched the GenAI Challenge Program to evaluate and advance DCAT capabilities. Meanwhile, two pending bills in Congress, the Artificial Intelligence Research, Innovation, and Accountability Act (S. 3312) and the Future of Artificial Intelligence Innovation Act (S. 4178), include provisions for DCAT R&D.
Although these critical first steps have been taken, an ambitious and sustained federal effort is necessary to facilitate the advancement of technical countermeasures such as DCAT. This is necessary to more successfully combat the risks posed by synthetic content—both in the immediate and long-term future. To gain and maintain a competitive edge in the ongoing race between deception and detection, it is vital to establish a robust national research ecosystem that fosters agile, comprehensive, and sustained DCAT R&D.
Plan of Action
NIST should engage in three initiatives: 1) establishing dedicated university-based DCAT research centers, 2) curating and maintaining a shared national database of synthetic content for training and evaluation, as well as 3) running and overseeing regular federal prize competitions to drive innovation in critical DCAT challenges. The programs, which should be spearheaded by AISI and NAIIL, are critical for enabling the creation of a robust and resilient U.S. DCAT research ecosystem. In addition, the 118th Congress should 4) allocate dedicated funding to supporting these enterprises.
These recommendations are not only designed to accelerate DCAT capabilities in the immediate future, but also to build a strong foundation for long-term DCAT R&D efforts. As generative AI capabilities expand, authentication technologies must too keep pace, meaning that developing and deploying effective technical countermeasures will require ongoing, iterative work. Success demands extensive collaboration across technology and research sectors to expand problem coverage, maximize resources, avoid duplication, and accelerate the development of effective solutions. This coordinated approach is essential given the diverse range of technologies and methodologies that must be considered when addressing synthetic content risks.
Recommendation 1. Establish DCAT Research Institutes
NIST should establish a network of dedicated university-based research to scale up and foster long-term, fundamental R&D on DCAT. While headquartered at leading universities, these centers would collaborate with academic, civil society, industry, and government partners, serving as nationwide focal points for DCAT research and bringing together a network of cross-sector expertise. Complementing NIST’s existing initiatives like the GenAI Challenge, the centers’ research priorities would be guided by AISI and NAIIL, with expert input from the AISIC, the International Network of AISI, and other key stakeholders.
A distributed research network offers several strategic advantages. It leverages elite expertise from industry and academia, and having permanent institutions dedicated to DCAT R&D enables the sustained, iterative development of authentication technologies to better keep pace with advancing generative AI capabilities. Meanwhile, central coordination by AISI and NAIIL would also ensure comprehensive coverage of research priorities while minimizing redundant efforts. Such a structure provides the foundation for a robust, long-term research ecosystem essential for developing effective countermeasures against synthetic content threats.
There are multiple pathways via which dedicated DCAT research centers could be stood up. One approach is direct NIST funding and oversight, following the model of Carnegie Mellon University’s AI Cooperative Research Center. Alternatively, centers could be established through the National AI Research Institutes Program, similar to the University of Maryland’s Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society, leveraging NSF’s existing partnership with NIST.
The DCAT research agenda could be structured in two ways. Informed by NIST’s report NIST AI 100-4, a vertical approach could be taken to centers’ research agendas, assigning specific technologies to each center (e.g. digital watermarking, metadata recording, provenance data tracking, or synthetic content detection). Centers would focus on all aspects of a specific technical capability, including: improving the robustness and security of existing countermeasures; developing new techniques to address current limitations; conducting real-world testing and evaluation, especially in a cross-platform environment; and studying interactions with other technical safeguards and non-technical countermeasures like regulations or educational initiatives. Conversely, a horizontal approach might seek to divide research agendas across areas such as: the advancement of multiple established DACT techniques, tools, and methods; innovation of novel techniques, tools, and methods; testing and evaluation of combined technical approaches in real-world settings; examining the interaction of multiple technical countermeasures with human factors such as label perception and non-technical countermeasures. While either framework provides a strong foundation for advancing DCAT capabilities, given institutional expertise and practical considerations, a hybrid model combining both approaches is likely the most feasible option.
Recommendation 2. Build and Maintain a National Synthetic Content Database
NIST should also build and maintain a national database of synthetic content database to advance and accelerate DCAT R&D, similar to existing federal initiatives such as NIST’s National Software Reference Library and NSF’s AI Research Resource pilot. Current DCAT R&D is severely constrained by limited access to diverse, verified, and up-to-date training and testing data. Many researchers, especially in academia, where a significant portion of DCAT research takes place, lack the resources to build and maintain their own datasets. This results in less accurate and more narrowly applicable authentication tools that struggle to keep pace with rapidly advancing AI capabilities.
A centralized database of synthetic and authentic content would accelerate DCAT R&D in several critical ways. First, it would significantly alleviate the effort on research teams to generate or collect synthetic data for training and evaluation, encouraging less well-resourced groups to conduct research as well as allowing researchers to focus more on other aspects of R&D. This includes providing much-needed resources for the NIST-facilitated university-based research centers and prize competitions proposed here. Moreover, a shared database would be able to provide more comprehensive coverage of the increasingly varied synthetic content being created today, permitting the development of more effective and robust authentication capabilities. The database would be useful for establishing standardized evaluation metrics for DCAT capabilities – one of NIST’s critical aims for addressing the risks posed by AI technology.
A national database would need to be comprehensive, encompassing samples of both early and state-of-the-art synthetic content. It should have controlled laboratory-generated along with verified “in the wild” or real world synthetic content datasets, including both benign and potentially harmful examples. Further critical to the database’s utility is its diversity, ensuring synthetic content spans multiple individual and combined modalities (text, image, audio, video) and features varied human populations as well as a variety of non-human subject matter. To maintain the database’s relevance as generative AI capabilities continue to evolve, routinely incorporating novel synthetic content that accurately reflects synthetic content improvements will also be required.
Initially, the database could be built on NIST’s GenAI Challenge project work, which includes “evolving benchmark dataset creation”, but as it scales up, it should operate as a standalone program with dedicated resources. The database could be grown and maintained through dataset contributions by AISIC members, industry partners, and academic institutions who have either generated synthetic content datasets themselves or, as generative AI technology providers, with the ability to create the large-scale and diverse datasets required. NIST would also direct targeted dataset acquisition to address specific gaps and evaluation needs.
Recommendation 3. Run Public Prize Competitions on DCAT Challenges
Third, NIST should set up and run a coordinated prize competition program, while also serving as federal oversight leads for prize competitions run by other agencies. Building on existing models such as the DARPA SemaFor’s AI FORCE and the FTC’s Voice Cloning challenge, the competitions would address expert-identified priorities as informed by the AISIC, International Network of AISI, and proposed DCAT national research centers. Competitions represent a proven approach to spurring innovation for complex technical challenges, enabling the rapid identification of solutions through diverse engagement. In particular, monetary prize competitions are especially successful at ensuring engagement. For example, the 2019 Kaggle Deepfake Detection competition, which had a prize of $1 million, fielded twice as many participants as the 2024 competition, which gave no cash prize.
By providing structured challenges and meaningful incentives, public competitions can accelerate the development of critical DCAT capabilities while building a more robust and diverse research community. Such competitions encourage novel technical approaches, rapid testing of new methods, facilitate the inclusion of new or non-traditional participants, and foster collaborations. The more rapid-cycle and narrow scope of the competitions would also complement the longer-term and broader research being conducted by the national DCAT research centers. Centralized federal oversight would also prevent the implementation gaps which have occurred in past approved federal prize competitions. For instance, the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) authorized a $5 million machine detection/deepfakes prize competition (Sec. 5724), and the 2024 NDAA authorized a ”Generative AI Detection and Watermark Competition” (Sec. 1543). However, neither prize competition has been carried out, and Watermark Competition has now been delayed to 2025. Centralized oversight would also ensure that prize competitions are run consistently to address specific technical challenges raised by expert stakeholders, encouraging more rapid development of relevant technical countermeasures.
Some examples of possible prize competitions might include: machine detection and digital forensic methods to detect partial or fully AI-generated content across single or multimodal content; assessing the robustness, interoperability, and security of watermarking and other labeling methods across modalities; testing innovations in tamper-evident or -proofing content provenance tools and other data origin techniques. Regular assessment and refinement of competition categories will ensure continued relevance as synthetic content capabilities evolve.
Recommendation 4. Congressional Funding of DCAT Research and Activities
Finally, the 118th Congress should allocate funding for these three NIST initiatives in order to more effectively establish the foundations of a strong DCAT national research infrastructure. Despite widespread acknowledgement of the vital role of technical countermeasures in addressing synthetic content risks, the DCAT research field remains severely underfunded. Although recent initiatives, such as the $11 million allocated to the International Network of AI Safety Institutes, are a welcome step in the right direction, substantially more investment is needed. Thus far, the overall financing of DCAT R&D has been only a drop in the bucket when compared to the many billions of dollars being dedicated by industry alone to improve generative AI technology.
This stark disparity between investment in generative AI versus DCAT capabilities presents an immediate opportunity for Congressional action. To address the widening capability gap, and to support pending legislation which will be reliant on technical countermeasures such as DCAT, the 118th Congress should establish multi-year appropriations with matching fund requirements. This will encourage private sector investment and permit flexible funding mechanisms to address emerging challenges. This funding should be accompanied by regular reporting requirements to track progress and impact.
One specific action that Congress could take to jumpstart DCAT R&D investment would be to reauthorize and appropriate the budget that was earmarked for the unexecuted machine detection competition it approved in 2020. Despite the 2020 NDAA authorizing $5 million for it, no SAC-D funding was allocated, and the competition never took place. Another action would be for Congress to explicitly allocate prize money for the watermarking competition authorized by the 2024 NDAA, which currently does not have any monetary prize attached to it, to encourage higher levels of participation in the competition when it takes place this year.
Conclusion
The risks posed by synthetic content present an undeniable danger to U.S. national interests and security. Advancing DCAT capabilities is vital for protecting U.S. citizens against both the direct and more diffuse harms resulting from the proliferating misuse of synthetic content. A robust national DCAT research ecosystem is required to accomplish this. Critically, this is not a challenge that can be addressed through one-time solutions or limited investment—it will require continuous work and dedicated resources to ensure technical countermeasures keep pace alongside increasingly sophisticated synthetic content threats. By implementing these recommendations with sustained federal support and investment, the U.S. will be able to more successfully address current and anticipated synthetic content risks, further reinforcing its role as a global leader in responsible AI use.
This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.
Supporting Federal Decision Making through Participatory Technology Assessment
The incoming administration needs a robust, adaptable and scalable participatory assessment capacity to address complex issues at the intersections of science, technology, and society. As such, the next administration should establish a special unit within the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI)—an existing federally funded research and development center (FFRDC)—to provide evidence-based, just-in-time, and fit-for-purpose capacity for Participatory Technology Assessment (pTA) to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and across executive branch agencies.
Robust participatory and multi-stakeholder engagement supports responsible decision making where neither science nor existing policy provide clear guidance. pTA is an established and evidence-based process to assess public values, manage sociotechnical uncertainties, integrate living and lived knowledge, and bridge democratic gaps on contested and complex science and society issues. By tapping into broader community expertise and experiences, pTA identifies plausible alternatives and solutions that may be overlooked by experts and advocates.
pTA provides critical and informed public input that is currently missing in technocratic policy- and decision-making processes. Policies and decisions will have greater legitimacy, transparency, and accountability as a result of enhanced use of pTA. When systematically integrated into research and development (R&D) processes, pTA can be used for anticipatory governance—that is, assessing socio-technical futures, engaging communities, stakeholders and publics, and directing decisions, policies, and investments toward desirable outcomes.
A pTA unit within STPI will help build and maintain a shared repository of knowledge and experience of the state of the art and innovative applications across government, and provide pTA as a design, development, implementation, integration and training service for the executive branch regarding emerging scientific and technological issues and questions. By integrating public and expert value assessments, the next administration can ensure that federal science and technology decisions provide the greatest benefit to society.
Challenge and Opportunity
Science and technology (S&T) policy problems always involve issues of public values—such as concerns for safety, prosperity, and justice—alongside issues of fact. However, few systematic and institutional processes meaningfully integrate values from informed public engagement alongside expert consultation. Existing public-engagement mechanisms such as public- comment periods, opinion surveys, and town halls have devolved into little more than “checkbox” exercises. In recent years, transition to online commenting, intended to improve access and participation, have also amplified the negatives. They have “also inadvertently opened the floodgates to mass comment campaigns, misattributed comments, and computer-generated comments, potentially making it harder for agencies to extract the information needed to inform decision making and undermining the legitimacy of the rulemaking process. Many researchers have found that a large percentage of the comments received in mass comment responses are not highly substantive, but rather contain general statements of support or opposition. Commenters are an entirely self selected group, and there is no reason to believe that they are in any way representative of the larger public. … Relatedly, the group of commenters may represent a relatively privileged group, with less advantaged members of the public less likely to engage in this form of political participation.”
Moreover, existing engagement mechanisms tend to be dominated by a small number of experts and organized interest groups: people and institutions who generally have established pathways to influence policy anyway.
Existing engagement mechanisms leave out the voices of people who may lack the time, awareness, and/or resources to voice their opinions in response to the Federal Register, such as the roofer, the hair stylist, or the bus driver. This means that important public values—widely held ideas about the rights and benefits that ought to guide policy making in a democratic system—go overlooked. For S&T policy, a failure to assess and integrate public values may result in lack of R&D and complementary investments that produce market successes with limited public value, such as treatments for cancer that most patients cannot afford or public failure when there is no immediately available technical or market response, such as early stages of a global pandemic. Failure to integrate public values may also mean that little to no attention gets paid to key areas of societal need, such as developing low-cost tools and approaches for mitigating lead and other contaminants in water supplies or designing effective policy response, such as behavioral and logistical actions to contain viral infections and delivering vaccination to resistant populations.
In its 2023 Letter to the President, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), observed that, “As a nation, we must strive to develop public policies that are informed by scientific understandings and community values. Achieving this goal will require both access to accurate and trusted scientific information and the ability to create dialogue and participatory engagement with the American people.” The PCAST letter recommends issuing “a clarion call to Federal agencies to make science and technology communication and public engagement a core component of their mission and strategy.” It also recommended the establishment of “a new office to support Federal agencies in their continuing efforts to develop and build participatory public engagement and effective science and technology communications.”
Institutionalizing pTA within the Federal Government would provide federal agencies access to the tools and resources they need to apply pTA to existing and emerging complex S&T challenges, enabling experts, publics, and decision makers to tackle pressing issues together.pTA can be applied toward resolving long-standing issues, as well as to anticipate and address questions around emerging or novel S&T issues.
pTA for Long-Standing S&T Issues
Storage and siting of disposal sites for nuclear waste is an example of the type of ongoing, intractable problems for which pTA is ideally suited. Billions of dollars have been invested to develop a government-managed site for storing nuclear waste in the United States, yet essentially no progress has been made. Entangled political and environmental concerns, such as the risks of leaving nuclear waste in a potentially unsafe state for the long term, have stalled progress. There is also genuine uncertainty and expert disagreement surrounding safety and efficacy of various storage alternatives. Our nation’s inability to address the issue of nuclear waste has long impacted development of new and alternative nuclear power plants and thus has contributed to the slowing the adoption of nuclear energy.
There are rarely unencumbered or obvious optimal solutions to long-standing S&T issues like nuclear-waste disposal. But a nuanced and informed dialogue among a diverse public, experts, and decision makers—precisely the type of dialogue enabled through pTA—can help break chronic stalemates and address misaligned or nonexistent incentives. By bringing people together to discuss options and to learn about the benefits and risks of different possible solutions, pTA enables stakeholders to better understand each other’s perspectives. Deliberative engagements like pTA often generate empathy, encouraging participants to collaborate and develop recommendations based on shared exploration of values. pTA is designed to facilitate timely, adequate, and pragmatic choices in the context of uncertainty, conflicting goals, and various real-world constraints. This builds transparency and trust across diverse stakeholders while helping move past gridlock.
pTA for Emerging and Novel Issues
pTA is also useful for anticipating controversies and governing emerging S&T challenges, such as the ethical dimensions of gene editing or artificial intelligence or nuclear adoption. pTA helps grow institutional knowledge and expertise about complex topics as well as about public attitudes and concerns salient to those topics at scale. For example, challenges associated with COVID-19 vaccines presented several opportunities to deploy pTA. Public trust of the government’s pandemic response was uneven at best. Many Americans reported specific concerns about receiving a COVID-19 vaccine. Public opinion polls have delivered mixed messages regarding willingness to receive a COVID- 19 vaccine, but polls can overlook other historically significant concerns and socio-political developments in rapidly changing environments. Demands for expediency in vaccine development complicated the situation when normal safeguards and oversights were relaxed. Apparent pressure to deliver a vaccine as soon as possible raised public concern that vaccine safety is not being adequately vetted. Logistical and ethical questions about vaccine rollout were also abound: who should get vaccinated first, at what cost, and alongside what other public health measures? The nation needed a portfolio of differentiated and locally robust strategies for vaccine deployment. pTA would help officials anticipate equity challenges and trust deficits related to vaccine use and inform messaging and means of delivery, helping effective and socially robust rollout strategies for different communities across the country.
pTA is an Established Practice
pTA has a history of use in the European Union and more recently in the United States. Inspired partly by the former U.S. Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), many European nations and the European Parliament operate their own technology assessment (TA) agencies. European TA took a distinctive turn from the OTA in further democratizing science and technology decision-making by developing and implementing a variety of effective and economical practices involving citizen participation (or pTA). Recent European Parliamentary Technology Assessment reports have taken on issues of assistive technologies, future of work, future of mobility, and climate-change innovation.
In the United States, a group of researchers, educators, and policy practitioners established the Expert and Citizen Assessment of Science and Technology (ECAST) network in 2010 to develop a distinctive 21st-century model of TA. Over the course of a decade, ECAST developed an innovative and reflexive participatory technology assessment (pTA) method to support democratic decision-making in different technical, social, and political contexts. After a demonstration project providing citizen input to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in collaboration with the Danish Board of Technology, ECAST, worked with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on the agency’s Asteroid Initiative. NASA-sponsored pTA activities about asteroid missions revealed important concerns about mitigating asteroid impact alongside decision support for specific NASA missions. Public audiences prioritized a U.S. role in planetary defense from asteroid impacts. These results were communicated to NASA administrators and informed the development of NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, demonstrating how pTA can identify novel public concerns to inform decision making.
This NASA pTA paved the way for pTA projects with the Department of Energy on nuclear-waste disposal and with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on community resilience. ECAST’s portfolio also includes projects on climate intervention research, the future of automated vehicles, gene editing, clean energy demonstration projects and interim storage of spent nuclear fuel. These and other pTA projects have been supported by more than six million dollars of public and philanthropic funding over the past ten years. Strong funding support in recent years highlights a growing demand for public engagement in science and technology decision-making.
However, the current scale of investment in pTA projects is vastly outstripped by the number of agencies and policy decisions that stand to benefit from pTA and are demanding applications for different use cases from public education, policy decisions, public value mapping and process and institutional innovations. ECAST’s capacity and ability to partner with federal agencies is limited and constrained by existing administrative rules and procedures on the federal side and resources and capacity deficiencies and flexibilities on the network side. Any external entity like ECAST will encounter difficulties in building institutional memory and in developing cooperative-agreement mechanisms across agencies with different missions as well as within agencies with different divisions. Integrating public engagement as a standard component of decision making will require aligning the interests of sponsoring agencies, publics, and pTA practitioners within the context of broad and shifting political environments. An FFRDC office dedicated to pTA would provide the embedded infrastructure, staffing, and processes necessary to achieve these challenging tasks. A dedicated home for pTA within the executive branch would also enable systematic research, evaluation, and training related to pTA methods and practices, as well as better integration of pTA tools into decision making involving public education, research, innovation and policy actions.
Plan of Action
The next administration should support and conduct pTA across the Federal Government by expanding the scope of the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI) to include a special unit with a separate operating budget dedicated specifically to pTA. STPI is an existing federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) that already conducts research on emerging technological challenges for the Federal Government. STPI is strategically associated with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). Integrating pTA across federal agencies aligns with STPI’s mission to provide technical and analytical support to agency sponsors on the assessment of critical and emerging technologies.
A dedicated pTA unit within STPI would (1) provide expertise and resources to conduct pTA for federal agencies and (2) document and archive broader public expertise captured through pTA. Much publicly valuable knowledge generated from one area of S&T is applicable to and usable in other areas. As part of an FFRDC associated with the executive branch, STPI’s pTA unit could collaborate with universities to help disseminate best practices across all executive agencies.
We envision that STPI’s pTA unit would conduct activities related to the general theory and practice of pTA as well as partner with other federal agencies to integrate pTA into projects large and small. Small-scale projects, such as a series of public focus groups, expert consultations, or general topic research could be conducted directly by the pTA unit’s staff. Larger projects, such as a series of in-person or online deliberative engagements, workshops, and subsequent analysis and evaluation, would require additional funding and support from the requesting agencies. The STPI pTA unit could also establish longer-term partnerships with universities and science centers (as in the ECAST network), thereby enabling the federal government to leverage and learn from pTA exercises sponsored by non-federal entities.
The new STPI pTA unit would be funded in part through projects requested by other federal agencies. An agency would fund the pTA unit to design, plan, conduct, assess, and analyze a pTA effort on a project relevant to the agency. This model would enable the unit to distribute costs across the executive branch and would ensure that the unit has access to subject-matter experts (i.e., agency staff) needed to conduct an informed pTA effort. Housing the unit within STPI would contribute to OSTP’s larger portfolio of science and technology policy analysis, open innovation and citizen science, and a robust civic infrastructure.
Cost and Capacities
Adding a pTA unit to STPI would increase federal capacity to conduct pTA, utilizing existing pathways and budget lines to support additional staff and infrastructure for pTA capabilities. Establishing a semi-independent office for pTA within STPI would make it possible for the executive branch to share support staff and other costs. We anticipate that $3.5–5 million per year would be needed to support the core team of researchers, practitioners, leadership, small-scale projects, and operations within STPI for the pTA unit. This funding would require congressional approval.
The STPI pTA unit and its staff would be dedicated to housing and maintaining a critical infrastructure for pTA projects, including practical know-how, robust relationships with partner organizations (e.g., science centers, museums, or other public venues for hosting deliberative pTA forums), and analytic capabilities. This unit would not wholly be responsible for any given pTA effort. Rather, sponsoring agencies should provide resources and direction to support individual pTA projects.
We expect that the STPI pTA unit would be able to conduct two or three pTA projects per year initially. Capacity and agility of the unit would expand as time went on to meet the growth and demands from the federal agencies. In the fifth year of the unit (the typical length of an FFRDC contract), the presidential administration should consider whether there is sufficient agency demand for pTA—and whether the STPI pTA unit has sufficiently demonstrated proof-of-concept—to merit establishment of a new and independent FFRDC or other government entity fully dedicated to pTA.
Operations
The process for initiating, implementing and finalizing a pTA project would resemble the following:
Pre:
- Agency approaches the pTA unit with interest in conducting pTA for agency assessment and decision making for a particular subject.
- pTA unit assists the agency in developing questions appropriate for pTA. This process involves input from agency decision makers and experts as well as external stakeholders.
- A Memorandum of understanding/agreement (MOU/MOA) is created, laying out the scope of the pTA effort.
During:
- pTA unit and agency convene expert and/or public workshops (as appropriate) to inform pTA activities.
- pTA unit and agency create, test, and evaluate prototype pTA activities (see FAQs below for more details on evaluation).
- pTA unit and agency work with a network of pTA host institutions (e.g, science centers, universities, nonprofit organizations, etc.) to coordinate pTA forums.
- pTA unit oversees pTA forums.
Post:
- pTA unit collects, assesses, and analyzes pTA forum results with iterative input and analysis from the hosting agency.
- pTA unit works with stakeholders to share and finalize pTA reports on the subject, as well as a dissemination plan for sharing results with stakeholder groups.
Conclusion
Participatory Technology Assessment (pTA) is an established suite of tools and processes for eliciting and documenting informed public values and opinions to contribute to decision making around complex issues at the intersections of science, technology, and society.
However, its creative adaptation and innovative use by federal agencies in recent years demonstrate their utility beyond providing decision support: from increasing scientific literacy and social acceptability to diffusing tensions and improving mutual trust. By creating capacity for pTA within STPI, the incoming administration will bolster its ability to address longstanding and emerging issues that lie at the intersection of scientific progress and societal well-being, where progress depends on aligning scientific, market and public values. Such capacity and capabilities will be crucial to improving the legitimacy, transparency, and accountability of decisions regarding how we navigate and tackle the most intractable problems facing our society, now and for years to come.
This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.
Experts can help map potential policy and R&D options and their implications. However, there will always be an element of judgment when it comes to deciding among options. This stage is often more driven by ethical and social concerns than by technical assessments. For instance, leaders may need to figure out a fair and just process to govern hazardous-waste disposal, or weigh the implications of using genetically modified organisms to control diseases, or siting clean energy research and demonstration projects in resistant or disadvantaged communities. Involving the public in decision-making can help counter challenges associated with expert judgment (for example, “groupthink”) while bringing in perspectives, values, and considerations that experts may overlook or discount.
pTA incorporates a variety of measures to inform discussion, such as background materials distributed to participants and multimedia tools to provide relevant information about the issue. The content of background materials is developed by experts and stakeholders prior to a pTA event to give the public the information they need to thoughtfully engage with the topic at hand. Evaluation tools, such as those from the informal science-education community, can be used to assess how effective background materials are at preparing the public for an informed discussion, and to identify ineffective materials that may need revision or supplementation. Evaluations of several past pTA efforts have 1) shown consistent learning among public participants and 2) have documented robust processes for the creation, testing, and refinement of pTA activities that foster informed discussions among pTA participants.
pTA can result in products and information, such as reports and data on public values, that are relevant and useful for the communication missions of agencies. However, pTA should avoid becoming a tool for strategic communications or a procedural “checkbox” activity for public engagement. Locating the Federal Government’s dedicated pTA unit within an FFRDC will ensure that pTA is informed by and accountable to a broader community of pTA experts and stakeholders who are independent of any mission agency.
The work of universities, science centers, and nonpartisan think tanks have greatly expanded the tools and approaches available for using pTA to inform decision-making. Many past and current pTA efforts have been driven by such nongovernmental institutions, and have proven agile, collaborative, and low cost. These efforts, while successful, have limited or diffuse ties to federal decision making.
Embedding pTA within the federal government would help agencies overcome the opportunity and time cost of integrating public input into tight decision-making timelines. ECAST’s work with federal agencies has shown the need for a stable bureaucratic infrastructure surrounding pTA at the federal level to build organizational memory, create a federal community of practice, and productively institutionalize pTA into federal decision-making.
Importantly, pTA is a nonpartisan method that can help reduce tensions and find shared values. Involving a diversity of perspectives through pTA engagements can help stakeholders move beyond impasse and conflict. pTA engagements emphasize recruiting and involving Americans from all walks of life, including those historically excluded from policymaking.
Currently, the Government Accountability Office’s Science, Technology Assessment, and Analytics team (STAA) conducts technology assessments for Congress. Technology Assessment (TA) is designed to enhance understanding of the implications of new technologies or existing S&T issues. The STAA certainly has the capacity to undertake pTA studies on key S&T issues if and when requested by Congress. However, the distinctive form of pTA developed by ECAST and exemplified in ECAST’s work with NASA, NOAA, and DOE follows a knowledge co- production model in which agency program managers work with pTA practitioners to co-design, co-develop, and integrate pTA into their decision-making processes. STAA, as a component of the legislative branch, is not well positioned to work alongside executive agencies in this way. The proposed pTA unit within STPI would make the proven ECAST model available to all executive agencies, nicely complementing the analytical TA capacity that STAA offers the federal legislature.
Executive orders could support one-off pTA projects and require agencies to conduct pTA. However, establishing a pTA unit within an FFRDC like STPI would provide additional benefits that would lead to a more robust pTA capacity.
FFRDCs are a special class of research institutions owned by the federal government but operated by contractors, including universities, nonprofits, and industrial firms. The primary purpose of FFRDCs is to pursue research and development that cannot be effectively provided by the government or other sectors operating on their own. FFRDCs also enable the government to recruit and retain diverse experts without government hiring and pay constraints, providing the government with a specialized, agile workforce to respond to agency needs and societal challenges.
Creating a pTA unit in an FFRDC would provide an institutional home for general pTA know-how and capacity: a resource that all agencies could tap into. The pTA unit would be staffed by a small but highly-trained staff who are well-versed in the knowledge and practice of pTA. The pTA unit would not preclude individual agencies from undertaking pTA on their own, but would provide a “help center” to help agencies figure out where to start and how to overcome roadblocks. pTA unit staff could also offer workshops and other opportunities to help train personnel in other agencies on ways to incorporate the public perspective into their activities.
Other potential homes for a dedicated federal pTA unit include the Government Accountability Office (GAO) or the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. However, GAO’s association with Congress would weaken the unit’s connections to agencies. The National Academies historically conduct assessments driven purely by expert consensus, which may compromise the ability of National Academies-hosted pTA to include and/or emphasize broader public values.
Evaluating a pTA effort means answering four questions:
First, did the pTA effort engage a diverse public not otherwise engaged in S&T policy formulation? pTA practitioners generally do not seek statistically representative samples of participants (unlike, for instance, practitioners of mass opinion polling). Instead, pTA practitioners focus on including a diverse group of participants, with particular attention paid to groups who are generally not engaged in S&T policy formulation.
Second, was the pTA process informed and deliberative? This question is generally answered through strategies borrowed from the informal science-learning community, such as “pre- and post-“ surveys of self-reported learning. Qualitative analysis of the participant responses and discussions can evaluate if and how background information was used in pTA exercises. Involving decision makers and stakeholders in the evaluation process—for example, through sharing initial evaluation results—helps build the credibility of participant responses, particularly when decision makers or agencies are skeptical of the ability of lay citizens to provide informed opinions.
Third, did pTA generate useful and actionable outputs for the agency and, if applicable, stakeholders? pTA practitioners use qualitative tools for assessing public opinions and values alongside quantitative tools, such as surveys. A combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis helps to evaluate not just what public participants prefer regarding a given issue but why they hold that preference and how they justify those preferences. To ensure such information is useful to agencies and decision makers, pTA practitioners involve decision makers at various points in the analysis process (for example, to probe participant responses regarding a particular concern). Interviews with decision makers and other stakeholders can also assess the utility of pTA results.
Fourth, what impact did pTA have on participants, decisions and decision-making processes, decision makers, and organizational culture? This question can be answered through interviews with decision makers and stakeholders, surveys of pTA participants, and impact assessments.
Evaluation of a pTA unit within an existing FFRDC would likely involve similar questions as above: questions focused on the impact of the unit on decisions, decision-making processes, and the culture and attitudes of agency staff who worked with the pTA unit. An external evaluator, such as the Government Accountability Office or the National Academies of Sciences, could be tasked with carrying out such an evaluation.
pTA results and processes should typically be made public as long as few risks are posed to pTA participants (in line with federal regulations protecting research participants). Publishing results and processes ensures that stakeholders, other members of government (e.g., Congress), and broader audiences can view and interpret the public values explored during a pTA effort. Further, making results and processes publicly available serves as a form of accountability, ensuring that pTA efforts are high quality.
Unpacking Hiring: Toward a Regional Federal Talent Strategy
Government, like all institutions, runs on people. We need more people with the right skills and expertise for the many critical roles that public agencies are hiring for today. Yet hiring talent in the federal government is a longstanding challenge. The next Administration should unpack hiring strategy from headquarters and launch a series of large scale, cross-agency recruitment and hiring surges throughout the country, reflecting the reality that 85% of federal employees are outside the Beltway. With a collaborative, cross-agency lens and a commitment to engaging jobseekers where they live, the government can enhance its ability to attract talent while underscoring to Americans that the federal government is not a distant authority but rather a stakeholder in their communities that offers credible opportunities to serve.
Challenge and Opportunity
The Federal Government’s hiring needs—already severe across many mission-critical occupations—are likely to remain acute as federal retirements continue, the labor market remains tight, and mission needs continue to grow. Unfortunately, federal hiring is misaligned with how most people approach job seeking. Most Americans search for employment in a geographically bounded way, a trend which has accelerated following the labor market disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast, federal agencies tend to engage with jobseekers in a manner siloed to a single agency and across a wide variety of professions.
The result is that the federal government tends to hire agency by agency while casting a wide geographic net, which limits its ability to build deep and direct relationships with talent providers, while also duplicating searches for similar roles across agencies. Instead, the next Administration should align with jobseekers’ expectations by recruiting across agencies within each geography.
By embracing a new approach, the government can begin to develop a more coordinated cross-agency employer profile within regions with significant federal presence, while still leveraging its scale by aggregating hiring needs across agencies. This approach would build upon the important hiring reforms advanced under the Biden-Harris Administration, including cross-agency pooled hiring, renewed attention to hiring experience for jobseekers, and new investments to unlock the federal government’s regional presence through elevation of the Federal Executive Board (FEB) program. FEBs are cross-agency councils of senior appointees and civil servants in regions of significant federal presence across the country. They are empowered to identify areas for cross-agency cooperation and are singularly positioned to collaborate to pool talent needs and represent the federal government in communities across the country.
Plan of Action
The next Administration should embrace a cross-agency, regionally-focused recruitment strategy and bring federal career opportunities closer to Americans through a series of 2-3 large scale, cross-agency recruitment and hiring pilots in geographies outside of Washington, DC. To be effective, this effort will need both sponsorship from senior leaders at the center of government, as well as ownership from frontline leaders who can build relationships on the ground.
Recommendation 1. Provide Strategic Direction from the Center of Government
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) should launch a small team, composed of leaders in recruitment, personnel policy and workforce data, to identify promising localities for coordinated regional hiring surges. They should leverage centralized workforce data or data from Human Capital Operating Plan workforce plans to identify prospective hiring needs by government-wide and agency-specific mission-critical occupations (MCOs) by FEB region, while ensuring that agency and sub-agency workforce plans consistently specify where hiring will occur in the future. They might also consider seasonal or cyclical cross-agency hiring needs for inclusion in the pilot to facilitate year-to-year experimentation and analysis. With this information, they should engage the FEB Center of Operations and jointly select 2-3 FEB regions outside of the capital where there are significant overlapping needs in MCOs.
As this pilot moves forward, it is imperative that OMB and OPM empower on-the-ground federal leaders to drive surge hiring and equip them with flexible hiring authorities where needed.
Recommendation 2. Empower Frontline Leadership from the FEBs
FEB field staff are well positioned to play a coordinating role to help drive surges, starting by convening agency leadership in their regions to validate hiring needs and make amendments as necessary. Together, they should set a reasonable, measurable goal for surge hiring in the coming year that reflects both total need and headline MCOs (e.g., “in the next 12 months, federal agencies in greater Columbus will hire 750 new employees, including 75 HR Specialists, 45 Data Scientists, and 110 Engineers”).
To begin to develop a regional talent strategy, the FEB should form a small task force drawn from standout hiring managers and HR professionals, and then begin to develop a stakeholder map of key educational institutions and civic partners with access to talent pools in the region, sharing existing relationships and building new ones. The FEB should bring these external partners together to socialize shared needs and listen to their impressions of federal career opportunities in the region.
With these insights, the project team should announce publicly the number and types of roles needed and prepare sharp public-facing collateral that foregrounds headline MCOs and raises the profile of local federal agencies. In support, OPM should launch regional USAJOBS skins (e.g., “Columbus.USAJOBS.gov”) to make it easy to explore available positions. The team should make sustained, targeted outreach at local educational institutions aligned with hiring needs, so all federal agencies are on graduates’ and administrators’ radar.
These activities should build toward one or more signature large, in-person, cross-agency recruitment and hiring fairs, perhaps headlined by a high profile Administration leader. Candidates should be able to come to an event, learn what it means to hold a job in their discipline in federal service, and apply live for roles at multiple agencies, all while exploring what else the federal government has to offer and building tangible relationships with federal recruiters. Ahead of the event, the project team should work with agencies to align their hiring cycles so the maximum number of jobs are open at the time of the event, potentially launching a pooled hiring action to coincide. The project team should capture all interested jobseekers from the event to seed the new Talent Campaigns function in USAStaffing that enables agencies to bucket tranches of qualified jobseekers for future sourcing.
Recommendation 3. Replicate and Celebrate
Following each regional surge, the center of government and frontline teams should collaborate to distill key learnings and conclude the sprint engagement by developing a playbook for regional recruitment surges. Especially successful surges will also present an opportunity to spotlight excellence in recruitment and hiring, which is rarely celebrated.
The center of government team should also identify geographies with effective relationships between agencies and talent providers for key roles and leverage the growing use of remote work and location negotiable positions to site certain roles in “friendly” labor markets.
Conclusion
Regional, cross-agency hiring surges are an opportunity for federal agencies to fill high-need roles across the country in a manner that is proactive and collaborative, rather than responsive and competitive. They would aim to facilitate a new level of information sharing between the frontline and the center of government, and inform agency strategic planning efforts, allowing headquarters to better understand the realities of recruitment and hiring on the ground. They would enable OPM and OMB to reach, engage, and empower frontline HR specialists and hiring managers who are sufficiently numerous and fragmented that they are difficult to reach in the present course of business.
Finally, engaging regionally will emphasize that most of the federal workforce resides outside of Washington, D.C., and build understanding and respect for the work of federal public servants in communities across the nation.
This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.
An Agenda for Ensuring Child Safety in the AI Era
The next administration should continue to make responsible policy on Artificial intelligence (AI) and children, especially in K-12, a top priority and create an AI and Kids Initiative led by the administration. AI is transforming how children learn and live, and policymakers, industry, and educators owe it to the next generation to set in place a responsible policy that embraces this new technology while at the same time ensuring all children’s well-being, privacy, and safety is respected. The federal government should develop clear prohibitions, enforce them, and serve as a national clearinghouse for AI K-12 educational policy. It should also support comprehensive digital literacy related to AI.
Specifically, we think these policy elements need to be front of mind for decision-makers: build a coordinated framework for AI Safety; champion legislation to support youth privacy and online safety in AI; and ensure every child can benefit from the promise of AI.
In terms of building a coordinated framework for AI Safety, the next administration should: ensure parity with existing child data protections; develop safety guidance for developers, including specific prohibitions to limit harmful designs, and inappropriate uses; and direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to serve as the lead organizer for federal efforts on AI safety for children. When championing legislation to support youth privacy and online safety in AI, the next administration should support the passage of online safety laws that address harmful design features that can lead to medically recognized mental health disorders and patterns of use indicating addiction-like behavior, and modernize federal children’s privacy laws including updating The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) and passing youth privacy laws to explicitly address AI data use issues, including prohibiting developing commercial models from students’ educational information, with strong enforcement mechanisms. And, in order to ensure every child can benefit from the promise of AI, the next administration should support comprehensive digital literacy efforts and prevent deepening the digital divide.
Importantly, policy and frameworks need to have teeth and need to take the burden off of individual states, school districts, or actors to assess AI tools for children. Enforcement should be tailored to specific laws, but should include as appropriate private rights of action, well-funded federal enforcers, and state and local enforcement. Companies should feel incentivized to act. The framework cannot be voluntary, enabling companies to pick and choose whether or not to follow recommendations.. We’ve seen what happens when we do not put in place guardrails for tech, such as increased risk of child addiction, depression and self-harm–and it should not happen again. We cannot say that this is merely a nascent technology and that we can delay the development of protections. We already know AI will critically impact our lives. We’ve watched tech critically impact lives and AI-enabled tech is both faster and potentially more extreme.
Challenge and Opportunity
AI is already embedded in children’s lives and education. According to Common Sense Media research, seven in ten teens have used generative AI, and the most common use is for help with homework. The research also found most parents are in the dark about their child’s generative AI use–only a third of parents whose children reported using generative AI were aware of such use. Beyond generative AI, machine learning systems are embedded in just about every application kids use at school and at home. Further, most teens and parents say schools have either no AI policy or have not communicated one.
Educational uses of AI are recognized to pose higher risk, according to the EU Artificial Intelligence Act and other international frameworks. The EU recognized that risk management requires special consideration when an AI system is likely to be accessed by children. The U.S. has developed a risk management framework, but the U.S. has not yet articulated risk levels or developed a specific educational or youth profile using NIST’s Risk Management Framework. There is still a deep need to ensure that AI systems likely to be accessed by children, including in schools, to be assessed in terms of risk management and impact on youth.
It is well established that children and teenagers are vulnerable to manipulation by technology. Youth report struggling to set boundaries from technology, and according to a U.S. Surgeon General report, almost a third of teens say they are on social media almost constantly. Almost half of youth say social media has reduced their attention span, and takes time away from other activities they care about. They are unequipped to assess sophisticated and targeted advertising, as most children cannot distinguish ads from content until they are at least eight years old, and most children do not realize ads can be customized. Additionally, social media design features lead, in addition to addiction, to teens suffering other mental or physical harm: from unattainable beauty filters to friend comparison to recommendation systems that promote harmful content, such as the algorithmic promotion of viral “challenges” that can lead to death. AI technology is particularly concerning given its novelness, and the speed and autonomy at which the technology can operate, and the frequent opacity even to developers of AI systems about how inputs and outputs may be used or exposed.
Particularly problematic uses of AI in products used in education and/or by children so far include products that use emotion detection, biometric data, facial recognition (built from scraping online images that include children), companion AI, automated education decisions, and social scoring. This list will continue to grow as AI is further adopted.
There are numerous useful frameworks and toolkits from expert organizations like EdSafe, and TeachAI, and from government organizations like NIST, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), and Department of Education (ED). However, we need the next administration to (1) encourage Congress to pass clear rules regarding AI products used with children, (2) have NIST develop risk management frameworks specifically addressing use of AI in education and by children more broadly, and serve as a clearinghouse function so individual actors and states do not bear that responsibility, and (3) ensure frameworks are required and prohibitions are enforced. This is also reflected in the lack of updated federal privacy and safety laws that protect children and teens.
Plan of Action
The federal government should take note of the innovative policy ideas bubbling up at the state level. For example, there is legislation and proposals in Colorado, California, Texas, and detailed guidance in over 20 states, including Ohio, Alabama, and Oregon.
Policymakers should take a multi-pronged approach to address AI for children and learning, recognizing they are higher risk and therefore additional layers of protection should apply:
Recommendation 1. Build a coordinated framework an AI Safety and Kids Initiative at NIST
As the federal government further details risk associated with uses of AI, common uses of AI by kids should be designated or managed as high risk. This is a foundational step to support the creation of guardrails or ensure protections for children as they use AI systems. The administration should clearly categorize education and use by children with in a risk level framework. For example, the EU is also considering risk in AI with the EU AI Act, which has different risk levels. If the risk framework includes education and AI systems that are likely to be accessed by children it provides a strong signal to policymakers at the state and federal level that these are uses that require protections (audits, transparency, or enforcement) to prevent or address potential harm.
NIST, in partnership with others, should develop risk management profiles for platform developers building AI products for use in Education and for products likely to be accessed by children. Emphasis should be on safety and efficacy before technology products come to market, with audits throughout development. NIST should:
- Develop a committee with ED,, FTC, and CPSC, to periodically update of risk management framework (RMF) profiles, including benchmarking standards related to safety.
- Refine risk levels and RMFs relevant to education, working in in partnership with NTIA and ED, through an open call to stakeholders.
Work in partnership with NTIA, FTC, CPSC, and HHS to refine risk levels and risk management profiles for AI systems likely to be accessed by children.
The administration should task NIST’s Safety Institute to provide clarity on how safety should be considered for the use of AI in education and for AI systems likely to be accessed by children. This is accomplished through:
- Developer guidance: Promulgate safety guidance for developers of AI systems likely to be accessed by children or used in education
- Procurement guidance: In collaboration with the Dept of Education to provide guidance on safety, efficacy, and privacy to support educational procurement of AI systems
- Information clearinghouse: To support state bodies and other entities developing guidance on use of AI systems by serving as a clearinghouse for information on the state of AI systems, developments in efficacy and safety, and to highlight through periodic reporting the concerns of and needs of users.
Recommendation 2. Ensure every child benefits from the promise of AI innovations
The administration should support comprehensive digital literacy and prevent a deepening of the digital divide.
- Highlighting Meaningful Use: Provide periodically updated guidance on best uses available for schools, teachers, students, and caregivers to support their use of AI technology for education.
- Support Professional Development: Dept of Ed and NSF can collaborate on Professional Development guidelines, and flag new areas for teacher training and administer funding to support educator professional development.
- Comprehensive Digital Literacy: NTIA, Dept of Ed should collaborate to administer funds for digital literacy efforts that support both students and caregivers. Digital literacy guidance should support both use and dynamically addresses concerns around current risks or safety issues as they arise.
- Clearinghouse for AI Developments: In addition to funding this work experts in government at NIST, NTIA, FTC, FCC, and Dept of Ed can work collaboratively to periodically alert and inform consumers and digital literacy organizations about developments with AI systems. Federal government can serve as a resource to alert stakeholders downstream on both positive and negative developments, for example the FCC Consumer Advisory Committee was tasked with developing recommendation with a consumer education outreach plan regarding AI generated robocalls.
Recommendation 3. Encourage Congress to pass clear enforceable rules re privacy and safety for AI products used by children
Champion Congressional updates to privacy laws like COPPA and FERPA to address use (especially for training) and sharing of personal information (PI) by AI tools. These laws can work in tandem, see for example recent proposed COPPA updates that would address use of technology in educational settings by children.
- Consumer Protections: In the consumer space, consider requirements generally prohibiting use of children’s PI for training AI models, unless deidentified or aggregated and with consent (see CA AB 2877).
- Education Protections: In education settings, it may be unclear when information about students shared with AI systems is subject to FERPA. Dept of Ed has acknowledged that educational uses of AI models may not be aligned with FERPA or state student privacy laws. FERPA should be updated to explicitly cover personal information collected by and shared with LLMs: covered education records must include this data; sharing of directory information for all purposes including AI should be limited; the statute should address when ed tech vendors operate as “school officials” and generally prohibit training AI models on student personal information.
Push for Congress to pass AI specific legislation addressing the development and deployment of AI systems for use by children
- Address High Risk Uses: Support legislation to prohibit the use of AI systems in high-risk educational contexts, or when likely to be accessed by children, unless committee-identified benchmarks are met. Use of AI in educational contexts and when accessed by children should be default deemed high risk unless it can be demonstrated otherwise. Specific examples of high risks uses in education include AI for threat detection and disciplinary uses, exam proctoring, automated grading and admissions, and generative and companion AI use by minor students.
- Require Third-Party Audits: Support legislation to require third-party audits at the application, model, and governance level, considering functionality, performance, robustness, security and privacy, safety, educational efficacy (as appropriate), accessibility, risks, and mitigation strategies.
- Require Transparency: Support legislation to require transparency reporting by AI developers.
Support Congressional passage of online safety laws that address harmful design features in technology–specifically addressing design features that can lead to medically recognized mental health disorders like anxiety, depression, eating disorders, substance use, and suicide, and patterns of use indicating addiction-like behavior, as in Title I of the Senate-passed Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act.
Moving Forward
One ultimate recommendation is that, critically, standards and requirements need teeth. Frameworks should require that companies comply with legal requirements or face effective enforcement (such as by a well-funded expert regulator, or private lawsuits), with tools such as fines and injunctions. We have seen with past technological developments that voluntary frameworks and suggestions will not adequately protect children. Social media for example has failed to voluntarily protect children and poses risks to their mental health and well being. From exacerbating body image issues to amplifying peer pressure and social comparison, from encouraging compulsive device use to reducing attention spans, from connecting youth to extremism, illegal products, and deadly challenges, the financial incentives do not appear to exist for technology companies to appropriately safeguard children on their own. The next Administration can support enforcement by funding government positions who will be enforcing such laws.
A Peer Support Service Integrated Into the 988 Lifeline
A peer support option should be integrated into the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline so that 988 service users can choose to connect with specialists based on a shared lived experience. As people and communities become more siloed, the risk of mortality and morbidity increases. Social connectedness is a critical protective factor. A peer support service would allow individuals to receive support built on a lived experience that is common to both the service user and the specialist. It should be free and easily accessible through phone call and text messaging. This service is especially timely, following the 2020 rollout of the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, as well as recent peer support initiatives at the federal and state levels.
While the efficacy of peer support is most known with mental illness, it has successfully helped a range of individuals including cancer patients, people experiencing homelessness, racial minorities, veterans, and formerly incarcerated people. The peer support service should provide support for all kinds of lived experience, including experiences with: disability resulting from poor physical or mental health, substance use, suicidal ideation, veteran-connected disability, financial insecurity, homelessness, domestic violence and family court, nonnuclear family structures or living alone, former incarceration, and belonging to racial or ethnic minority groups. The service should be a preventative intervention as well as complimentary assistance for those in recovery or treatment.
Challenge and Opportunity
The United States faces an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” While individuals from all backgrounds are afflicted, the most vulnerable and underserved members of society have suffered the most. A range of challenging circumstances cause this suffering, including poor physical or mental health, nontraditional living conditions, and historic inequality. Not having anyone who shares one’s lived experience is isolating. These challenging life circumstances take an emotional toll, and they become risk factors for a slew of physical and mental health conditions that increase morbidity and decrease life expectancy.
In addition to the social costs, these outcomes have an increasingly devastating economic impact. Health care costs are projected to account for 20% of the U.S. economy by 2031. Psychiatric hospitalizations are steadily increasing, and a shortage of psychiatric inpatient beds is rampant.
Social connectedness alleviates physical and mental burdens. Peer support offers a cost-effective intervention for prevention and recovery. It reduces spending on both physical and mental illnesses, and it reduces psychiatric hospitalizations, saving an average of $4.76 for every $1 spent on peer support. In a New York City-based peer support program, service users saved about $2,000 per month in Medicaid costs and had 2.9 fewer hospitalizations per year.
Telephone-based peer support has life-saving outcomes, too. Over telephone, peer support led to a 15% increase in women’s mammography screening rates, with the highest increase among women of low-to-middle income. Telephone-based peer support increased breastfeeding rates by 14% and reduced breastfeeding dissatisfaction by 10% among first-time mothers, and it led to a 10% change in diet among patients with heart disease. While peer support would not solve national crises of homelessness or rising healthcare costs, it would ease them by fostering community empowerment and self-reliance and reducing federal intervention.
In 2023, SAMHSA rolled out “National Model Standards for Peer Support Certification”. This guide provides recommendations for how each state can integrate its own “peer mental health workforce across all elements of the healthcare system.” In its current form, SAMHSA’s strategy targets lived experiences with substance use and mental health. A broader scope would assist and empower more underserved members of the community. Following the momentum of SAMHSA’s initiative, now is the most optimal time to integrate a peer support service into the 988 Lifeline.
Peer support exists in the U.S., but services are spread thin across private and nonprofit sectors. The Restoring Hope for Mental Health and Well-Being Act of 2022 authorized $1.7 trillion in funding until FY2027 for various health initiatives, including peer support mental health services. This funding relies on organizations and institutions to independently implement peer support services based on community needs. However, a fragmented system can result in underuse, limited accessibility, and a varied quality of service, with pockets of the United States lacking any service at all. It also poses privacy concerns about how individuals’ data are stored and used, as well as cybersecurity vulnerabilities with smaller organizations that may lack a robust security infrastructure.
A peer support service that is integrated into the 988 Lifeline would ensure that all Americans have equal access to a high-quality, confidential peer support network. The standardization of the 988 Lifeline is a prime example of successful implementation. Its transition from a 10-digit number to a three-digit dial led to a 33% average increase in in-state call volume over four months. Standardization shifted funding from primarily private and nonprofit initiatives and donations to stable public sector support. As a result, call pickup rates rose from 70% to 93%, and wait times dropped from 2 minutes 20 seconds to just 35 seconds.
The 988 Lifeline also adheres to privacy and confidentiality protocols in line with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Security Rule. Under these protocols, the 988 Lifeline retains minimal information about callers and texters, and this information stays private and securely stored. A peer support service with similar safeguards would help both service users and peer support workers (PSWs) feel safe when sharing sensitive information.
Peer support for mental health has gained traction recently. The National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) offers peer-to-peer courses, although these are currently limited in their duration and available locations. Last year, Congress expressed an interest in peer support mental health services: a “Supporting All Students Act” was proposed in the Senate for “peer and school-based mental health support.” This endeavor especially targets the escalating suicide crisis among youths in the form of a peer-to-peer suicide prevention. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction also recently introduced Peer-to-Peer Suicide Prevention Grants. The federal and state-level governments clearly recognize the value of peer support work. Still, they underutilize its potential.
Loneliness and isolation are at an all-time high in the United States. However, they stem from a multitude of causes. An empathic connection with a peer who has lived the same experience has immense potential for healing and recovery in both the PSW and the service user. The 988 Lifeline should include an integrated peer support service for both mental health and a broad range of lived experiences. While there exist some peer support services for conditions not related to mental health, these are not standardized or easily accessible to the entire American population. Many peer-operated warmlines (i.e., support lines) exist. However, they are spread across dozens of phone numbers and websites with varied and limited sources of funding. A single peer support service integrated into the 988 Lifeline would make peer support universally available. This service would address the emotional toll that accompanies a wide range of challenging life circumstances.
In short, a peer support service integrated into the 988 Lifeline would make the efforts of existing peer support organizations even more effective as it would:
- Standardize training, quality of care, and confidentiality,
- Expand the kinds of lived experience that are available for peer support, and
- Maximize the distribution of high-quality services across the U.S., with a focus on reaching high-risk populations.
Action Plan
The peer support service should begin by covering only a few kinds of lived experiences. After this implementation, the service should be expanded to cover a broader range of experiences.
Recommendation 1. Create a Peer Support Task Force (PSTF).
A PSTF should be established within SAMHSA. The secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) should work with SAMHSA’s assistant secretary for mental health and substance use to establish this temporary task force.
The PSTF should lead the implementation of the peer support service, acting as an interagency task force that coordinates with partners across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. This partnership will ensure that different lived experiences are accounted for and that existing resources are used effectively. The PSTF should collaborate with federal agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Indian Health Service (IHS), as well as with advocacy organizations like NAMI and the American Cancer Society that champion the needs of people with specific lived experiences.
The PSTF should be charged with the following recommendations to start.
Recommendation 2. Integrate a peer support option into the 988 Lifeline.
Under the authority of the PSTF, integrating a peer support option into the 988 Lifeline could bypass additional Congressional action.
In the first pass, the integrated peer support option should cover only a few kinds of lived experiences (e.g., suicide and behavioral crises, veteran-connected disability).
- Before scaling the peer support service across the United States, the PSTF should implement a pilot program to test and refine protocols. The PSTF should select 988 Lifeline centers in states that already have a strong peer support program, and it should pilot peer support call and text services. The pilot program should select a few peer support needs to test first (e.g., suicide and behavioral crises, veteran-connected disability), as a narrow scope will be easier to assess for the first pass.
- The PSTF should then incorporate feedback from this pilot program as it scales up and integrates a peer support option into the nationwide 988 Lifeline.
- The PSTF should coordinate with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to add a caller menu option for peer support into the 988 Lifeline. (E.g., “Press 4 for peer support.”)
- The PSTF should coordinate with the FCC and U.S. Digital Service to implement a telephone triage, so the service user can submit a request for a specific kind of peer support and then be routed to a PSW on shift who has a lived experience that best matches the submitted request.
- The PSTF should facilitate the 988 Lifeline’s partnership with existing local and national peer support organizations and warmlines. Partnering with these existing organizations would bolster the 988 Lifeline’s capacity to provide peer support. Furthermore, states that already have a strong peer support certification in place could easily integrate their trained PSWs into the 988 Lifeline services using their existing infrastructure and expertise.
- The PSTF should coordinate with the FCC to incorporate a peer support text messaging option within the 988 Lifeline’s text and chat services. (For example, service users could text “PEER” to 9-8-8 and be routed to a PSW on shift.)
- The PSTF should implement a public campaign to the general public clarifying that the 988 Lifeline will remain as a suicide and crisis hotline, but it will also provide access to broader peer support services. The available peer support services should be clearly outlined on the 988 Lifeline website.
PSWs should work in call centers alongside 988 Lifeline phone and text specialists.
Recommendation 3. Develop an action plan to fund and sustain the integration of the peer support service.
The peer support service would need funding to become integrated into the 988 Lifeline. The government has recently approved funds for mental health initiatives, such as with the Restoring Hope for Mental Health and Well-Being Act of 2022. In 2023, HHS announced an additional $200 million in funding for the 988 Lifeline, but overall, HHS has granted almost $1.5 billion in total toward the 988 Lifeline. Similar avenues of funding should help jumpstart the integration of the peer support service.
For continued maintenance, fees for the peer support service should apply in a similar fashion to 9-1-1. That is, service users should not pay each time they access the 988 Lifeline or its integrated peer support service. Some U.S. states have already passed 9-8-8 implementation legislation that allows a monthly flat fee to be collected through telephone and wireless service providers, as permitted in the “National Suicide Hotline Designation Act of 2020”. The remaining states should be encouraged to pass similar legislation. The fee should remain in an account that is spent only for the maintenance of the 988 Lifeline and peer support services. If a fee is collected, then the FCC should provide an annual report on these fees and their usage.
Funding for the peer support service’s integration into the 988 Lifeline would entail the following:
- Maintenance of the peer support service
- Financial compensation for trainers who will train and mentor the PSWs
- Recruitment of trainers and PSWs
- The development of training resources for PSWs
Recommendation 4. Establish state-level standardized peer support training and certification.
PSWs should learn skills that are commonly taught to 988 Lifeline specialists, including active listening and recovery-oriented language. They should learn how to share their own stories, navigate challenging conversations, maintain boundaries, and self-care. Their training should be standardized at the state level, and it should be based on the “National Model Standards for Peer Support Certification” established by SAMHSA.
While most U.S. states have some version of peer support certification for mental health and/or substance use recovery, the PSTF should work with advocacy organizations to ensure that the state-level standardized training accounts for the peer support needs and demographics of each state. The peer support training should address the needs of people with a diverse range of lived experiences. Peer support needs can also be studied using caller outcome data that are recorded by 988 Lifeline specialists.
The PSTF should recruit trainers who will train and mentor the PSWs. To start, the PSTF should liaise within SAMHSA and with existing peer support organizations to coordinate this recruitment.
Recommendation 5. Establish a nation-wide system for the recruitment and training of PSWs.
Recruit individuals who would like to use their own lived experience to help other community members. Recruitment should occur through hospitals, clinics, as well as peer-run and community-based organizations to maximize recruitment pathways.
Current 988 Lifeline phone and text specialists could also be good candidates for the peer support service. Many are motivated by their own lived experiences and are already trained to handle calls across multiple helplines. 988 Lifeline specialists are instructed to focus on the service user seeking help and not share about themselves. However, specialists’ own lived experiences––if they are comfortable sharing them––represent untapped potential.
Once recruited, individuals who are training to become PSWs should attend live training sessions online with a peer cohort.
Recommendation 6. Expand the peer support service to cover a diverse range of lived experiences.
After successfully establishing the peer support service, it should be expanded upon to provide support for a broad and diverse range of lived experiences. The available peer support services should continue to be updated and outlined on the 988 Lifeline website.
Conclusion
A peer support service should be integrated into the 988 Lifeline. A service that caters to all kinds of lived experience paves way for a more empowered and self-reliant community. It fosters a societal mindset of helping each other based on shared lived experience in an empathic and healthy way. Peer support empowers both the PSW and the service user. While the service user finds empathy and understanding, the PSW finds a renewed sense of purpose and confidence. In this way, peer support would alleviate loneliness and isolation that result from a variety of causes while instilling longer-term resilience into the community.
This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.
A service user refers to any individual who uses the peer support service for assistance.
Peer support work can be empowering and healing for those in recovery. However, as with any emotionally challenging work, PSWs benefit from ongoing support and supervision. Some interactions can be draining, especially if they hit too close to home. It is common for 988 Lifeline call centers to have a trained staff member, such as a psychologist or therapist, on call for such situations. A PSW could use this resource to debrief or process as needed. Additionally, during recruitment, PSW candidates should be screened to ensure they are comfortable speaking about their own lived experience and helping others who are going through the same experience.
Most PSWs would be compensated in the same way as their 988 Lifeline call and text specialist counterparts. They would be compensated with rigorous ongoing training, support, and resources for recovery and self-care in return for their time. They would also benefit from a social support system of fellow PSWs. Some individuals who may be ideal candidates for peer support work may struggle to find employment and health insurance. They will be less likely to volunteer if they do not have a living wage. To maximize the range of lived experiences available, certain individuals should be eligible for financial compensation.
A service user’s phone call or text should be routed to a 988 Lifeline peer support operator or telephone triage, where the service user is asked to say aloud (or type) what kind of support they are searching for (e.g., “I want to speak with someone who has been in prison.”) Then, the service user’s call (or text) would be routed to a PSW (under an alias) anywhere in the United States who 1) is currently on shift and 2) has a lived experience that is closest to the service user’s request. Each PSW would have associated keywords, such as “former incarceration,” “PTSD,” or “living alone,” which means that they are trained to connect with any service user about those lived experiences. The PSW would follow the service user’s lead in the conversation, and the PSW could share parts of their own lived experience when appropriate.
Text messaging can be more accessible than a phone line for youths and people with disabilities. The 988 Lifeline includes a text messaging option for this same reason.
It is true that both the regular 988 Lifeline and peer support service would provide resources and emotional support. By incorporating peer support into the 988 Lifeline, existing local and national peer support organizations would be eligible to partner with the 988 Lifeline and bolster its capacity to provide peer support. This endeavor will help with some staffing concerns. Furthermore, the peer support service would cover a diverse range of lived experiences extending beyond mental health. Therefore, more individuals may be motivated to join the 988 Lifeline staff to share their unique lived experience and help others who feel the same way.
Integrating a versatile peer support service into the 988 Lifeline transforms the latter into a service that every single American can use. (Every American has some unique lived experience.) The service’s versatility may help incentivize the remaining states to pass legislation to collect a 988 Lifeline fee through telephone and wireless service providers.
Finally, peer support is a cost-effective, preventative intervention. It should help remove the burden on other federal services, thereby reducing overall spending in time.
After implementing the action plan outlined in this memo, a subsequent memo should outline how to integrate peer support work into the community in person and on a large scale. Incorporating peer support into the 988 Lifeline would show its effectiveness to the public, policymakers, and healthcare professionals. This credibility would bolster endeavors to integrate peer support work into community settings throughout the country (e.g., behavioral health centers, hospitals and emergency rooms, and community clinics). These endeavors could also lead to professionalizing peer support, so PSWs can be reimbursed through Medicaid programs and health insurance.
Antitrust in the AI Era: Strengthening Enforcement Against Emerging Anticompetitive Behavior
The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized business practices, enabling companies to process vast amounts of data and automate complex tasks in ways previously unimaginable. However, while AI has gained much praise for its capabilities, it has also raised various antitrust concerns. Among the most pressing is the potential for AI to be used in an anticompetitive manner. This includes algorithms that facilitate price-fixing, predatory pricing, and discriminatory pricing (harming the consumer market), as well as those which enable the manipulation of wages and worker mobility (harming the labor market). More troubling perhaps is the fact that the overwhelming majority of the AI landscape is controlled by just a few market players. These tech giants—some of the world’s most powerful corporations—have established a near-monopoly over the development and deployment of AI. Their dominance over necessary infrastructure and resources makes it increasingly challenging for smaller firms to compete.
While the antitrust enforcement agencies—the FTC and DOJ—have recently begun to investigate these issues, they are likely only scratching the surface. The covert and complex nature of AI makes it difficult to detect when it is being used in an anticompetitive manner. To ensure that business practices remain competitive in the era of AI, the enforcement agencies must be adequately equipped with the appropriate strategies and resources. The best way to achieve this is to (1) require the disclosure of AI technologies during the merger-review process and (2) reinforce the enforcement agencies’ technical strategy in assessing and mitigating anticompetitive AI practices.
Challenge & Opportunity
Since the late 1970s, antitrust enforcement has been in decline, in part due to a more relaxed antitrust approach put forth by the Chicago school of economics. Both the budgets and the number of full-time employees at the enforcement agencies have steadily decreased, while the volume of permitted mergers and acquisitions has risen (see Figure 1). This resource gap has limited the ability of the agencies to effectively oversee and regulate anticompetitive practices.
Changing attitudes surrounding big business, as well as recent shifts in leadership at the enforcement agencies—most notably President Biden’s appointment of Lina Khan to FTC Chair—have signaled a more aggressive approach to antitrust law. But even with this renewed focus, the agencies are still not operating at their full potential.
This landscape provides a significant opportunity to make some much-needed changes. Two areas for improvement stand out. First, agencies can make use of the merger review process to aid in the detection of anticompetitive AI practices. In particular, the agencies should be on the look-out for algorithms that facilitate price-fixing, where competitors use AI to monitor and adjust prices automatically, covertly allowing for tacit collusion; predatory pricing algorithms, which enable firms to undercut competitors only to later raise prices once dominance is achieved; and dynamic pricing algorithms, which allow firms to discriminate against different consumer groups, resulting in price disparities that may distort market competition. On the labor side, agencies should screen for wage-fixing algorithms and other data-driven hiring practices that may suppress wages and limit job mobility. Requiring companies to disclose the use of such AI technologies during merger assessments would allow regulators to examine and identify problematic practices early on. This is especially useful for flagging companies with a history of anticompetitive behavior or those involved in large transactions, where the use of AI could have the strongest anticompetitive effects.
Second, agencies can use AI to combat AI. Research has demonstrated that AI can be more effective in detecting anticompetitive behavior than other traditional methods. Leveraging such technology could transform enforcement capabilities by allowing agencies to cover more ground despite limited resources. While increasing funding for these agencies would be requisite, AI nonetheless provides a cost-effective solution, enhancing efficiency in detecting anticompetitive practices, without requiring massive budget increases.
The success of these recommendations hinges on the enforcement agencies employing technologists who have a deep understanding of AI. Their knowledge on algorithm functionality, the latest insights in AI, and the interplay between big data and anticompetitive behavior is instrumental. A detailed discussion of the need for AI expertise is covered in the following section.
Plan Of Action
Recommendation 1. Require Disclosure of AI Technologies During Merger-Review.
Currently, there is no formal requirement in the merger review process that mandates the reporting of AI technologies. This lack of transparency allows companies to withhold critical information that may help agencies determine potential anticompetitive effects. To effectively safeguard competition, it is essential that the FTC and DOJ have full visibility of businesses’ technologies, particularly those that may impact market dynamics. While the agencies can request information on certain technologies further in the review process, typically during the second request phase, a formalized reporting requirement would provide a more proactive approach. Such an approach would be beneficial for several reasons. First, it would enable the agencies to identify anticompetitive technologies they might have otherwise overlooked. Second, an early assessment would allow the agencies to detect and mitigate risk upfront, rather than having to address it post-merger or further along in the merger review process, when remedies may be more difficult to enforce. This is particularly applicable with regard to deep integrations that often occur between digital products post-merger. For instance, the merger of Instagram and Facebook complicated the FTC’s subsequent efforts to challenge Meta. As Dmitry Borodaenko, a former Facebook engineer, explained:
“Instagram is no longer viable outside of Facebook’s infrastructure. Over the course of six years, they integrated deeply… Undoing this would not be a simple task—it would take years, not just the click of a button.”
Lastly, given the rapidly evolving nature of AI, this requirement would help the agencies identify trends and better determine which technologies are harmful to competition, under what circumstances, and in which industries. Insights gained from one sector could inform investigations in other sectors, where similar technologies are being deployed. For example, the DOJ recently filed suit against RealPage, a property management software company, for allegedly using price-fixing algorithms to coordinate rent increases among competing landlords. The case is the first of its kind, as there had not been any previous lawsuit addressing price-fixing in the rental market. With this insight, however, if the agencies detect similar algorithms during the merger review process, they would be better equipped to intervene and prevent such practices.
There are several ways the government could implement this recommendation. To start, The FTC and DOJ should issue interpretive guidelines specifying that anticompetitive effects stemming from AI technologies are within the purview of the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act, and that accordingly, such technologies should be disclosed in the pre-merger notification process. In particular, the agencies should instruct companies to report detailed descriptions of all AI technologies in use, how they might change post-merger, and their potential impact on competition metrics (e.g., price, market share). This would serve as a key step in signaling to companies that AI considerations are integral during merger review. Building on this, Congress could pass legislation mandating AI disclosures, thereby formalizing the requirement. Ultimately, in a future round of HSR revisions, the agencies could incorporate this mandate as a binding rule within the pre-merger framework. To avoid unnecessary burden on businesses, reporting should only be required when AI plays a significant role in the company’s operations or is expected to post-merger. What constitutes a ‘significant role’ should be left to the discretion of the agencies but could include AI systems central to core functions such as pricing, customer targeting, wage-setting, or automation of critical processes.
Recommendation 2. Reinforce the FTC and DOJ’s Technical Strategy in Assessing and Mitigating Anticompetitive AI Practices.
Strengthening the agencies’ ability to address AI requires two actions: integrating computational antitrust strategies and increasing technical expertise. A wave of recent research has highlighted AI as a powerful tool in helping detect anticompetitive behavior. For instance, scholars at the Stanford Computational Antitrust Project have demonstrated that methods such as machine learning, natural language processing, and network analysis can assist with tasks, ranging from uncovering collusion between firms to distinguishing digital markets. While the DOJ has already partnered with the Project, the FTC could benefit by pursuing a similar collaboration. More broadly, the agencies should deepen their technical expertise by expanding workshops and training with AI academic leaders. Doing so would not only provide them with access to the most sophisticated techniques in the field, but would also help bridge the gap between academic research and real-world implementation. Examples may include the use of machine learning algorithms to identify price-fixing and wage-setting; sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and other natural language processing tools to detect intention to collude in firm communications; or reverse-engineering algorithms to predict outcomes of AI-driven market manipulation.
Leveraging such computational strategies would enable regulators to analyze complex market data more effectively, enhancing the efficiency and precision of antitrust investigations. Given AI’s immense power, only a small—but highly skilled—team is needed to make significant progress. For instance, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) recently stood up a Data, Technology and Analytics unit, whereby they implement machine learning strategies to investigate various antitrust matters. For the U.S. agencies to facilitate this, the DOJ and FTC should hire more ML/AI experts, data scientists, and technologists, who could serve several key functions. First, they could conduct research on the most effective methods for detecting collusion and anticompetitive behavior in both digital and non-digital markets. Second, based on such research, they could guide the implementation of selected AI solutions in investigations and policy development. Third, they could perform assessments of AI technologies, evaluating the potential risks and benefits of AI applications in specific markets and companies. These assessments would be particularly useful during merger review, as previously discussed in Recommendation 1. Finally, they could help establish guidelines for transparency and accountability, ensuring the responsible and ethical use of AI both within the agencies and across the markets they regulate.
To formalize this recommendation, the President should submit a budget proposal to Congress requesting increased funding for the FTC and DOJ to (1) hire technology/AI experts and (2) provide necessary training for other selected employees on AI algorithms and datasets. The FTC may separately consider using its 6(b) subpoena powers to conduct a comprehensive study of the AI industry or of the use of AI practices more generally (e.g., to set prices or wages). Finally, the agencies should strive to foster collaboration between each other (e.g., establishing a Joint DOJ-FTC Computational Task Force), as well as with those in academia and the private sector, to ensure that enforcement strategies remain at the cutting edge of AI advancements.
Conclusion
The nation is in the midst of an AI revolution, and with it comes new avenues for anticompetitive behavior. As it stands, the antitrust enforcement agencies lack the necessary tools to adequately address this growing threat.
However, this environment also presents a pivotal opportunity for modernization. By requiring the disclosure of AI technologies during the merger review process, and by reinforcing the technical strategy at the FTC and DOJ, the antitrust agencies can strengthen their ability to detect and prevent anticompetitive practices. Leveraging the expertise of technologists in enforcement efforts can enhance the agencies’ capacity to monitor levels of competition in markets, as well as allow them to identify patterns between certain technologies and violations of antitrust.
Given the rapid pace of AI advancement, a proactive effort triumphs over a reactive one. Detecting antitrust violations early allows agencies to save both time and resources. To protect consumers, workers, and the economy more broadly, it is imperative that the FTC and DOJ adapt their enforcement strategies to meet the complexities of the AI era.
This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.
Using Pull Finance for Market-driven Infrastructure and Asset Resilience
The incoming administration should establish a $500 million pull-financing facility to ensure infrastructure and asset resiliency with partner nations by catalyzing the private sector to develop cutting-edge technologies. The increasing frequency of extreme weather events, which caused over $200 billion in global economic losses in 2023, is disrupting global supply chains and exacerbating migration pressures, particularly for the U.S. Investing in climate resilience abroad offers a significant opportunity for U.S. businesses in technology, engineering, and infrastructure, while also supporting job creation at home.
Pull-finance mechanisms can maximize the efficiency and impact of U.S. investments, fostering innovation and driving sustainable solutions to address global vulnerabilities. Unlike traditional funding which second-guesses the markets by supporting only selected innovators, pull financing drives results by relying on the market to efficiently allocate resources to achievement, fostering competition and rewarding the most impactful solutions. Managed and steered by the U.S. government, the pull-financing facility would fund infrastructure and asset resiliency results delivered by the world’s cutting-edge innovators, mitigating the effects of extreme weather events and ultimately supporting U.S. interests abroad.
Challenge and Opportunity
The increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events pose significant risks to global economic stability, with direct implications for U.S. interests. In 2023 alone, natural disasters caused over $200 billion in global economic losses with much of the damage concentrated in regions critical to global supply chains. U.S. businesses that depend on these supply chains face rising costs and disruptions, which translate into higher costs for U.S. businesses and consumers, undermining economic competitiveness.
Beyond the economic dimension, these vulnerabilities exacerbate socio-political pressures. Climate-induced displacement is accelerating, with 32.6 million people internally displaced by disasters in 2022. Most displaced individuals that cross borders migrate to countries neighboring their own, which are ill-equipped to handle the influx, often further destabilizing fragile states. For the U.S., this translates into increased migration pressures at its southern border, where natural disasters are already a driving force behind migration from Central America. Addressing these root causes through proactive resiliency investments abroad would reduce long-term strain on the U.S. and bolster stability in strategically important regions.
In addition to economic and social risks, resilience is now a key front in global competition. The People’s Republic of China has rapidly expanded its influence in developing nations through initiatives like the Belt and Road, financing over $200 billion in energy and infrastructure projects since 2013. A significant portion of these projects focus on resiliency investments, enabling China to position itself as a partner of choice for nations with asset and infrastructure exposure. This growing influence comes at the expense of U.S. global leadership.
In the context of these challenges, it is especially concerning that much of the U.S.’s existing spending may not be achieving the results it could. A recent audit of USAID climate initiatives highlights concerns around limited transparency and effectiveness in its development funding. The inefficient use of this funding is leaving opportunities on the table for U.S. businesses and workers. Global investments in adaptation and resiliency are projected to reach $500 billion annually by 2050. Resilience projects abroad could open substantial markets for American engineering, technology, and infrastructure firms. For instance, U.S.-based companies specializing in resilient agriculture, flood defense systems, advanced irrigation technologies, and energy infrastructure stand to benefit from increased demand. Domestically, the manufacturing and export of these solutions could generate significant economic activity, supporting high-quality jobs and revitalizing industrial sectors.
Pull finance presents an opportunity to increase the cost effectiveness of resiliency funding—and ensure this funding achieves U.S. interests. Pull finance mechanisms like results-based financing and Advance Market Commitments (AMC) reward successful solutions that meet specific criteria, promoting private sector engagement and market-driven problem-solving. Unlike traditional “push” financing, which funds chosen teams or projects directly, pull financing sets a goal and allows any innovator who reaches it to claim the reward, fostering competitive problem-solving without pre-selected winners. This approach includes various mechanisms – such as prize challenges, milestone payments, advance market commitments, and subscription models – each suited to different issues and industries.
Pull financing is particularly effective for addressing complex challenges with unclear or emerging solutions, or in areas with limited commercial incentives. It has proven successful in various contexts, such as the first Trump Administration’s rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines through Operation Warp Speed and GAVI’s introduction of the pneumococcal vaccine in low-income countries. These initiatives highlight how pull financing can stimulate breakthrough innovations that efficiently address immediate needs in collaboration with private actors through effective incentives.
Pull finance can be used to efficiently advance infrastructure and asset resilience goals while also providing opportunities for U.S. innovators and industry. By stimulating demand for critically needed technologies for development like resilient seeds and energy storage solutions, as detailed in Box 1, well-designed pull finance would help link U.S. technology innovators to addressing needs of U.S. partners. As such, pull finance can play a critical role in positioning the U.S. as a partner of first choice for countries seeking to access U.S. innovation to meet resilience needs.
What would the design of a pull financing mechanism look like in practice?
Resilient Seeds
Agriculture in Africa is highly susceptible to extreme weather events, with limited adoption of effective farming technologies. Developing new seed varieties capable of withstanding these events and optimizing resource use has the potential to yield significant societal benefits.
While push financing can support the development of resource-efficient and productive seeds, it often lacks the ability to ensure they meet essential quality standards, like flavor and appearance, and are user-friendly across farming, transport and marketing stages. In contrast, pull financing can effectively incentivize private sector innovation across all critical dimensions, including end-user take-up.
A pull mechanism for resilient seeds, using a milestone payment mechanism, could cover a portion of R&D costs initially, with additional payments tied to successful lab trials. Depending on the obstacles to scaling – whether they arise from the innovator/distributor side or the farmer side – a small per-user payment to the innovator or per-user subsidy could help sustain market demand.
The design and scale of a pull financing mechanism to promote the rollout of new seeds and crop varieties will largely depend on the market readiness of the various seed types involved. Establishing effective pull mechanisms for seed development is estimated to cost between $50 million and $100 million, aiming for significant outreach to farmers. Along with supporting improved livelihoods for farmers, this small investment would open opportunities for U.S. technology innovators and companies.
Pull Finance Initiative for Infrastructure and Asset Resiliency in the Caribbean
The Caribbean is one of the regions most vulnerable to extreme weather events, making it critical to engage the private sector in developing and adopting technologies suited to Small Island Developing States (SIDS). Challenges such as limited demand and high costs hinder innovation and investment in these small markets, leaving key areas like agriculture and access underserved. Overcoming these market failures requires innovative approaches to create sustainable incentives for private sector involvement.
Pull finances offers a promising solution to drive resiliency in SIDS. By tying payments to measurable outcomes, this approach will incentivize the development and deployment of technologies that might otherwise remain inaccessible.
For example, pull finance could be used to stimulate the creation of energy storage solutions designed to withstand extreme weather conditions in remote areas. This could be help address the critical needs of SIDS’ such as Guyana which face energy security challenges linked to extreme weather conditions, especially in remote and dispersed areas. Energy storage technologies exist, but companies are not motivated to invest in tailored innovation for local needs because end-users cannot pay prices that compensate for innovation efforts. Pull finance could address this by committing to purchase an amount large enough that nudges companies to develop a tailored product, without raising market prices. Success would require partnerships with local SMEs, caps in installation costs, and specifications on storage capacity, along with relevant technology partners such as those in the U.S.. This approach would support immediate adaptation needs and lay the foundation for sustainable, market-driven solutions that ensure long-term resilience for SIDS.
Plan of Action
The new administration should establish a dedicated pull-financing facility to accelerate the scale-up and deployment of development solutions with partner nations. In line with other major U.S. climate initiatives, this facility could be managed by USAID’s Bureau for Resilience, Environment and Food Security (REFS), with significant support from USAID’s Innovation, Technology, and Research (ITR) Hub, in partnership with the U.S. Department of State. By leveraging USAID’s deep expertise in development and SPEC’s strategic diplomacy, this collaboration would ensure the facility addresses LMIC-specific needs while aligning with broader U.S. objectives.
The recent audit of USAID climate initiatives referenced above highlights concerns on the limited transparency and effectiveness in its climate funding. Thus, we recommend that USAID assesses the impact of its climate spending under the 2020-2024 administration and reallocates a portion of funds from less effective or stalled initiatives to this new facility. We recognize that it may be challenging to quickly identify $500 million in underperforming projects to close and reassign. Therefore, in addition to reallocating existing resources, we strongly recommend appealing to new funding for this initiative. This approach will ensure the new facility has the financial backing it needs to drive meaningful outcomes. Additional resources could also be sourced from large multilateral organizations such as the World Bank.
To enhance the facility’s impact, we recommend the active participation of agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOOA), particularly through the Climate and Societal Interactions Division (CSI) in the Steering Committee,
We propose that this facility draw on the example of the UK’s planned Climate Innovation Pull Facility (CIPF), a £185 million fund which aims to fund development-relevant pull finance projects in LMICs such as those proposed by the Center for Global Development and Instiglio. This can be achieved through the following steps:
Recommendation 1. Establish the pull-finance facility, governance and administration with an initial tranche of $500 million.
The initiative proposes establishing a pull-finance facility with an initial fund of $500 million. This facility will be overseen by a steering board chaired by USAID and comprising senior representatives from USAID, the State Department, NOOA , which will set the strategic direction and make final project selections.
A facility management team, led by USAID, will be responsible for ensuring the successful implementation of the facility, including the selection and delivery of 8 to 16 projects. The final number of projects will depend on the launch readiness of prioritized technologies and their potential impact, with the selection process guided by criteria that align with the facility’s strategic goals. The facility management team will also be responsible for contracting with project and evaluation partners, compliance with regulations, risk management, monitoring and evaluation, as well as payouts. Additionally, the facility management team will provide incubation support for selected initiatives, including technical consultations, financial modeling, contracting expertise, and feasibility assessments.
Designing pull financing mechanisms is complex and requires input from specialized experts, including scientists, economists, and legal advisors, to identify suitable market gaps and targets. An independent Technical Advisory Group (TAG) led by USAID and comprised of such experts should be established to provide technical guidance and quality assurance. The TAG will identify priority resilience topics, such as reducing crop-residue burning or developing resilient crops. It will also focus on sectors where the U.S. can enhance its global competitiveness, which faces high upfront costs and risks. Additionally, the TAG will be responsible for technical review and recommendations of the shortlisted project proposals to inform final selection, as well as provide general advice and challenge to the facility management team and steering board.
We suggest starting with $500 million as the minimum required to be credible and relevant as well as responsive to the scale of global need. Further, experience shows that pull mechanisms need to be of sufficient scale to sustainably shift markets. For instance, GAVI’s pneumococcal vaccine AMC entailed a $1.5 billion commitment and Frontier’s carbon capture AMC likewise entails over $1 billion in commitments.
Recommendation 2. Set up a performance management system to measure, assess and ensure impact.
The U.S. pull financing facility will implement a robust monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL) framework to track and enhance its impact and drive ongoing improvement through feedback and learning.
The facility manager will develop a logical framework (logframe) that includes key performance indicators (KPIs) and a progress and risk dashboard to track monthly performance. These tools will enable effective monitoring of progress, assessment of impact, and proactive risk management, allowing for quick responses to unexpected challenges or underperformance.
Monthly check-ins with an independent evaluation partner, along with oversight from a dedicated MEL committee, will ensure consistent and rigorous evaluation as well as continuous learning. Additionally, knowledge management and dissemination activities will facilitate the sharing of insights and best practices across the program.
Recommendation 3. Establish a knowledge management hub to facilitate the sharing of results and insights and ensure coordination across pull-financing projects.
The hub will work closely with community partners and stakeholders – such as industry and tech leaders and manufacturers – in areas like resiliency-focused finance and innovation to build strong support and develop resources on essential topics, including the effectiveness of pull financing and optimal design strategies. Additionally, the hub will promote collaboration across projects focused on similar technological and production advancements, generating synergies that enhance their collective impact and benefits.
Once the proof of concept is established through clear evidence and learning, the facility will likely secure further stakeholder buy-in and attract additional funding for a scale up phase covering a larger portfolio of projects.
Conclusion
The federal government should establish a $500 million pull-financing facility to accelerate technologies for resilience in the face of growing development challenges. This initiative will unlock high-return investments and increase cost effectiveness of resiliency spending, driving economic and geopolitical goals. Managed and steered by USAID and the State Department, with support from NOOA, the facility would foster breakthroughs in critical areas like resilient infrastructure, energy, and technology, benefiting both U.S. businesses and our international partners. By investing strategically, the U.S. can ensure both national and global stability.
The authors thank FAS for the reviews and feedback, along with Ranil Dissanayake, Florence Oberholtzer, and Laura Mejia Villada for their valuable contribution to this piece.
This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.
Pull financing mechanisms, such as prize competitions, milestone payments, and Advanced Market Commitments (AMCs) often face regulatory and legal challenges due to their dependency on successful outcomes for funding disbursement (CGD, 2021; CGD, 2023). First, it can make cashflow management challenging as federal law requires that legally binding financial commitments be made if the necessary appropriated funds are available, resulting in upfront scoring of costs, even if the actual expenditures occur years later. The uncertainty surrounding innovation and payouts can also create risk aversion, as most funding accounts are not “no-year” accounts, meaning committed funds can expire if competition goals are unmet within the designated timeframe.
To mitigate these constraints, agencies can use budgetary workarounds like no-year appropriations, allowing them to reallocate de-obligated funds from canceled competitions to new initiatives. Other options include employing credit-type scoring to discount costs based on the likelihood of non-payment and making non-legally binding commitments backed by third parties, such as international institutions, to avoid these challenges altogether.
The entire fund is expected to span a maximum of five () years. The initial 12 months will concentrate on identifying eight (8) to 16 projects through comprehensive due diligence and providing incubation support. In the subsequent four (4) years, the focus will shift to project delivery.
In contrast to the traditional push-funding approach of the CFDA program, our proposed pull-finance initiative introduces a unique market-shaping component aimed at driving key infrastructure and resilience solutions to fruition. In contrast to CFDA, pull finance addresses demand-side risks by providing demand-side guarantees of a future market for the technology or solution. It also mitigates R&D risk by combining incentives for research and development, ensuring that a viable market exists once the technology is developed. This approach helps accelerate market creation and innovation in high-risk, high-innovation sectors where demand or technological maturity is uncertain.
A National Guidance Platform for AI Acquisition
Streamlining the procurement process for more equitable, safe, and innovative government use of AI
The federal government’s approach to procuring AI systems serves two critical purposes: it not only shapes industry and academic standards but also determines how effectively AI can enhance public services. By leveraging its substantial purchasing power responsibly, the government can encourage high-quality, inclusive AI solutions that address diverse citizen needs while setting a strong precedent for innovation and accountability. Guidance issued in October 2024 by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) gives recommendations on how agencies should use AI systems, focusing on public trust and data transparency. However, it is unclear how these guidelines align with general procurement regulations like the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR).
To reduce bureaucratic hurdles and encourage safe government innovation, the General Services Administration (GSA) should develop a digital platform that guides federal agencies through an “acquisition journey” for AI procurement. This recommendation is for streamlining guidance for procuring AI systems and should not be confused with the use of AI to simplify the procurement process. The platform should be intuitive and easy to navigate by clearly outlining the necessary information, requirements, and resources at each process stage, helping users understand what they need at any point in the procurement lifecycle. Such a platform would help agencies safely procure and implement AI technologies while staying informed on the latest guidelines and adhering to existing federal procurement rules. GSA should take inspiration from Brazil’s well-regarded Public Procurement Platform for Innovation (CPIN). CPIN helps public servants navigate the procurement process by offering best practices, risk assessments, and contract guidance, ensuring transparency and fairness at each stage of the procurement process.
Challenges and Opportunities
The federal government’s approach to AI systems is a crucial societal benchmark, shaping standards that ripple through industries, academia, and public discourse. Along with shaping the market, the government also faces a delicate balancing act when it comes to its own use of AI: it must harness AI’s potential to dramatically enhance efficiency and effectiveness in public service delivery while simultaneously adhering to the highest AI safety and equity standards. As such, the government’s handling of AI technologies carries immense responsibility and opportunity.
The U.S. federal government procures AI for numerous different tasks—from analyzing weather hazards and expediting benefits claims to processing veteran feedback. Positive impacts could potentially include faster and more accurate public services, cost savings, better resource allocation, improved decision-making based on data insights, and enhanced safety and security for citizens. However, risks can include privacy breaches, algorithmic bias leading to unfair treatment of certain groups, over-reliance on AI for critical decisions, lack of transparency in AI-driven processes, and cybersecurity vulnerabilities. These issues could erode public trust, inhibit the adoption of beneficial AI, and exacerbate existing social inequalities.
The federal government has recently published several guidelines on the acquisition and use of AI systems within the federal government, specifically how to identify and mitigate systems that may impact public trust in these systems. For example:
- OMB Memo M-24-10 (2024): Guides federal agencies on the use of artificial intelligence. It emphasizes responsible AI development and deployment, focusing on key principles such as safety, security, fairness, and transparency. The memo outlines requirements for AI governance, risk management, and public transparency in federal AI applications.
- OMB Memo M-24-18 (2024): Provides Guidance on AI acquisitions, such as transparency, continued guidance for incident reporting on rights and safety impacting AI, data management, and specific advice for AI-based biometrics.
- Agency Memos (2024): Per M-24-10, many U.S. agencies have published their internal strategies for AI use.
- AI Use Case Inventory (2024): Requires agencies to perform an annual inventory of AI systems with information on Procurement Instrument Identifiers and potential for rights or safety impacts.
- Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence (2023) This requires agencies to adopt trustworthy and responsible AI practices. It mandates using AI safety standards, including rigorous testing, auditing, and privacy protections across federal systems.
- Executive Order 13960 (2020) promotes the use of trustworthy artificial intelligence in government and outlines the responsibilities of agencies to ensure their AI use is ethical, transparent, and accountable. It includes the need for agencies to consider risks, fairness, and bias in AI systems.
This guidance, coupled with the already extensive set of general procurement regulations such as the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR ), can be overwhelming for public servants. In conversations with the author of this memo, stakeholders, including agency personnel and vendors, frequently noted that they needed clarification about when impact and risk assessments should occur in the FAR process.
How can government agencies adequately follow their mandate to provide safe and trustworthy AI for public services while reducing the bureaucratic burden that can result in an aversion to government innovation? A compelling example comes from Brazil. The Public Procurement Platform for Innovation (CPIN), managed by the Brazilian Ministry of Development, Industry, Commerce, and Services (MDIC), is an open resource designed to share knowledge and best practices on public procurement for innovation. In 2023, the platform was recognized by the Federal Court of Auditors (TCU—the agency that oversees federal procurement) as an essential new asset in facilitating public service. The CPIN helps public servants navigate the procurement process by diagnosing needs and selecting suitable contracting methods through questionnaires. Then, it orients agencies through a procurement journey, identifying what procurement process should be used, what kinds of dialogue the agency should have with potential vendors and other stakeholders, guidance for risk assessments, and contract language. The platform is meant to guide public servants through each stage of the procurement process, ensuring they know their obligations for transparency, fairness, and risk mitigation at any given time. CPIN is open to the public and is meant to be a resource, not new requirements that supplant existing mandates by Brazilian authorities.
Here in the U.S., the Office of Federal Procurement (OFFP) within the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in partnership with the General Services Administration (GSA) and the Council of Chief AI Officers (CAIO), should develop a similar centralized resource to help federal agencies procure AI technologies safely and effectively. This platform would ensure agencies have up-to-date guidelines on AI acquisition integrated with existing procurement frameworks.
This approach is beneficial because:
- Public-facing access reduces information gaps between government entities, vendors, and stakeholders, fostering transparency and leveling the playing field for mid- and small-sized vendors.
- Streamlined processes alleviate complexity, making it easier for agencies to procure AI technologies.
- Clear guidance for agencies throughout each step of the procurement process ensures that they complete essential tasks such as impact evaluations and risk assessments within the appropriate time frame.
GSA has created similar tools before. For example, the Generative AI Acquisition Resource Guide assists federal buyers in procuring and implementing generative AI technologies by describing key considerations, best practices, and potential challenges associated with acquiring generative AI solutions. However, this digital platform would go one step further and align best practices, recommendations, and other AI considerations within the processes outlined in the FAR and other procurement methods.
Plan of Action
Recommendation 1. Establish a Working Group led by the OMB OFPP, with participation from GSA, OSTP, and the CAIO Council, tasked with systematically mapping all processes and policies influencing public sector AI procurement.
This includes direct AI-related guidance and tangential policies such as IT, data management, and cybersecurity regulations. The primary objective is identifying and addressing existing AI procurement guidance gaps, ensuring that the forthcoming platform can provide clear, actionable information to federal agencies. To achieve this, the working group should:
Conduct a thorough review of current mandates (see the FAQ for a non-exhaustive list of current mandates), executive orders, OMB guidance, and federal guidelines that pertain to AI procurement. This includes mapping out the requirements and obligations agencies must meet during acquisition. Evaluate if these mandates come with explicit deadlines or milestones that need to be integrated into the procurement timeline (e.g., AI risk assessments, ethics reviews, security checks)
Conduct a gap analysis to identify areas where existing AI procurement guidance needs to be clarified, completed, or updated. Prioritize gaps that can be addressed by clarifying existing rules or providing additional resources like best practices rather than creating new mandates to avoid unnecessary regulatory burdens. For example, guidance on handling personally identifiable information within commercially available information, guidance on data ownership between government and vendors, and the level of detail required for risk assessments.
Categorize federal guidance into two main buckets: general federal procurement guidance (e.g., Federal Acquisition Regulation [FAR]) and agency-specific guidelines (e.g., individual AI policies from agencies such as DoD’s AI Memos or NASA’s Other Transaction Authorities [OTAs]). Ensure that agency-specific rules are clearly distinguished on the platform, allowing agencies to understand when general AI acquisition rules apply and when specialized guidance takes precedence. Since the FAR may take years to update to reflect agency best practices, this could help give visibility to potential gaps.
Recommendation 2. The OMB OFPP-GSA-CAIO Council Working Group should convene a series of structured engagements with government and external stakeholders to co-create non-binding, practical guidance addressing gaps in AI procurement to be included in the platform.
These stakeholders should include government agency departments (e.g., project leads, procurement officers, IT departments) and external partners (vendors, academics, civil society organizations). The working group’s recommendations should focus on providing agencies with the tools, content, and resources they need to navigate AI procurement efficiently. Key focus areas would include risk management, ethical considerations, and compliance with cybersecurity policies throughout the procurement process. The guidance should also highlight areas where more frequent updates will be required, particularly in response to rapid developments in AI technologies and federal policies.
Topics that these stakeholder convenings could cover include:
Procurement Process
- Acquisition Pathways: What acquisition methods (e.g., FAR, Other Transaction Authorities [OTA], and joint acquisition programs) can be leveraged for procuring AI? Identify the most appropriate mechanisms for different AI use cases. For example, agencies looking to develop an advanced AI system with the help of external researchers may want to consider OTA if that is available to them.
- Integrating New Guidance: How can recent AI-related guidance from OMB memos (like M-24-10 and M-24-18) be incorporated into existing procurement frameworks, especially within the FAR?
- Stakeholder Responsibilities: Clearly define the roles and obligations of each party in the AI procurement process, from agency departments (such as project teams, procurement offices, and IT) to vendors and contractors. Determine who manages AI-related risks, evaluates AI systems, and ensures compliance with relevant policies.
- NIST AI Risk Management Framework (RMF): Explore how the NIST AI RMF can be integrated into the acquisition process and ensure agencies are equipped to assess AI risks effectively within procurement.
Transparency
- Public Disclosure: Define what information must be shared with the public at various stages of the AI acquisition process. Ensure there is a balance between transparency and protecting sensitive information.
- Data Sharing and Protection: Identify resources to help agencies understand their obligations regarding data sharing and protection under OMB Memo M-24-18 or forthcoming memos from the new administration to ensure compliance with any data security and privacy requirements.
- Risk Communication: Establish when and how to communicate to relevant stakeholders (e.g., the public and civil society) that a potential AI acquisition could impact public trust in AI technologies. Outline the types of transparency that should accompany AI systems that carry such risks.
Resources:
- External Best Practices: Gather and share civil society toolkits, industry best practices, and academic evaluations that can help agencies ensure the trustworthy use of AI. This would provide agencies with access to external expertise to complement federal guidelines and standards. The stakeholder convening should deliberate on whether these best practices will just be linked to the platform or if they need some kind of endorsement from government agencies.
Recommendation 3. The OPPF, in collaboration with GSA and the United States Digital Service (USDS) should then develop an intuitive, easy-to-navigate digital platform that guides federal agencies through an “acquisition journey” for AI procurement.
While the focus of this memo is on the broader procurement of AI systems, this digital platform could also benefit from the incorporation of AI, for example, by using a chatbot that is able to refer government users to the specific regulations governing their use cases. At each process stage, the platform should clearly outline the necessary information collected during the previous phases of this project to help users understand exactly what is needed at any given point in the procurement lifecycle.
The platform should serve as a central repository that unites all relevant AI procurement requirements, guidance from federal regulations (e.g., FAR, OMB memos), and insights from stakeholder convenings (e.g., vendors, academics, civil society). Each procurement stage should feature the most up-to-date guidance, ensuring a comprehensive and organized resource for federal employees.
The system should be designed for ease of navigation, potentially modeled after Brazil’s CPIN, which is organized like a city subway map. Users can begin with a simple questionnaire recommending a specific “subway line” or procurement process. Each “stop” along the line would represent a key stage in the procurement journey, offering relevant guidance, requirements, and best practices for that phase.
OPPF and GSA must regularly update the platform to reflect the latest federal AI and procurement policies and evolving best practices from government, civil society, and industry sources. Regular updates ensure that agencies use the most current information, especially as AI technologies and policies evolve rapidly.
The Federal Acquisition Institute within OFPP should create robust training programs to familiarize public servants with the new platform and how to use it effectively. These programs should explain how the platform supports AI acquisition and links to broader agency AI strategies.
- Roll out the platform gradually through agency-specific capacity-building sessions, demonstrating its utility for different departments. These sessions should show how the resource can help public servants meet their AI procurement needs and align with their agency’s strategic AI goals.
- Develop specialized training modules for different government stakeholders. For example, project teams might focus on aligning AI systems with mission objectives, procurement specialists on contract compliance, and IT departments on technical evaluations and cybersecurity.
- To ensure broad understanding and transparency, host public briefings for external stakeholders such as vendors, civil society organizations, and researchers. These sessions would clarify AI procurement requirements, fostering trust and collaboration between the public and private sectors.
Conclusion
The proposed centralized platform would represent a significant step forward in streamlining and standardizing the acquisition of AI technologies across federal agencies. By consolidating guidance, resources, and best practices into a user-friendly digital interface, this initiative would address gaps in the current AI acquisition landscape without increasing bureaucracy. This initiative supports individual agencies in their AI adoption efforts. It promotes a cohesive, government-wide approach to responsible AI implementation, ultimately benefiting both public servants and the citizens they serve.
This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.
There are so many considerations based on a particular agency’s many needs. A non-exhaustive list of legislation, executive orders, standards and other guidance relating to innovation procurement and agency use of AI can be found here. One approach to top-level simplification and communication is to create something similar to Brazil’s city subway map, discussed above.
The original Brazilian CPIN is designed for general innovation procurement and is agnostic to specific technologies or services. However, this memo focuses on artificial intelligence (AI) in light of recent guidance from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the growing interest in AI from both the Biden Administration and the incoming Trump Administration. Establishing a platform specifically for AI system procurement could serve as a pilot for developing a broader innovation procurement platform.
The platform seeks to ensure responsible public sector AI by mitigating information asymmetries between government agencies and vendors, specifically by:
- Incorporating the latest OMB guidelines on AI system usage, focusing on human rights, safety, and data transparency. These guidelines are seamlessly integrated into each step of the procurement process.
- Throughout the “acquisition journey,” the platform should include clarifying checkpoints where agencies can demonstrate how their procurement plans align with established safety, equity, and ethical standards.
- Prompting agencies to consider how procured AI systems will address context-specific risks by integrating agency-specific guidance (e.g., the Department of Labor’s AI Principles) into the existing AI procurement frameworks.
Enhancing Local Capacity for Disaster Resilience
Across the United States, thousands of communities, particularly rural ones, don’t have the capacity to identify, apply for, and manage federal grants. And more than half of Americans don’t feel that the federal government adequately takes their interests into account. These factors make it difficult to build climate resilience in our most vulnerable populations. AmeriCorps can tackle this challenge by providing the human power needed to help communities overcome significant structural obstacles in accessing federal resources. Specifically, federal agencies that are part of the Thriving Communities Network can partner with the philanthropic sector to place AmeriCorps members in Community Disaster Resilience Zones (CDRZs) as part of a new Resilient Communities Corps. Through this initiative, AmeriCorps would provide technical assistance to vulnerable communities in accessing deeply needed resources.
There is precedent for this type of effort. AmeriCorps programming, like AmeriCorps VISTA, has a long history of aiding communities and organizations by directly helping secure grant monies and by empowering communities and organizations to self-support in the future. The AmeriCorps Energy Communities is a public-private partnership that targets service investment to support low-capacity and highly vulnerable communities in capitalizing on emerging energy opportunities. And the Environmental Justice Climate Corps, a partnership between the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and AmeriCorps, will place AmeriCorps VISTA members in historically marginalized communities to work on environmental justice projects.
A new initiative targeting service investment to build resilience in low-capacity communities, particularly rural communities, would help build capacity at the local level, train a new generation of service-oriented individuals in grant writing and resilience work, and ensure that federal funding gets to the communities that need it most.
Challenge and Opportunity
A significant barrier to getting federal funding to those who need it the most is the capacity of those communities to search and apply for grants. Many such communities lack both sufficient staff bandwidth to apply and search for grants and the internal expertise to put forward a successful application. Indeed, the Midwest and Interior West have seen under 20% of their communities receive competitive federal grants since the year 2000. Low-capacity rural communities account for only 3% of grants from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s flagship program for building community resilience. Even communities that receive grants often lack the capacity for strong grant management, which can mean losing monies that go unspent within the grant period.
This is problematic because low-capacity communities are particularly vulnerable to natural disasters from flooding to wildfires. Out of the nearly 8,000 most at-risk communities with limited capacity to advocate for resources, 46% are at risk for flooding, 36% are at risk for wildfires, and 19% are at risk for both.
Ensuring communities can access federal grants to help them become more climate resilient is crucial to achieving an equitable and efficient distribution of federal monies, and to building a stronger nation from the ground up. These objectives are especially salient given that there is still a lot of federal money available through the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) that low-capacity communities can tap into for climate resilience work. As of April 2024, only $60 billion out of the $145 billion in the IRA for energy and climate programs had been spent. For the IIJA, only half of the nearly $650 billion in direct formula funding had been spent.
The Biden-Harris Administration has tried to address the mismatch between federal resilience funding and community capacity in a variety of ways. The Administration has deployed resources for low-capacity communities, agencies tasked with allocating funds from the IRA and IIJA have held information sessions, and the IRA and IIJA contain over a hundred technical assistance programs. Yet there still is not enough support in the form of human capacity at the local level to access grants and other resources and assistance provided by federal agencies. AmeriCorps members can support communities in making informed decisions, applying for federal support, and managing federal financial assistance. Indeed, state programs like the Maine Climate Corps, include aiding communities with both resilience planning and emergency management assistance as part of their focus. Evening the playing field by expanding deployment of human capital will yield a more equitable distribution of federal monies to the communities that need it the most.
AmeriCorps’ Energy Communities initiative serves as a model for a public-private partnership to support low-capacity communities in meeting their climate resilience goals. Over a three-year period, the program will invest over $7.8 million from federal agencies and philanthropic dollars to help communities designated by the Interagency Working Group on Coal & Power Plant Communities & Economic Revitalization on issues revolving around energy opportunity, environmental cleanup, and economic development to help communities capitalize on emerging energy opportunities.
There is an opportunity to replicate this model towards resilience. Specifically, the next Administration can leverage the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA’s) Community Disaster Resilience Zone (CDRZ) designations to target AmeriCorps support to the communities that need it most. Doing so will not only build community resilience, but will help restore trust in the federal government and its programs (see FAQ).
Plan of Action
The next administration can support vulnerable communities in building climate resilience by launching a new Resilient Communities Corps through AmeriCorps. The initiative can be launched through a three-part Plan of Action: (1) find a philanthropic partner to fund AmeriCorps placements in CDRZs, (2) engage federal agencies that are part of the Thriving Communities Network to provide resilience training and support to Corps members, and (3) use the CDRZ designations to help guide where AmeriCorps members should be placed.
Recommendation 1. Secure philanthropic funding
American service programs have a history of utilizing philanthropic monies to fund programming. The AmeriCorps Energy Communities is funded with philanthropic monies from Bloomberg Philanthropies. California Volunteers Fund (CVF), the Waverly Street Foundation, and individual philanthropists helped fund the state Climate Corps. CVF has also provided assistance and insights for state Climate Corps officials as they develop their programs.
A new Resilient Communities Corps under the AmeriCorps umbrella could be funded through one or several major philanthropic donors, and/or through grassroots donations. Widespread public support for AmeriCorps’ ACC that transcends generational and party lines presents the opportunity for new grassroots donations to supplement federal monies allocated to the program along with tapping the existing network of foundations, individuals, companies, and organizations that have provided past donations. The Partnership for the Civilian Climate Corps (PCCC), which has had a history of collaborating with the ACC’s federal partners, would be well suited to help spearhead this grassroots effort.
America’s Service Commissions (ASC), which represents state service commissions, can also help coordinate with state service commissions to find local philanthropic monies to fund AmeriCorps work in CDRZs. There is precedent for this type of fundraising. Maine’s state service commission was able to secure private monies for one Maine Service Fellow. The fellow has since worked with low-capacity communities in Maine on climate resilience. ASC can also work with state service commissions to identify current state, private, and federally funded service programming that could be tapped to work in CDRZs or are currently working in CDRZs. This will help tie in existing local service infrastructure.
Recommendation 2. Engage federal agencies participating in the Thriving Communities Network and the American Climate Corps (ACC) interagency working group.
Philanthropic funding will be helpful but not sufficient in launching the Resilient Communities Corps. The next administration should also engage federal agencies to provide AmeriCorps members participating in the initiative with training on climate resilience, orientations and points of contact for major federal resilience programs, and, where available, additional financial support for the program. The ACC’s interagency working group has centered AmeriCorps as a multiagency initiative that has directed resources and provides collaboration in implementing AmeriCorps programming. The Resilient Communities Corps will be able to tap into this cross-agency collaboration in ways that align with the resilience work already being done by partnership members.
There are currently four ACC programs that are funded through cooperation with other federal agencies. These are the Working Lands Climate Corps with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)’s Natural Resources and Conservation Service, AmeriCorps NCCC Forest Corps with the USDA Forest Service, Energy Communities AmeriCorps with the Department of Interior and the Department of Commerce, and the Environmental Justice Corps, which was announced in September 2024 and will launch in 2025, with the EPA. The Resilient Communities Corps could be established as a formal partnership with one or more federal agencies as funding partners.
In addition, the Resilient Communities Corps can and should leverage existing work that federal agencies are doing to build community capacity and enhance community climate resilience. For instance, USDA’s Rural Partners Network helps rural communities access federal funding while the EPA’s Environmental Justice Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Centers Program provides training and assistance for communities to build the capacity to navigate, develop proposals, and manage federal grants. The Thriving Communities Network provides a forum for federal agencies to provide technical assistance to communities trying to access federal monies. Corps members, through the network, can help federal agencies provide communities they are working with building capacity to access this technical assistance.
Recommendation 3. Use CDRZ designations and engage with state service commissions to guide Resilient Communities Corps placements
FEMA, through its National Risk Index, has identified communities across the country that are most vulnerable to the climate crisis and need targeted federal support for climate resilience projects. CDRZs provide an opportunity for AmeriCorps to identify low-capacity communities that need their assistance in accessing this federal support. With assistance from partner agencies and philanthropic dollars, the AmeriCorps can fund Corps members to work in these designated zones to help drive resources into them. As part of this effort, the ACC interagency working group should be broadened to include the Department of Homeland Security (which already sponsors FEMA Corps).
In 2024, the Biden-Harris Administration announced Federal-State partnerships between state service commissions and the ACC. This partnership with state service commissions will help AmeriCorps and partner agencies identify what is currently being done in CDRZs, what is needed from communities, and any existing service programming that could be built up with federal and philanthropic monies. State service commissions understand the communities they work with and what existing programming is currently in place. This knowledge and coordination will prove invaluable for the Resilient Communities Corps and AmeriCorps more broadly as they determine where to allocate members and what existing service programming could receive Resilient Communities Corps designation. This will be helpful in deciding where to focus initial/pilot Resilient Communities Corps placements.
Conclusion
A Resilient Communities Corps presents an incredible opportunity for the next administration to support low-capacity communities in accessing competitive grants in CDRZ-designated areas. It will improve the federal government’s impact and efficiency of dispersing grant monies by making grants more accessible and ensure that our most vulnerable communities are better prepared and more resilient in the face of the climate crisis, introduce a new generation of young people to grant writing and public service, and help restore trust in federal government programs from communities that often feel overlooked.
This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.
Funding for one AmeriCorps member in each of FEMA’s 483 designated Community Disaster Resilience Zones would cost around $14,500,000 per year. This is with an estimate of $30,000 per member. However, this figure will be subject to change due to overhead and living adjustment costs.
There are many communities that could benefit from additional support when it comes to building resilience. Headwater Economics, a research institute in Montana, has flagged that the CDRZ does not account for all low-capacity communities hampered in their efforts to become more climate resilient. But the CDRZ designation does provide a federal framework that can serve as a jumping-off point for AmeriCorps to begin to fill capacity gaps. These designations, identified through the National Risk Index, provide a clear picture for where federal, public and private monies are needed the most. These communities are some of the most vulnerable to climate change, lack the resources for resilience work, and need the human capacity to access them. Because of these reasons, the CDRZ communities provide the ideal and most appropriate area for the Resilient Communities Corps to first serve in.
Funding for national service programming, particularly for the ACC, has bipartisan support. 53% of likely voters say that national service programming can help communities face climate-related issues.
On the other hand, 53% of Americans also feel that the federal government doesn’t take into account “the interests of people like them.” ACC programming, like what Maine’s Climate Corps is doing in rural areas, can help reach communities and build support among Americans for government programs that can be at times met with hostility.
For example, in Maine, the small and politically conservative town of Dover-Foxcroft applied for and was approved to host a Maine Service Fellow (part of the Maine Climate Corps network) to help the local climate action committee to obtain funding for and implement energy efficiency programs. The fellow, a recent graduate from a local college, helped Dover-Foxcroft’s new warming/cooling emergency shelter create policies, organized events on conversations about climate change, wrote a report about how the county will be affected by climate change, and recruited locals at the Black Fly Festival to participate in energy efficiency programs.
Like the Maine Service Fellows, Resilient Communities Corps members will be integral members of the communities in which they serve. They will gather essential information about their communities and provide feedback from the ground on what is working and what areas need improvement or are not being adequately addressed. This information can be passed up to the interagency working groups that can then be relayed to colleagues administering the grants, improving information flow, and creating feedback channels to better craft and implement policy. It also presents the opportunity for representatives of those agencies to directly reach out to those communities to let them know they have been heard and proactively alert residents to any changes they plan on making.
Ensuring the Next Generation of STEM Talent through K–12 Research Programming
Labor shortages persist in the United States in a variety of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. To address these shortages, the next administration should establish a national, federally funded initiative involving the public and private sectors to develop a more robust and diverse pipeline of STEM talent. The Next Generation of STEM Talent Through K–12 Research Programming Initiative will remove significant barriers to participation in STEM careers through enhanced K–12 STEM programs such as science fairs and robotics competitions, as well as through strengthened federal support for teacher training to actively engage K–12 students in STEM research.
Challenge and Opportunity
Need for a Stronger STEM Pipeline in the United States
The 2024 Federal Strategic Plan for Advancing STEM Education and Cultivating STEM Talent from the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) notes that “The United States must “inspire, educate, train, and innovate in STEM fields and STEM careers, so that through unparalleled access and opportunity, the nation can leverage the full potential of its STEM talent and ensure the country’s national security, economic prosperity, and global competitiveness.” Indeed, a vigorous domestic STEM workforce that innovates quickly to confront national challenges is a central driver for economic growth. Yet while the number of degrees awarded in STEM fields has increased since 2000 in the United States, labor shortages persist in certain fields requiring STEM degrees. These fields include computer science, data science, electrical engineering, and software development.
Fostering STEM talent across the country “is critical both to enable all individuals to achieve their own aspirations in STEM fields and careers and to ready the nation to pursue new opportunities.” Yet, the rest of the world is outpacing the United States when it comes to upper-level STEM education. The United States awarded nearly 800,000 first university degrees (i.e., associate’s and bachelor’s degrees) in science and engineering (S&E) in 2016. However, the European Union (EU) top six countries (France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the U.K., then part of the EU) produced more than 700,000 equivalent degrees—and China 1.7 million (in 2015)—around the same timeframe. In 2020, the United States came in third in terms of the most first university degrees in science and engineering (900,000), lagging behind nations such as India (2.5 million) and China (2 million).
The data are more complex but equally worrisome at the doctorate level. As of 2019, the United States no longer awards the largest number of science and engineering (S&E) doctoral degrees of any country. It was surpassed by China, with the United States awarding 42,000 and China awarding 43,000 that year. Comparisons of doctoral-degree production in the United States with doctoral-degree production in other nations need to account for the fact that a substantial number of U.S. S&E doctorate recipients are students on temporary visas. However, many of these doctorate recipients stay in the United States for jobs after obtaining their degrees. Moreover, the United States also lags peer nations when it comes to the percentage of S&E doctorates awarded out of all doctorates awarded. This figure is 44% for the United States, behind China (nearly 60%), Sweden (55%), Taiwan (53%), India (50%), and the U.K. (48%).
We as a nation must prepare by strengthening the STEM pipeline and closing the gap between demand for and supply of STEM talent. This effort must also focus on creating a diverse and inclusive STEM talent pool. Only by drawing on the talents of all its citizens can the United States effectively maintain and grow the national innovation base that supports key economic sectors. This broader participation in STEM “fosters closer alignment between societal needs and research, enhances public understanding and trust in science, facilitates uptake of research results throughout society, and supports evidence-based policymaking.”
If the United States is to keep pace and ensure continued innovation and prosperity, it must up its game on STEM education and training. Because of the time and training required to become a scientist or engineer, this effort must begin without delay. The COVID-19 pandemic emphasized the need for a robust STEM workforce. Scientists raced to discover more about the virus itself and its impact, as well as to develop vaccines and treatments safely and in record time. Engineers designed new equipment and ways to manufacture needed personal protective equipment (PPE) and ventilators. Computer scientists, statisticians, epidemiologists, and big-data scientists collaborated to make sense of pandemic data and model outcomes to inform public-health policies. Similar crises will inevitably arise in the future.
Engaging Learning Experiences with Well-Trained Educators are Even More Important Because of Pandemic Learning Losses
The coronavirus pandemic led to a significant disruption in K-12 education. Even with students back in classrooms, the negative impact of this disruption is clear and will have myriad effects on the STEM talent pipeline into the future.
Chronic absenteeism nationwide (based on students missing at least 10% of a school year) surged from 15% in 2018 to 28% in 2022, showing that post-pandemic school attendance has reduced test scores. Student attendance is instrumental to their success. As absenteeism increased, test scores declined.
This standardized test score decline is seen across the globe where middle and high school students are still struggling academically in the years since the start of the pandemic. The Program for International Student Assessment, taken by 15-year-olds, found record decreases in scores between 2018 and 2022, where math scores decreased by 15 points and reading scores by 10 points. When students have fewer math skills, it reduces the number of students likely to become STEM experts, which narrows the pool of future scientists and engineers.
Students experienced years of learning loss, along with disruption to their social and emotional development. When compared to peer nations, U.S. children are not equipped with the high-level reading, math and digital problem-solving skills needed for the fastest-growing jobs especially in a global economy that is highly competitive. The most vulnerable students are also the most negatively impacted. Gaps already present in 2019 between high-poverty and higher-income school districts increased during the pandemic and have not closed.
Launching the Next Generation of STEM Talent Through K–12 Research Programming Initiative
The next administration should launch the Next Generation of STEM Talent Through K–12 Research Programming Initiative, coordinated by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) through a working group of federal agency representatives, to strengthen the STEM pipeline in the United States. The initiative would provide an additional $25 million per year for 10 years to select agencies to support K–12 research programs (such as science fairs and robotics competitions) that inspire critical thinking and encourage young people to pursue STEM careers. The new funds would also be used to train educators and community- based scientists to become K–12 research mentors, expand research programs at the local and national levels, and build an interagency tracking mechanism to coordinate and evaluate the success of these programs. These activities directly support the five interdependent pillars outlined in the Committee on STEM Education (CoSTEM) 2024 Federal Strategic Plan for Advancing STEM Education and Cultivating STEM Talent:
- STEM Engagement: Foster youth, community, and public engagement that supports inspiration and belonging, connects research and practice, and builds STEM literacy and lifelong learning.
- STEM Teaching and Learning: Improve the opportunities and outcomes for learners and educators in and across all STEM disciplines.
- STEM Workforce: Support the training and recruitment of the nation’s federal and national STEM workforce while cultivating global talent mobility and opportunity.
- STEM Research and Innovation Capacity: Drive cutting-edge STEM education research and innovation, build and advance STEM research capacity, and cultivate innovation and entrepreneurial talent development.
- STEM Environments: Remove barriers to participation and retention in STEM learning, working, and research environments
Since almost 16% of the 2.1 million federal employees in the United States occupy a STEM position, this initiative would directly benefit the Federal Government—and, by extension, U.S. civil society. Students and educators involved with this initiative would increase their awareness of Federal Government STEM occupations and develop a mental contract with participating U.S. agencies that will impact future career choices. This initiative should also involve the private sector, as many companies and their trade associations are also in need of STEM talent and lead programs that the initiative could leverage. In 2021, out of 146.4 million people ages 18 to 74 working in the United States, 34.9 million (24%) were in STEM occupations. Only the federal government has the resources and infrastructure to undertake and coordinate this public-private partnership.
Inclusivity is an indispensable aspect and opportunity of this new initiative. To foster development of STEM skills, the 2023 Progress Report on the Implementation of the Federal Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education Strategic Plan emphasized that “the nation must engage in a collaborative effort to ensure that everyone has access to high quality STEM education throughout their lifetimes.” Access to STEM education and representation in STEM fields is unequally distributed in the United States. Women, differently abled persons, and three ethnic or racial groups—Blacks or African Americans, Hispanics or Latinos, and American Indians or Alaska Natives—are significantly underrepresented in science and engineering education and employment. In 2021, a greater share of men (29%) than women (18%) worked in STEM occupations, even though men and women represented similar proportions of the total workforce (52% men and 48% women). Similarly, Blacks/African Americans and Hispanics/Latinos make up about 28% of the overall population but only 13% of the STEM workforce. Research suggests there are many individuals—especially women, minorities, and children from low-income families—who would have developed highly impactful inventions had they been exposed to innovation in childhood. The Next Generation of STEM Talent Through K–12 Research Programming Initiative is designed to help find those “lost Einsteins”.
There also will be an emphasis placed on rural students who do not have adequate mentors and educational systems currently in place. Studies have shown that underserved minority and rural communities often do not have access to the same educational opportunities as more affluent white communities, and this impacts the careers they will pursue. The pandemic exposed the enormous gaps between the country’s poorest and wealthiest schools around access to basic technology and live remote instruction, as well as the percentages of students who teachers report were not logging in or making contact.
The Federal Strategic Plan for Advancing STEM Education and Cultivating STEM Talent cites one of its pillars as STEM Research and Innovation Capacity. Informal learning, especially participation in research programs such as science fairs or robotic competitions, is one way to inspire critical thinking in young people and foster long-term interest in STEM. Research funded by the National Science Foundation shows that participating in a science research project increases student interest in STEM careers. These competitions provide students with opportunities to create solutions to real-life problems, encouraging innovation, which is a critical component of economic growth and entrepreneurial talent development.
There is flexibility in how opportunities are delivered to students. When schools were shut down in 2020-2021, the Society for Science converted its STEM Research Grants program, an opportunity for teachers to receive up to $5,000 for classroom resources and/or transportation to research sites, to include STEM Research kits full of resources that students were able to bring home to complete STEM research outside of school. The Society for Science has continued to provide home and school options for the resources teachers receive from this program. Relatedly, the Society for Science launched a new Research at Home website to support this work.
No matter if the vehicle for delivery is from educators providing materials to be used at home or at school, success in this area requires training teachers to be effective research mentors. In line with CoSTEM’s Federal Objective for Training STEM Educators, an excellent prototype for such training is the Research Teachers Conferences run by the Society for Science. The Research Teachers Conferences convene high-school and middle school STEM research teachers annually to share best practices, troubleshoot challenges, and establish a network of support for each other. Nearly 2,000 teachers each year request the opportunity to attend these conferences, but funding for 2024 was only available for 275—highlighting the pent-up demand for STEM research training. More training is also needed to help professional scientists become more effective research mentors for K–12 students, and they, too, need training to ensure optimal effectiveness. The Next Generation of STEM Talent Through K–12 Research Programming Initiative is designed to train a collaborative community of K–12 research mentors working throughout the United States.
There are already many hands-on programs designed to increase the STEM talent pool by providing research-based and problem-solving learning opportunities to K–12 students: especially underrepresented minorities, girls, or students from rural communities. These programs range in size from small to large and in scope from local to federal. Programs are run by institutions such as nonprofit organizations, colleges and universities, scientific societies, and even industry trade associations. For example, the American Chemical Society has provided economically disadvantaged high-school students with paid summer-research internships for more than 50 years. Students participating in the internship program work under the guidance of professional scientists who have been trained to be research mentors. The Society for Science’s Advocate Program provides mentors to support underserved students in submitting research projects to science competitions. Funding for these types of K–12 STEM programs comes from a myriad of sources, including philanthropic foundations and individuals, companies, and local, state, and federal governments. But there is currently no widespread coordination among these programs or sharing of best practices. There is also little rigorous evaluation to determine program success. The Next Generation of STEM Talent Through K–12 Research Programming Initiative will provide leadership to align complementary efforts and additional funding to support assessment and scale-up of practices proven effective.
Only the federal government has the ability to accomplish the three objectives outlined above. But as the 2024 STEM Plan states, “the federal government alone cannot produce the STEM talent needed for the entire country. Multi-agency and multi-sector partnerships and ecosystem development, including with international counterparts, are necessary to achieve a vision for STEM in America.”
Plan of Action
The Next Generation of STEM Talent Through K–12 Research Programming Initiative should have four major components:
Component 1. White House leadership, coordination, tracking, and evaluation
The next president should sign an Executive Order (EO) launching a national Next Generation of STEM Talent Through K–12 Research Programming Initiative led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The initiative would oversee and strengthen federal support for teacher training and program development designed to actively engage students in STEM research and problem-solving.
The EO should also establish an OSTP-led working group like the Committee on STEM Education (CoSTEM), the NSTC group that wrote Charting a Course for Success: America’s Strategy for STEM Education. CoSTEM – with its mandate to review STEM education programs, investments, and activities, and the respective assessments of each, in federal agencies to ensure that they are effective – serves as a model for this initiative. While CoSTEM coordinates the interagency working groups focused on different aspects of STEM, particularly the Interagency Working Group to Engage Students where Disciplines Converge (IWGC) and the Interagency Working Group to Develop and Enrich Strategic Partnerships (SP-IWG), this new working group would coordinate relevant activities across federal agencies and their subunits, with the goal to gather the leading scientists, administrators and educators doing this work outside of federal agencies, leveraging the organizational power of the federal government to provide the resources and infrastructure to coordinate this public-private partnership.
While some federal agencies already have directly relevant programs in place, other agencies could help identify offices and programs essential to the initiative’s success. The working group should issue an open call for nonprofit organizations with expertise in research-based STEM learning and teacher/mentor training to participate as advisors to the working group. The working group could also include representatives from existing programs that help expand research-based and problem-solving STEM experiences at the K–12 level. The EO should task the working group with developing a strategic national action plan that includes metrics to monitor the initiative’s success, as well as with creating a centralized database that can track, monitor, and evaluate programs funded by the initiative. The working group should periodically report to the Executive Office of the President on the initiative’s progress.
Overall goals of the initiative would be to:
- Ensure an abundance of qualified applicants from a variety of backgrounds—including variety in gender, race, or socioeconomic status—for all STEM jobs in the United States.
- Train teachers to provide students with research-based STEM education opportunities throughout their K–12 education experiences
- Create a comprehensive database to track programs (and their participants) aligned with and/or funded by the initiative.
- Rigorously and fairly evaluate programs aligned with and/or funded by the initiative, quickly communicating evaluation findings in ways that help programs adjust to best serve students and educators.
Quantitative targets to assess progress towards these goals include:
- Improving the extent to which demographics of applicants to STEM jobs in the United States reflect demographics of the United States as a whole.
- Availability of project-based STEM learning at publicly funded K–12 schools, as well as student access to opportunities (e.g., science fairs) where they can share the results of their work.
- Grow the pool of qualified STEM research educators to 100,000 in the next 10 years, so that all schools have access to the needed number of trained educators.
Component 2. Federal budget commitments
A few agencies—such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Department of Defense (DoD)—currently directly support aspects of this initiative. Yet at least 20 federal agencies (full list found in FAQ) and their subunits have a clear stake in developing the STEM workforce and hiring STEM graduates.
Each of these federal units will need dedicated funding to support the initiative, including by:
- Partnering with established nonprofit organizations, community colleges and universities to offer training and grants to support teachers and community scientists in becoming effective K–12 research and project mentors.
- Providing monetary awards and increased recognition opportunities for students who participate in STEM competitions.
- Executing an annual gathering on the topic of developing STEM talent through K-12 research programming where federal agencies and non-federal organizations make commitments and, starting in year two, present progress to meeting commitments and goals.
- Building an agency-wide mechanism to track outcomes of and build alumni networks for students who participate in initiative programs. Coordinate communication and additional opportunities for these alumni to ensure they remain connected and to leverage their leadership in this initiative.
- Maintaining a central database to track metrics of initiative programs.
- Recruiting exceptional STEM students into the professional federal STEM pipeline.
We estimate that an average allocation of $25 million per year for 10 years per relevant federal unit would be sufficient to get the initiative off the ground. These funds alone are not enough to develop the STEM workforce to the level needed in the United States. However, consistent federal funding for K–12 research programming (and associated teacher training) would provide a solid foundation for addressing the shortfalls outlined at the beginning of this memo. To maximize the initiative’s impact, additional funding should be allocated specifically for coordination and evaluation. Evaluations should be carried out every few years, and findings used to inform funding priorities and program structure as needed. Emphasis should be placed on allocating funds to expand access to high-quality STEM experiences for underserved and underrepresented students.
Component 3. Meaningful agency participation
The working group will identify existing federal programs that could be expanded to achieve the initiative’s goal. The working group will also identify agencies that have relevant missions but currently lack relevant programs.
Component 4. Partnership with non-federal organizations to provide programmatic content and complementary actions
The working group should partner with third-party organizations that already offer programs and resources (financial and in-kind) relevant to the initiative. These include but are not limited to:
- School-based programs.
- STEM nonprofit organizations that deliver curricula for teacher training.
- Scientific societies and trade associations.
- Post-secondary institutions such as community colleges, colleges, and universities.
- Private-sector companies.
- State and local governments.
- Philanthropic foundations organizations and individuals.
The working group itself should aim to have representatives from underrepresented groups in STEM to ensure a wide variety of voices are represented as part of the leadership of this initiative.
The next administration can use the power of the federal government to help such third-party organizations scale up and strengthen programs that have already proven effective, resulting in more teachers and scientists trained and more K–12 students able to participate in science and engineering research projects.
Precedents
The initiative outlined in this memo can and should build on multiple outstanding federal precedents. One example is the DoD’s Defense STEM Education Consortium (DSEC). The DSEC is a collaborative partnership among academia, industry, nonprofit organizations, and government that aims to broaden STEM literacy and develop a diverse and agile workforce with the technical excellence to defend our nation. Many smaller federal programs provide teacher training in various STEM fields. The next administration should leverage and potentially refocus such existing programs to emphasize critical-thinking skills and research-based programs at the K–12 level.
Conclusion
The next administration should seize the opportunity to reinvigorate the STEM talent pool in the United States by creating the Next Generation of STEM Talent Through K–12 Research Programming Initiative. The initiative will motivate participation in STEM careers by making participation in hands-on STEM research and problem-solving opportunities a standard component of K–12 education. Failure to replenish and grow our domestic STEM talent pool will lead to a decline in national innovation and economic progress and an inability to meet the moment in future times of challenge, such as a next pandemic. Only the federal government can address this need at the scale and pace needed.
Inclusivity is an indispensable aspect of this initiative. Building a robust STEM workforce in the United States requires us as a nation to draw on the talent of all Americans. The Next Generation of STEM Talent Through K–12 Research Programming Initiative will rediscover our country’s ”lost Einsteins”: the underrepresented minorities, women and underserved students from rural communities who have the capacity to deliver transformative contributions to STEM if only they were provided opportunities to do so.
This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.
The current and previous administrations have taken multiple actions that serve as a foundation for achieving the goals of Ensuring the Next Generation of STEM Talent Through K-12 Research Programming. “Agencies across the federal government are united in their commitment to developing STEM talent so that all individuals and communities can grow, aspire, and thrive, allowing the United States to reach its full potential.” While there are groups within the Federal government that are doing similar work, like the Committee on STEM Education (CoSTEM) with its mandate to review science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education programs, investments, and activities, and the respective assessments of each, in federal agencies to ensure that they are effective, this initiative is unique in that the main leadership would be a coalition of leaders and organizations outside of the government, with a government agency like OSTP coordinating, rather than CoSTEM’s focus on interagency working groups (IWGs). CoSTEM serves as a model, with the goal to gather the best of the best who are doing this work outside of federal agencies and leverage the organizational power of the government to provide the resources and infrastructure to coordinate this public-private partnership.
An outstanding example of a federal initiative that works is DoD STEM’s Defense STEM Education Consortium (DSEC). Aligned to the Federal STEM Education Strategic plan, the Defense Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Education Consortium (DSEC) is a collaborative partnership among academia, industry, non-for-profit organizations, and government that aims to broaden STEM literacy and develop a diverse and agile workforce with the technical excellence to defend our Nation. By addressing and prioritizing critical STEM challenges, DoD is investing in evidence-based approaches to inspire and develop the Nation’s science and technology workforce.
This multi-year effort includes elements focused on STEM enrichment programs for students and educators, STEM workforce engagement, program evaluation, and public outreach. These efforts will allow DoD to improve access for students to pursue STEM careers and consider Defense laboratories as a place of employment. Through strategic investment in STEM education and outreach activities, the effort will provide students with more exposure to educational and career opportunities, as well as DoD research. The program includes scholarships, internships/apprenticeships, teacher training, and conferences.
Yes. One example that could be adapted for K-12 are the existing programs funded by the National Science Foundation, which provides summer research experiences nationally and internationally to college students. Those programs involve partnerships with universities and non-for-profit scientific societies.
In 2022, the Department of Education launched its YOU Belong in STEM initiative to strengthen STEM education nationwide by implementing and scaling high-quality PreK through university STEM education for all, which is well aligned with the goals of this proposal. Similar programs exist in many other federal agencies, but they are not coordinated nor specifically directed to building the STEM pipeline.
Although OSTP is the obvious coordinating group, in the event it could not undertake a project of this size, the National Science Foundation in concert with the Department of Education, given its YOU Belong in STEM initiative, would be an appropriate coordinator.
A few agencies—such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Department of Defense (DoD)—currently directly support aspects of this initiative. Yet at least 20 federal agencies and their subunits have a clear stake in developing the STEM workforce and hire STEM graduates.
While there are dozens if not hundreds of organizations doing similar types of programs, they are underfunded, uncoordinated, and under-evaluated. They are not uniformly distributed throughout the U.S., and their goals are also diffuse. Only the federal government is positioned to create the umbrella to coordinate such programs, track them, and evaluate them.
The OSTP working group would need to prioritize the number of federal agencies and choose those that have the most at stake from this proposal—agencies that specifically need STEM workforce to carry out their mission. Narrowed in this way, the number of units might drop by 50%, from 20 to 10. The working group could also focus on those agencies that currently have robust programs in the same space and build on those. For example, more money might be given to the DSEC program.
In addition, funding should be continued and increased for the National Science Foundation to evaluate these programs from a rigorous viewpoint to determine whether they are succeeding. Continued funding would be dependent on the results of these evaluations.
An Innovation Agenda for Addiction: Breakthrough Medicines That Scale
The federal government should expand the FDA’s priority review voucher program (PRV) and provide market exclusivity advantages to encourage the development of medications for addiction.
Taken together, substance use disorders (alcohol, cigarettes, and other drugs) cause more deaths in the U.S. every year than cancer or heart disease and cause devastating downstream social harms. Despite this, only 3% of eligible patients received substance use disorder (SUD) medication, a result of low uptake and efficacy of existing medications and a lack of options for patients addicted to stimulants. This is due to a near-total absence of pharmaceutical research and development activity. To make population level impact to reduce harms from opioids, methamphetamine, cocaine, alcohol, and cigarettes, we must address the broken market dynamics in addiction medicine.
The PRV program should be expanded to cover opioid use disorder, alcohol use disorder, stimulant use disorder, and smoking. In addition, drugs that are approved for these SUD indications should have extended exclusivity and sponsors that develop these medications should receive vouchers to extend exclusivity for other medications.
Challenge and Opportunity
Addiction policy efforts on both the left and the right have struggled. Despite substantial progress reducing smoking, 29 million Americans still smoke cigarettes and feel unable to quit and 480,000 Americans die each year from smoking. While overdose deaths from opioids, cocaine, and methamphetamine have fallen slightly from their peak in 2022, they are still near record highs, three times higher than 20 years ago. Alcohol deaths per capita have doubled since 1999.
Roughly 60% of all crimes and 65% of violent crimes are related to drugs or alcohol; and the opioid crisis alone costs the United States $1.5 trillion a year. Progress in reducing addiction is held back because people with a substance use disorder take medication. This low uptake has multiple causes: in opiate use disorder, uptake is persistently low despite recent relaxations of prescription rules, with patients reporting a variety of reasons for refusal; treatments for alcohol use disorder have modest effects; and there are no approved treatments for stimulant use disorder. Only three percent take SUD medications, as shown in figure 1 below [link to image]. In brief, only 2% of those suffering alcohol use disorder, 13% of those with opiate use disorder, 2% of smokers, and approximately 0% of illicit stimulant users are receiving medication, giving a weighted average of about 3%.
There has been rapid innovation in the illicit market as synthetic opioids and expanded meth production have lowered price and increased strength and availability. Meanwhile, there has been virtually no innovation in medicines to prevent and treat addiction. The last significant FDA approval for opioid use disorder was buprenorphine in 2002; progress since then has been minimal, with new formulations or dosing of old medications. For alcohol use disorder, the most recent was acamprosate in 2004 (and it is rarely prescribed due to limited efficacy and three times a day dosing).
None of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies have active addiction medicine programs or drug candidates, and the pharmaceutical industry as a whole has only pursued minimal drug development. According to the trade association BIO, “Venture investment into companies with novel addiction drug programs over the last 10 years is estimated at $130M, 270 times less than oncology.”
There are promising addiction drug candidates being studied by academics but without industry support they will never become medicines. If pharmaceutical companies spent just 10% of what they spend on obesity therapies, we might quickly make progress.
For example, GLP-1 medicines like Ozempic and Mounjaro have strong anti-addictive effects across substances. Randomized trials and real-world patient health record studies show dramatic drops in consumption of drugs and alcohol for patients taking a GLP-1. Many addiction scientists now consider these compounds to be the biggest breakthrough in decades. However, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, who own the drugs currently in the market, do not plan to run phase 3 addiction trials on them, due to fear of adverse events in substance use disorder populations. The result is that a huge medical opportunity is stuck in limbo indefinitely. Fortunately, Lilly has recently signaled that they will run trials on related compounds, but remain years from approval.
Conversations with industry leaders make clear that large pharmas avoid SUD indications for several reasons. First, their upside appears limited, since current SUD medications have modest sales. Second, like other psychiatric disorders, the problem is challenging given the range and complexity of neurological targets and the logistical challenges of recruiting people with substance use disorder as participants. Finally, companies face downside reputational and regulatory risk if participants, who face high baseline rates of death from overdose regardless, were to die in trials. In the case of Ozempic and Mounjaro, sponsors face an obstacle some have termed the “problem of new uses” – clinical trials of an already lucrative drug for a new indication carry downside risk if new side effects or adverse events are reported.
Image from Charting the fourth wave, based on CDC data
Plan of Action
Market Shaping Interventions
Recommendation 1. Expand the FDA priority review voucher (PRV) program to include addiction medicine indications.
The FDA priority review voucher (PRV) program incentivizes development of drugs for rare pediatric and infectious diseases by rewarding companies who get drugs approved with a transferable voucher that accelerates FDA approval. These vouchers are currently selling for an average of $100M. The PRV program doesn’t cost the government any money but it makes drug development in the designated categories much more lucrative. The PRV program has proven very successful, leading to a surge in approvals of medications.
As a neglected market with urgent unmet medical and public health needs, and which also promises to benefit the broader public by reducing the negative externalities of addiction, addiction medicine is a perfect fit for the PRV program. Doing so could transform the broken market dynamics of the field. The advantage of the PRV program is that it does not require substantial new congressional appropriations, though it will require Congress giving the FDA authority to expand the PRV program, as it has done previously to add other disease areas.
Recommendation 2. Extend exclusivity for addiction medicines and incentivize pursuit of new indications
Market exclusivity is a primary driver of pharmaceutical industry revenue. Extending exclusivities would have a very large effect on industry behavior and is needed to create sufficient incentives. The duration of exclusivity for alcohol use disorder, opioid use disorder, stimulant use disorder, and smoking cessation indications should be extended along with other incentives.
- Addiction medicine indications should receive an additional two years of exclusivity for biologics and three years for small molecules.
- Companies that achieve an indication for a substance use disorder for a medication that represents a significant advance would receive an exclusivity voucher that can be transferred to another medication. For 2nd, 3rd, and 4th SUD indications with the same compound, companies would be granted a shorter duration exclusivity voucher. Durations would be tiered, as described in this proposal from Duke, to balance public interest and reward levels.
- FDA should provide increased consideration for addiction medicines for breakthrough, fast track, and priority review designations, as well as accelerate meeting schedules, all of which substantially reduce development expenses.
For precedent, there are already a number of FDA programs that extend medication exclusivity, including ‘orphan drug exclusivity’ and the qualified infectious disease product (QIDP) program. Like rare diseases and antibiotics, addiction is a market that requires incentives to function effectively. In addition, successful treatments, given the negative externalities of addiction, have public benefit beyond the direct medical impact, and deserve additional public incentives.
Recommendation 3. Modernize FDA Standards of Efficacy for Substance Use Disorder Trials
A significant barrier to pharmaceutical innovation in SUDs is outdated or unpredictable efficacy standards sometimes set by the FDA for clinical trials. Efficacy expectations for substance use disorder indications are often rooted in abstinence-only and other binary measure orientations that the scientific and medical community has moved past when evaluating substance use disorder harms.
This article in the American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse demonstrates that binary outcome measures like ‘number of heavy drinking days’ (NHDD) can underestimate the efficacy of treatments. This recent report from NIAAA on alcohol trial endpoints recommends a shift away from abstinence-based endpoints and towards more meaningful consumption-based endpoints. This approach should be adopted by the FDA for all SUD treatments, not just alcohol.
There are some indications that the FDA has begun modernizing their approach. This recent paper from NIH and FDA on smoking cessation therapies provides updated guidance that moves in the right direction.
More broadly, the FDA should work to adopt endpoints and standards of efficacy that mirror standards in other disease areas. This shift is best achieved through new guidance or statements issued by the FDA, which would offer positive assurance to pharmaceutical companies that they have achievable paths to approval. Predictability throughout the medication development life cycle is absolutely essential for companies considering investment.
Congress should include statements in upcoming appropriations and authorizations that state:
- The FDA should adopt non-binary standards of efficacy for addiction treatments that are aligned with standards for other common disorders and the FDA shall, within 12 months, report on the standards employed for substance use disorder relative to other prevalent chronic conditions and report steps to eliminate disparities in evidentiary standards and issue new guidance on the subject.
- The FDA should publish clear guidance on endpoints across SUDs to support planning among pharmaceutical companies considering work in this field.
Conclusion
Sustained focus and investment in diabetes and heart disease treatments has enabled medical breakthroughs. Addiction medicine, by contrast, has been largely stagnant for decades. Stimulating private-sector interest in addiction medicine through regulatory and exclusivity incentives, as well as modernized efficacy standards, is essential for disrupting the status quo. Breakthroughs in addiction medicine could save hundreds of thousands of lives in the US and provide long-term relief for one of our most intractable social problems. Given the negative externalities of addiction, this would also have enormous benefits for society at large, reducing crime and intergenerational trauma and saving money on social services and law enforcement.
This action-ready policy memo is part of Day One 2025 — our effort to bring forward bold policy ideas, grounded in science and evidence, that can tackle the country’s biggest challenges and bring us closer to the prosperous, equitable and safe future that we all hope for whoever takes office in 2025 and beyond.
Per author conversations with industry leaders, private sector interest in SUD medication development is limited for the following reasons:
- The upside of pursuing SUD indications appears limited, since current SUD medications, which are generally targeted for specific substances, have modest sales.
- Even with preliminary evidence that GLP-1 drugs may be efficacious for some SUD indications (e.g, alcohol, opiates, and tobacco), companies are reluctant to pursue label expansion for SUD. As described previously, with already lucrative drugs, companies face a downside risk (termed the “problem of new uses”) from running large clinical trials, and possibly uncovering new side effects or incurring random adverse events which could harm reputation and existing markets.
- In the specific case of SUD, this downside risk might be especially large, since people with substance use disorder have high baseline rates of overdose and death.
Moreover, there is an argument that a treatment for SUD is a public good, to the degree that it ameliorates the negative externalities of addiction – increasing the case for more public-sector incentives for SUD treatment. The end result is that medical treatments for SUD are stuck in an indefinite limbo, with private-sector interest in SUD, as documented previously, being very low.
The current lack of effective and widely used SUD medications is disheartening, but this is in the context of private sector disinterest and scant funding. Even modest successes in SUD treatment have the potential to kickstart an innovation loop, akin to the rush of biotech companies hastening to enter the obesity treatment field. Prior to the success of the GLP-1 drugs, obesity treatment had been moribund, and viewed pessimistically in light of drugs that had limited efficacy or had been withdrawn for side effects like suicidality or cardiovascular issues.
An SUD success like GLP-1 for obesity has the potential to kindle a similar rush of interest; the challenge is the initiation of that cascade. Given the very low levels of investment in SUD treatments, there is potential low-hanging fruit that, given sufficient funding, could be trialed and deployed.
There has been rapid innovation in the field of addiction, but it’s been happening on the wrong side: addiction-inducing technologies are becoming more powerful, while SUD treatments have largely stagnated. This innovation is most evident in synthetic opioids and methamphetamine.
Compared to heroin, fentanyl is about 25x stronger (on a per-weight basis), and hence, much easier to smuggle. As the Commission on Combating Synthetic Opioid Trafficking put it:
Single-digit metric tonnage of pure fentanyl is not a large amount and could easily fit into a shipping container or a truck trailer, which seriously challenges interdiction…Perhaps as much as 5 MT [metric tons] of pure fentanyl would be needed to satisfy the entire annual U.S. consumption for illegally supplied opioids.
Moreover, as a recent Scientific American article documented, innovations in fentanyl production, including the use of safer precursors and methods that don’t require sophisticated equipment, mean that fentanyl production is now decentralized, and resistant to attempts by law enforcement to shut it down.
As fentanyl has come to dominate the opioid supply over the past 10 years, overdose deaths have risen dramatically. New synthetic opioids and non-opioids like xylazine are also becoming common.
At the same time, due to advances in production techniques in Mexico, methamphetamine production has skyrocketed in recent decades while purity has improved. Worst of all, unlike heroin, fentanyl is easily combined with meth and cocaine in pills and powder.
The DEA has highlighted the presence of “super labs” in Mexico capable of producing hundreds of pounds of meth per batch.
Together, these three innovations (fentanyl, cheap meth, and new combinations) have led to a 400% increase in overdose deaths in the past 20 years. Without equally powerful innovations to reduce addiction rates, we will never make long-term and sustainable progress.