Establish a $100M National Lab of Neurotechnology for Brain Moonshots

A rigorous scientific understanding of how the brain works would transform human health and the economy by (i) enabling design of effective therapies for mental and neurodegenerative diseases (such as depression and Alzheimer’s), and (ii) fueling novel areas of enterprise for the biomedical, technology, and artificial intelligence industries. Launched in 2013, the U.S. BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative has made significant progress toward harnessing the ingenuity and creativity of individual laboratories in developing neurotechnological methods. This has provided a strong foundation for future work, producing advances like:

However, pursuing these ambitious goals will require new approaches to brain research, at greater scale and scope.

Given the BRAIN Initiative’s momentum, this is the moment to expand the Initiative by investing in a National Laboratory of Neurotechnology (NLN) that would bring together a multidisciplinary team of researchers and engineers with combined expertise in physical and biomedical sciences. The NLN team would develop large-scale instruments, tools, and methods for recording and manipulating the activity of complex neural circuits in living animals or humans — studies that would enable us to understand how the brain works at a deeper, more detailed level than ever before. Specific high-impact initiatives that the NLN team could pursue include:

The BRAIN Initiative currently funds small teams at existing research institutes. The natural next step is to expand the Initiative by establishing a dedicated center — staffed by a large, collaborative, and interdisciplinary team — capable of developing the high-cost, large-scale equipment needed to address complex and persistent challenges in the field of neurotechnology. Such a center would multiply the return on investment in brain research that the federal government is making on behalf of American taxpayers. Successful operation of a National Laboratory of Neurotechnology would require about $100 million per year.

To read a detailed vision for a National Laboratory of Neurotechnology, click here.

“Quorkforce”: Developing a National Quantum Workforce

The Biden-Harris Administration should establish a national initiative to develop a workforce pipeline for the new and emerging quantum ecosystem – call it the “Quorkforce.” Due to the rapid growth in the fields of quantum computing and technology along with fears of losing competitiveness, both the public and private sectors are struggling to find skilled employees. Quantum skills are derived from a mixture of many disciplines such as physics, computer science, applied mathematics and engineering, and there is no unique path to enter the quantum sphere. Through partnerships between the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, and the private quantum industry, the Biden-Harris Administration should establish an educational plan to train the next quantum generation across K-12, undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate levels. The Administration should initiate an open call to create ten national quantum education centers with a baseline funding of $300M over a period of 10-12 years. The short-term goal would be to train the existing workforce with adequate quantum skills, while the long-term goal would be to provide a steady flow of quantum-literate graduates capable of advancing the field and fulfilling the needs of this growing industry.

Challenge and Opportunity

In December 2018, the U.S. Congress passed the National Quantum Initiative (NQI) Act to establish goals and priorities for a ten-year plan to accelerate the development of quantum information science and technology applications. Quantum information science is defined as the use of the laws of quantum physics for the storage, transmission, manipulation, or measurement of information. Title III of the NQI states that the National Science Foundation shall carry out a basic research and education program on quantum information science and engineering, and award grants for the establishment of Multidisciplinary Centers for Quantum Research and Education. This proposal aims at extending these efforts with a special focus on preparing a steady stream of quantum-ready workers.

The acceleration in the advancement of quantum technologies has created an urgent need to develop a workforce pipeline by expanding the number of researchers, educators, and students with training in quantum information science and technology. Human capital in this field is necessary both for national security purposes and in order to remain dominant in the present and the future. Already, both the Federal Government and the private sector are facing a significant talent problem in quantum technologies due to the shortage in quantum-trained college graduates. In the related field of computer science, only 400,000 graduates from U.S. universities were available to fill the 1.4 million computing jobs open in 2020 (~29%). This gap between labor force demand and supply is only expected to grow as the applications of quantum information science become more germane to innovation and global technology competition. A steady flow of quantum-literate workers on all levels will make the US stand out among its allies as well as surpass its adversaries.

Quantum education and research fall under the big STEM umbrella (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). Broadly speaking, the demand for STEM workers is projected to continuously increase for the foreseeable future. The Education Commission of the States estimates that in the next decade, STEM-related jobs will increase by 13%, while non-STEM-related jobs will only grow by 9%. Currently, there are around 18 million STEM employees in the U.S. out of a total of 160 million total jobs, which accounts to roughly 11.25% of the American labor force.

The main challenge for the fast-growing quantum industry is that the quantum-ready workforce supply is not keeping up with demand. This has the potential to hinder long-run scientific advancement and impact U.S. dominance in the quantum field of research on the global level. China in particular has aggressively invested in quantum research and development at a rate that may soon surpass U.S. research and development funding levels. In 2019 for example, China’s patent office received more than twice as many applications as its U.S. counterpart, indicating the increase in the Chinese scientific workforce. To address this pressing issue, a longitudinal educational path needs to be established with the aim of closing the workforce gap in the next 10-15 years. Three main pillars will be essential for the success of this endeavor: middle/high school outreach, undergraduate/graduate education, and current employee training. To ensure the success and the longevity of such a mission, central hubs must be created for coordination purposes. At a time when U.S. officials worry that the country is losing ground to other nations, it is important to realize that the American people are the real asset, and that quantum education is the key to fortifying the country’s status as a global leader in quantum discovery and innovation.

The National Science Foundation has been the leader of science innovation and education for over 70 years. This institution is the best fit to lead the effort of creating and managing the quantum centers. Such an endeavor could be accomplished either through existing research directorates (Computer and Information Science and Engineering, Engineering, Mathematical and Physical Sciences, and Education and Human Resources), or via the establishment of a new directorate for quantum research and education.

Plan of Action

The Biden-Harris Administration should work through the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to oversee and strengthen federal support for quantum education in the United States. In order to ensure the widest spread of a successful initiative, the National Science Foundation should, as a first step, dedicate seed funds for the establishment of ten quantum hubs across the United States Northeast, South, Midwest, and West. Once the top candidate for each of the centers is announced, a follow-up grant of $15 million per center should be provided for founding and launching these centers over a period of 2-3 years. A similar amount of funding for the following 5 years will give sufficient time for these centers to take root and succeed. The underlying mission of the quantum educational centers will be three-fold: 

  1. Facilitating the wider accessibility of undergraduate/graduate degrees to develop a larger and more diverse quantum-ready workforce. 
  2. Training current employees to ensure the quantum workforce remains relevant and up to date in the field. 
  3. Planning outreach activities for middle and high school students to encourage the future generation to pursue this exciting new career path.

This ten-year plan will gradually fill the current workforce gap in the quantum industry as well as furnish a steady flow of workers skilled in quantum science and technology to keep up with the growing demands of the field.

1. Tertiary Education

Because quantum skills stem from a mixture of academic departments such as physics, chemistry, mathematics, computer science and engineering, they cannot be acquired via an existing, simple, old-fashion major or degree. The quantum centers should form a consortium of universities within their geographical bounds that offer courses and classes in the disciplines that together form quantum science and technology. It is crucial to understand that quantum education is not only relevant for PhD programs at elite universities but should be considered from the earliest years of science and engineering education. The ultimate outcome will be the creation of well-defined paths for students to pursue degrees at the bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral levels. Having a commonwealth of colleges in a common geographical region guarantees the long-term continuation of a quantum education program: a single institution might not realize sufficient demand from students and sponsors to make a quantum program financially sustainable.

Building quantum laboratories within the centers will be their most pressing task. Experimental skills related to quantum technologies are equally, or even more, important for entering the workforce than courses in complex quantum theory, which is still ahead of industrial quantum systems. As quantum concepts are being transformed into commercial products, there is an urgent need for a workforce which possess hands-on experience with quantum systems.

Building a successful quantum education program will require that each center gather subject matter experts, develop strong relationships with industry, ensure institutional commitment, acquire resources for laboratories, hire faculty clusters, and set up dissemination mechanisms. Most current educational systems stress separate academic subjects rather than a multidisciplinary approach to quantum education, a trend that has led to the graduation of physics majors with very little experience in building quantum devices and engineering majors with little to no exposure to quantum mechanics. The role of the centers in this context will be to install cohesive benchmarks and standards across the multiple disciplines involved rather than create a unified curriculum for all degrees and specializations.

Partners from the private sector will play a major role in this paradigm. They are the main drivers of workforce demand in the quantum industry in their respective areas of operations (sensors, networks, communications, computing, etc.). The skills the private sector requires range from hardware knowledge to quantum programming, and even pure quantum information theory. Due to its very early stage of development, it remains challenging to quantify the number and size of companies within the quantum industry, let alone the distribution of jobs. There must be a continuous dialogue between higher education institutions and quantum employers to ensure that the former are preparing graduates to fulfill the needs of the latter. Mutual contributions will enable smooth supply and demand dynamics and avoid the potential for misuse of resources. A town hall every 3-6 months with the main players on each side would allow for exchanging ideas, sharing successful milestones, and anticipating potential challenges.

2. Current Workforce Training

In 5-10 years, the centers will be providing a steady flow of college graduates ready to be employed in the quantum industry. However, there is a dire need to fill the intermediate gap in the quantum workforce across a range of applications from devices to software and everything in between (e.g., fabrication of novel quantum materials, software compilers for quantum computers, etc.).

In the past couple of years, quantum technology has been transitioning into commercial products with the potential to solve real-world problems. As a result, many companies have begun to hire more engineers and technicians to ensure the new systems are reliable. Due to the shortage of such skilled employees, many physicists and engineers are facing the challenge of learning a whole new set of skills to prepare themselves to participate in the quantum revolution.

Hence, another overarching goal for the quantum centers will be to provide substantial training for current employees in the quantum industry. Week-long workshops, monthly seminars, summer training, etc., will each focus on a specific topic or a specific technology (optical-metrology, cryogenics, microwave electronics, etc.). On the experimental level, the centers’ labs will be responsible for designing hands-on training at their facilities to give physicists, engineers, and chemists the practical skills they need for proficiency in the latest quantum technologies. This endeavor could be sponsored by private quantum companies, which will be the main beneficiaries from the re-training of their employees.

3. K-12 Outreach

To ensure the long-term success of these efforts, special attention should be devoted to the K12 sector. The quantum centers should each have a division for outreach to public and private middle/high schools within their geographical boundaries. This is an essential step to introduce the younger generation to quantum science and technology, which is generally not already included in their current curricula.

It is impossible to change middle and high school science curricula overnight. The centers should work with existing STEM educational material and make strategic additions to it. The goal is to give American teenagers a glimpse into the area of quantum research and ignite their curiosity and motivation to pursue a future career in the field. Moreover, the centers should organize summer boot camps for advanced students at their facilities to give them hands-on experience with quantum lab demos, invite them to meet-the-scientists events, and introduce them to toy models and experiments. Such activities could range between 7-10 weeks in the summer and introduce students to quantum algorithms, quantum computer prototypes (D-wave, Microsoft, Google, IBM, etc.), post-quantum cryptography (PQC), and other topics in the field. Many similar efforts have been initiated by private companies to do outreach to and site visits with students; the task of the centers would be to strengthen this kind of collaboration and make it more established for the long run. The overarching goal would be to motivate these students to pursue further explorations in and around the quantum area of research and applications. All the above efforts should be coordinated with several relevant associations such as the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT), the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators (AMTE), the American Association of Chemistry Teachers (AACT), and the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA). Most importantly, centers around the country should organize workshops in the form of “train the trainer” events in order to equip high school teachers with the right tools and set them up for success.

Inclusion and Diversity

As the National Science Foundation continues to expand its investments in the quantum space, it is important to improve the diversity of the quantum workforce. The foundational work in both quantum research and education should be diverse and inclusive across multiple attributes: geography, demographics, and technology. Broadening participation in STEM fields is a challenge that has not yet been overcome. However, to ensure that the quantum community will meet the workforce needs of the present and the future, it is imperative to utilize the broadest possible range of human capital. If research and education in the quantum field progresses without addressing barriers to diversity and inclusion, these problems will be solidified in the next generation. Therefore, each center should prioritize efforts to ensure that the quantum community is representative of the country’s diversity in race, gender, ethnicity, social class, etc.

To date, the field of quantum research has been developed primarily by disciplines with some of the lowest representation of women and minority populations. For example, women make up 21% of Computer Science (CS) bachelor’s degree graduates and 20.3% of CS doctoral graduates, and domestic underrepresented minorities make up 14.7% of CS bachelor’s degree graduates and only 3.1% of doctoral CS graduates. The most significant barrier to fostering students’ passion for STEM education at all age levels is the persistent and still-widening gap in opportunity in underserved communities. Educating parents in these communities about the opportunities that STEM education in general — and quantum education in particular — can offer their children should start with showing them hard data on the continued growth of these jobs.

Many initiatives in the past decade have shown their effectiveness in reaching previously marginalized communities. The great successes achieved by movements like CS for all, AI for all, Black in AI, etc. should be a strong motivation to launch the next organization: Quantum for all or Q4ALL. Such a movement would promote wider inclusion in the quantum fields of research and education. Primary channels which these models have established to accomplish this include scholarships, fellowships, national meetings, summer camps, workgroups, and other activities geared towards a diverse student corps around the country. Previous successes have been accomplished by setting a collective agenda with the cooperation of content providers, education associations, researchers, and supporters to help schools and districts provide all students with rigorous K-12 STEM education. The national quantum centers could support a Quantum for all movement by serving as a platform for connecting diverse stakeholders, providing support to new and developing initiatives, tracking and sharing progress, and communicating about the work to local and national audiences.

The national quantum centers, separately and in collaboration, must make the issue of inclusion and diversity a priority. Some relevant organizations and events are already emerging, such as the Women in Quantum Development Symposium, the American Physical Society Bridge Program, the Inclusive Graduate Education Network, etc. They are shaping how PhD programs approach admissions, retention, and professional development with the aim of increasing participation of underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups. The quantum centers should coordinate these efforts, while engaging both public and the private industry to reduce factors that hinder participation in the future quantum workforce such as pay disparities. discrimination in hiring, affordable childcare provision, inappropriate expectations for working hours.

National Collaboration and Monitoring 

Critical to this plan’s success will be the collaboration with two partners: government labs and the private sector. Government labs like Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), and Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) play an important role in developing quantum systems through their facilities. The private sector, meanwhile, will be the main beneficiary of the development of a quantum workforce, and their participation in the efforts led by the centers will be vital to the appropriate allocation of resources and focus areas. To monitor the plan’s success, the NSF should audit the progress of the centers and engage them in annual general meetings to share, evaluate, and coordinate their respective efforts and accomplishments. Finally, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics should start taking into account purely quantum jobs in their census, as this will be the main metric for measuring the saturation of the quantum job market and hence the successful outcomes of this plan.

Conclusion

As the quantum industry is growing rapidly, there is an urgent need for a workforce skilled in quantum science and technology. By creating a group of national centers under the guidance of the National Science Foundation, education in quantum information science can be provided on all levels from middle school to post-doctoral, while simultaneously training the current non-quantum workforce for this new and exciting field. Over the next decade, this plan would achieve job market saturation in the quantum industry and furnish a steady flow of quantum-ready workers.

Demystifing Tech Careers: Industry-Driven Transparency for Expanding Access to the New Economy

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and/or the National Economic Council and Department of Labor should convene a Transparent Tech Training Alliance, a coalition of public and private sector leaders called to expand access to early tech careers by codifying and communicating industry hiring standards. To meet the economy’s urgent and growing demand for tech workers, innovative educators have developed tens of thousands of short courses and bootcamps to rapidly upskill workers. But this landscape is complicated to navigate, especially for low-wage workers and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) who are training and hiring in tech at increasing numbers. Without intervention, this nascent system will exacerbate the divide between the “haves and have nots” of our economy, further endangering the health of our workforce, communities, and businesses.

In response, the Alliance should:

  1. make a highly publicized commitment to unprecedented transparency in hiring practices and the annual publication of hiring data;
  2. generate a clear, industry-driven guide of certified credentials, career pathways, and funding sources;
  3. utilize this guide and more for a prize competition that modernizes CareerOneStop; and
  4. reconvene annually to publicize their progress and update resources.

Challenge and Opportunity

America’s pool of tech talent will grow too slowly and homogeneously to meet the economy’s needs. An estimated 400,000 STEM college students graduate every year, but by 2030 there will still be a shortage of 6 million tech workers in the United States. The accelerated demand for tech workers has driven educators to create innovative training methods, like short-courses and bootcamps. Now, the tech-training space has become crowded and governed by an opaque universe of unwritten rules: Which bootcamps and credentials are reputable? What projects make a compelling portfolio? What types of questions will be asked in an interview?

Those with personal or professional networks in the technology industry have access to information that helps them navigate to the “right” programs and credentials for upskilling. However, those without access to this information risk investing time and financial resources into low-quality training programs with limited guarantees of joining the new economy.

This unnecessarily blocks a new pipeline of workers ready to fill high-demand vacancies, while also cementing the industry’s homogeneous hiring practices and exacerbating racial and gender inequality. Considering their total workforce participation, women and Black and Latinx workers are severely underrepresented along the career spectrum. Given the anticipated rapid expansion of jobs in technology, and the compression of jobs in other fields, there is an urgent need to address these gaps and provide access to upskilling for all workers, especially in the technology industry.

The “alphabet soup” of tech training programs and failures of existing federal tools to guide workers bear large responsibility for the system’s failure.

Alphabet Soup

The tech credential and training space is often referred to as “alphabet soup” to denote the myriad of available options: workers must decide between more than 12,000 cybersecurity, 4,000 IT Helpdesk and 17,000 web programming credential options, and there are many more categories of tech professions.

On one hand, the saturation of credentialing services indicates educators are innovatively upskilling and reskilling workers to fill in-demand jobs. On the other, it creates a significant challenge of reliability for workers looking for a program or credential that will enable their gainful employment. It also creates a barrier for SMEs, who are rapidly hiring tech talent but may not have the technical expertise to assess highly qualified workers among the universe of credential options. Without clear metrics for quality, both candidates and businesses waste precious time and financial resources navigating this nontransparent process.

Black and Latinx individuals are disproportionately in a position of reliance on short-term tech training such as bootcamps to enter the industry due to lack of equitable access to traditional four-year degree programs. Compared to their representation in the tech industry, Black and Latinx workers are 29% and 38% more likely to use bootcamps, respectively. Therefore, these already vulnerable workers incur the disproportionate risk created by such a vast, unregulated landscape, exasperating the existing disparities in access to tech careers.

Failures in Existing Federal Tools

The existing federal tool, CareerOneStop, is ill-equipped to support the needs of the growing tech workforce. Outdated and difficult to use, CareerOneStop provides an incomplete picture of the breadth of career and program options available. CareerOneStop also does not provide comparative tools for workers deciding between different careers or educational pathways. For example, it includes over 70 certifications in cybersecurity without information on cost, results, or anticipated wages after their completion. Information on training, jobs and local support are not integrated by industry verticals, making it tedious to compare one’s options. Lastly, the site is entirely literacy intensive, failing to incorporate video footage or other media to reach workers at lower reading levels or different means of accessibility.

These features disadvantage both workers and counselors, who rely on CareerOneStop to make high-stakes financial investments in reskilling.

A Call for Transparency to Increase Access and Accountability

To maintain its global competitiveness and support the growing tech needs in businesses across all industries, the United States must rapidly upskill workers into programming, cybersecurity and IT jobs. Clear pathways, quality benchmarks, and program options will not only make these careers more accessible, but also less risky to marginalized populations. There is a crucial opportunity to bring transparency to careers in the new economy while the industry is still nascent and developing.

Plan of Action

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and/or the National Economic Council, in close partnership with the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration (ETA), should assemble a Transparent Tech Training Alliance, a cross-sector coalition of leaders with a mandate to increase transparency and therefore access and accountability in tech hiring. They should meet in a highly publicized convening in order to make two public commitments: 

  1. Unprecedented transparency in hiring standards: sharing the “unwritten rules” via accessible documentation that codifies standards and norms in tech recruiting to guide Americans into these careers.
  2. Accountability through public data: committing to a method and timeline for publishing their hiring demographics (e.g. race, gender, educational background and training), no more than one year from the convening.

Spearheaded by the ETA, but including representatives from the broader Departments of Labor and Education, a coalition of federal leaders can accomplish these outcomes through the following three steps:

Step I. Preparation

Assemble a Roster

First, the ETA should propose a cross-sector Alliance, including representatives from major tech companies, large national or regional employers across multiple industries, academia, local government, tech investment and nonprofit organizations that are committed to increasing diversity and inclusion in tech hiring. This will require the ETA to gather research regarding the relevant stakeholders and experts who would have the greatest impact on the group with their attendance whose hiring footprint is either large and growing or most representative of the country’s employers.

Outreach should be conducted by a highly visible member of the Department of Labor such as Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh or Chief Innovation Officer Chike Aguh in order to elevate the importance and urgency of the Alliance.

Publicize a Call to Action for the Alliance

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and/or the National Economic Council must make a Call for Action to the Alliance, drawing an explicit connection between transparency, economic mobility, and equity. This will empower consumers to hold industry accountable for their role in rebuilding the economy justly. In other words, not participating should be equivalent to denouncing equity initiatives in tech. Federal government leaders should apply pressure to companies not only to participate, but to follow through on their commitment to transparent data sharing.

Step II. Convene the Alliance

Host a Formal and Public Initial Convening

A representative from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and/or the National Economic Council or the Department of Labor should open the event with a call to action – clearly connecting access to good jobs with our economic recovery, equity, and global competitiveness. Then, the Alliance members would make the two aforementioned commitments: unprecedented transparency in hiring standards and accountability through public data. These should be documented and signed in a highly public fashion, including a social media campaign and press reporting on the event. Awards should be given to the firms that have made the most progress in hiring diversity and inclusivity in the last decade through data and storytelling spotlights. The convening is also an opportunity to announce the prize competition to modernize CareerOneStop (i.e. Step III). 

Appoint Representatives to a Task Force

The Alliance must recommend representatives for a Task Force to accomplish the following goals:

Reconvene the Alliance Annually to Review Data and Recommit to Transparency

The Alliance should meet annually to:

Step III. Use a Prize Competition to Update Federal Resources

Driven by the ETA, the Department of Labor should launch a prize competition to modernize CareerOneStop, the existing federal career exploration platform. The new platform should spotlight the Alliance Task Force’s information on transparency on high-demand tech jobs, and the educational levels needed to attain them. It should also clarify pathways between skills, credentials, and jobs on a platform that is user friendly for workers, counselors and small- and medium- business leaders who are hiring in fields like programming, IT and cybersecurity. The best platforms will include resources for integrating the content into other sites such as LinkedIn, a corresponding smart phone application, and multi-language access.

The Prize Competition will also bring attention to the broader initiative, driving both employer and worker traffic to the site upon publication. There should be a monetary prize of approximately $100,000 for the winner and runners up, and a multi-year contract for the winner to manage the platform. It should be publicized in the coder community, via tech investors, and publicly on federal sites such as www.challenge.gov.

Conclusion 

The potential of the Transparent Tech Training Alliance lies in government leaders’ “power of the podium” to motivate industry leaders to increase transparency about their hiring practices and data. Equipped with relevant knowledge about the credentials and training experiences industry most values, delivered via a modernized, user-friendly tool, workers can invest their time and financial resources in upskilling and reskilling in tech. By making “insider information” about industry preferences public, the White House and ETA will create opportunities for all Americans to access gainful employment in the technology industry.

Establishing the White House Council on Disabilities

Every American deserves to engage with the world on their own terms. But for the 61 million adults in the United States living with a disability, challenges—including social isolation, the need for advanced assistive technologies, access to care, and economic security—abound. These challenges require a coordinated National Strategy on Disabilities.

To empower people with disabilities to engage with the world on their own terms, President Biden should establish a White House Council on Disabilities tasked with the mission of providing a federally coordinated approach to aligning federal policy, medical reimbursement, and research funding to address issues critical to people those living with disabilities. The goal of this Council would be to provide much-needed leadership and coordination among federal agencies and with external stakeholders, that enable the development of (and access to) the new knowledge and technologies necessary to better support Americans with disabilities of all types and further enrich connections to one another and our economy.

Challenge and Opportunity

July 26, 2020 marked the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). This landmark piece of legislation aimed to “provide equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency” for people with disabilities. The ADA also drove positive change in Americans’ attitudes about disabilities by asserting that people with disabilities “should participate fully in all aspects of our communities and have opportunities to take risks, to succeed, and—yes—to fail.” While the ADA has addressed many of the major civil-rights challenges faced by those living with disabilities, more must be done to modernize the government’s approach to meeting the needs of people living with disabilities.

Over a quarter (61 million) of adult Americans live with a disability. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that out of this group:

We the authors write from the perspective of people living with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), which creates physical and cognitive limitations for thousands of Americans each year and serves as a powerful example of many obstacles Americans with disabilities often face. ALS is just one of the countless conditions that make it challenging for Americans to engage with the world in the way that they want. Many of these challenges could be addressed through coordinated federal activities, investment, and programs for people with disabilities.

For example, those living with conditions such as muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and spina bifida, need new and improved technologies that provide better mobility, independence, and self-care—technologies such as lighter, nimbler wheelchairs. Today’s power wheelchairs are heavy, bulky, and hard to transport on buses and planes. In fact, one airline recently proposed a policy that would preclude people who use heavy wheelchairs from flying on small regional jets. While the policy was reversed after activist involvement, the fact that it was proposed in the first place demonstrates some of the limitations of existing equipment and policy. Public and private investment in innovation that would make power wheelchairs lighter and more mobile would make it easier for people with certain mobility limitations to leave their homes and more fully engage with the world.

Directly related to the need for innovation is the need for modern payment and reimbursement policies that create affordable access to such technologies for people living with disabilities. New medical technologies are useless if people aren’t able to access them. For example, Medicare only covers equipment primarily intended for in-home use. That means that Medicare will not reimburse for essential exterior home modifications such as wheelchair ramps. People with disabilities have the right to be outside. It is time for a commonsense approach to coverage for services and technology that empower Americans with disabilities to experience life on their terms. Another example is that Medicare will only cover equipment for a direct medical reason. This constraint precludes coverage for multi-use devices that can ease access challenges for people with disabilities, including tablet computers that can convert eye gaze to speech and other assistive technology devices.

It is time for a commonsense, open-minded approach to coverage for services and technologies that empower Americans with disabilities. Today’s medical-reimbursement policies are outdated and problematically narrow in scope. These policies must be updated to recognize the broad potential of consumer technology and value of connectedness to wellness. Removing constraints on innovation and function in reimbursement policies will also encourage development of new and creative solutions to the diverse challenges facing those with disabilities.

Modern and coordinated research, development, and reimbursement policies are critical for tapping the enormous value that society would gain from enabling people with disabilities to engage the world more fluidly and consistently—including through employment. Just 36% of adults living with disabilities are employed. Addressing the challenges faced by people living with disabilities would help more of those people join the workforce, boosting the economy and productivity while enabling those with disabilities to live lives that are fuller and more financially secure.

Finally, there is a need to develop a data-centric approach to the evolution of policy over time to ensure that guidances, rules, and regulations are regularly updated to meet the needs of people living with disabilities based on data and the best information available. Are our policies having the impacts we need to help people with engage the world on their terms?

Plan of Action

Establishing the White House Council on Disabilities

The Biden campaign’s Plan for Full Participation and Equality for People with Disabilities provides solid groundwork for ensuring that people with disabilities are included in policy and decision-making. Realizing the promise of this plan requires a coordinating executive body to ensure that government agencies are implementing synergistic policies and avoiding bureaucratic silos. The Biden-Harris Administration should establish a White House Council on Disabilities (WHCD), run through the Domestic Policy Council, as an action-oriented entity that complements—rather than replicates—the largely advisory work of the National Council on Disability. The WHCD’s responsibilities would include:

  1. Coordinating federal activities and programs for people with disabilities.
  2. Examining everyday challenges facing those living with disabilities, identify opportunities for addressing those challenges, and set goals and timelines designed to increase engagement and stimulate innovation around disabilities.
  3. Revisiting the ADA to see where improvements and updates need to be made.

The WHCD should be tasked with developing a National Strategy on Disabilities that lays out specific actions and forward-leaning public policies related to each of these workstreams that should be implemented over the next four years in order to improve quality of life for all people living with disabilities in the United States. As part of developing the strategy, the WHCD should aunch a robust public-engagement effort. For instance, the WHCD should organize forums that bring together private and public stakeholders to discuss common issues, and should host listening sessions to hear directly from people living with disabilities and their care partners.

The Biden campaign’s Plan for Full Participation and Equality for People with Disabilities provides solid groundwork for ensuring that people with disabilities are included in policy and decision-making. However, a coordinating executive body is needed to ensure that government agencies are implementing complementary policies and avoiding bureaucratic silos, so that the promise of the President’s campaign plan can be realized. This action-oriented effort would be complementary to the National Council on Disability, which is “an independent federal agency charged with advising the President, Congress, and other federal agencies regarding policies, programs, practices, and procedures that affect people with disabilities”. The Administration should build on this work and existing structures to ensure that the Biden plan can be implemented by appointing a Director of the WHCD to drive and oversee this effort.

The WHCD should also be tasked with establishing a comprehensive research agenda focused on addressing challenges faced by those living with disabilities that goes beyond the development of new technologies, and also improves social engagement and isolation common among people living with disabilities. The agenda should include research on:

  1. Meeting technology needs, including those related to assistive technology and durable medical equipment (DME), communications technology and broadband access, transportation, and education.
  2. Ensuring affordable access to and reimbursement for care, including by implementing new financing mechanisms, working with existing providers, and funding innovation.
  3. Promoting economic security of those living with disabilities, including by expanding employment opportunities, implementing tax reforms, and changing social policies.

Priority areas and opportunities for action

Herein, we expand on three priority areas—and associated opportunities for action—that the WHCD could pursue. Each of these areas demonstrates the clear positive impacts that a WHCD could have on the lives of the millions living with disabilities across the United States.

Priority Area 1. Research and technology: innovation that empowers

People with disabilities use a variety of technologies to improve their lives. For mobility-challenged persons, for instance, key technologies include powered wheelchairs, special beds, and stair-lifts. But these products can be expensive and unwieldy, and no federal agency is specifically charged with driving innovation for the disabled community. In cases where innovation has occurred, such as more compact ventilators or high mobility wheelchairs, Medicare’s focus on in-home use does not adequately consider the benefits of equipment that better supports travel and social engagement. 

As part of the National Strategy on Disabilities, the WHCD should identify ways to improve and expand access to advanced technologies for people living with disabilities, such as:

The federal government could also establish clear and straightforward reimbursement pathways for advanced technologies. Better reimbursement policies create incentives for innovations and accelerate uptake of new technologies, thereby improving quality of life improvement for people living with disabilities. Durable Medical Equipment (DME) is a class of technologies that would especially benefit from modernized reimbursement policies. DME refers to non-disposable devices used at home to assist someone with a function. Examples of DME include wheelchairs, ventilators, crutches, and CPAP machines. As discussed previously existing reimbursement policies like in home use requirements tend to be rigid in the types of DME they cover, leading to disincentives to innovate in this space. The WHCD could coordinate a strategy for enhancing innovation in DME.

The first step is to ensure that research and development funding, as well as federal insurance coverages for DME, enable innovation that maximize engagement and equipment function. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services could sponsor an Innovation Pilot testing novel DME devices. The WHCD could ensure that federal initiatives such as this are coordinated and complementary. The second step is to encourage DME manufacturers to enhance collaborations with manufacturers of consumer technology (e.g., speech-to-text capabilities and auto-driving assistance) as well as with manufacturers of cutting-edge technology (e.g., brain-computer interfaces and exoskeletons). Innovation to support enhanced mobility, computer control, and other important functions for people with disabilities can in turn cross over to applications in broader consumer markets. The end result of these cycles of improvement will be better DME for people with disabilities as well as new products that benefit even those outside of the disabled community.

Priority Area 2. Communication and social engagement

The WHCD could establish an interagency agenda to develop and deliver science and technology that can reduce the isolation of Americans living with disabilities, and empower those Americans to engage with the world as they wish. Developing and implementing the science for this subset of Americans can not only result in fast improvements, but can also help develop strategies to address isolation and disengagement across America as a whole.

The impacts of social isolation have come into sharp focus during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet people with disabilities face challenges of isolation every single day. Disabilities can make it difficult to communicate online, to speak on the phone, and/or to meet people in person. Investments need to be made to identify and deploy effective mechanisms for all people with disabilities to maintain social engagement and emotional wellness. The Biden campaign’s call for a new Assistive Technology Innovation Fund, administered by the Department of Commerce, to sponsor public-private partnerships focused on increasing the independence of people living with disabilities is a great starting point. As with DME, innovations targeted at the disabled community will ultimately cross over into the broader consumer market to help address isolation and disengagement across America as a whole.

Improving access to broadband is fundamental to ensuring that people with disabilities have the means for social and economic engagement. Broadband also fulfills a medical need, providing better access to healthcare through avenues such as remote monitoring and telehealth. However, according to a Pew Research Center survey, “[d]isabled Americans are about three times as likely as those without a disability to say they never go online.” Adults with disabilities are also less likely to have broadband at home. President Biden’s commitment to invest $20 billion in rural broadband infrastructure, direct the federal government to support cities and towns that want to build municipally owned broadband networks, and increase funding for states to expand broadband will help communities tackle the digital divide. Broadband access alone is not sufficient to create social engagement, but ensuring equitable access is an important first step.

A next step is supporting research into how today’s technologies and tools can be leveraged to better include and engage people living with disabilities. How can we best use broadband and internet-enabled platforms to promote social engagement? How can instrumental enablers of engagement like broadband and social media, accessible transportation, DME, and others be combined with behavioral and educational interventions, volunteer activities, and online communities to reduce social isolation? These are empirical questions that need study and demonstration, coupled with evidence-based policymaking, to drive a new era of inclusiveness for all people with disabilities. And if we as a nation can develop the science to address isolation for Americans with physical and communication challenges, we can use that same science to help reduce isolation for all Americans. This will lead to the more connected and inclusive nation President Biden has been calling for and that we all wish to see.

Finally, reducing social isolation and promoting engagement—as well as simply making it easier to get around one’s community —for those with disabilities demands a concerted effort to address transportation challenges. While investing in better, nimbler DME is a start, new strategies and investments are also needed to improve the transportation infrastructure for the disabled community. Making it easier for people with disabilities to go out in the world makes it easier for them to take advantage of broader opportunities for employment, volunteering, and social engagement, leading to an increase in well-being for individuals and strengthening the overall fabric of our society.

Priority Area 3. Affordable access to care

People with disabilities often have more complex medical needs as well as greater difficulty obtaining quality care. The WHCD should draft forward-leaning access to care policies that agencies can implement, including policies related to telehealth, transportation to medical appointments, and others. Additionally, many forms of disabilities typically require specialized care, including care that sometimes cannot be provided within the person’s home state. Accessing out-of-state care can be challenging, especially for people covered by Medicaid or CHIP. Even after a state Medicaid program or Medicaid Managed Care Organization (MCO) has already authorized out-of-state care, delays in accessing that care may follow. This is an area that the WHCD should examine and propose policy solutions or pilots to address.

People with disabilities often have more complex medical needs as well as greater difficulty obtaining quality care. Additionally, many forms of disabilities typically require specialized care, including care that sometimes cannot be provided within the person’s home state. The WHCD should draft forward-leaning access to care policies that agencies can implement, including policies related to telehealth, transportation to medical appointments, and access to distant specialty services.

Conclusion

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a laudable piece of civil-rights legislation. But this 30-year-old law certainly does not solve the many challenges encountered by Americans with disabilities today. ADA current rules are insufficient – three decades ago it was about getting people into places and securing legal protections, but we’re facing a different set of problems now like access to Broadband, self-driving cars, and telemedicine.

Now is the time to put into motion a coordinated federal effort to empower people with disabilities to engage with the world on their own terms. The problems are complex and require coordination of federal agencies and leadership from and within the White House. The Establishment of the WHCD could ensure that legislative policy fixes and agency implementation go hand in glove.

The Biden campaign’s Plan for Full Participation and Equality for People with Disabilities provides a solid foundation for ensuring that people with disabilities are well served by federal policy and decision-making. A coordinating body can bring the President’s vision to life and ensure that government agencies are implementing complementary policies and avoiding bureaucratic silos. A new White House Council on Disabilities (WHCD) can serve these functions.

Within 6 months of formation, the WHCD should develop and release a detailed National Strategy on Disabilities that covers topics such as innovation in technologies that enable those living with disabilities to engage with the world as they choose, ensuring affordable access to those technologies, and promoting economic security by expanding employment opportunities for those living with disabilities. These actions can and must be informed by the communities they affect. The WHCD should prioritize listening sessions with those living with disabilities and their care partners. It will also be important to bring together other key stakeholders from the disabilities community, including nonprofits, advocates, medical providers, payers, technologists, and others. By working together, we can do much to empower people with disabilities to live independently and to the fullest.

Meeting Biology’s “Sputnik Moment”

Biology is becoming a defining technology of the modern era: the bioeconomy is expected to contribute nearly 1.1 million jobs to the United States by 2030. Preparing the skilled workforce that our nation will need to fill these jobs requires a fundamental shift in how the field of biology is viewed. Biology is not merely a collection of facts to be memorized in school. Rather, it is a dynamic economic sector that provides opportunities for Americans of all skillsets, and that can generate creatively engineered solutions to persistent global challenges.

The Biden-Harris Administration can position the United States as a world leader in the emerging bioeconomy by funding modernized biology education, establishing world-class entrepreneurial hubs for biotechnology in non-traditional regions of the country, and supporting equitable access to industry-recognized certificates and work-based training. Through this comprehensive Built with Biology Plan, the federal government can prepare and invite more Americans into skilled jobs that support the bioeconomy. The social imperative for investing in the bioeconomy is at least as great as the economic one. We will build a better future for all Americans—including people of color, people with disabilities, and people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds—only by harnessing regional talent and growing robust bioeconomies in all 50 states.

Challenge and Opportunity

Scientific and engineering advances have positioned biology to become a core technology of the modern era. Sequencing the human genome is 10 million times cheaper than it was twenty years ago. Genome editing, which includes technology to read and write genetic codes, has redefined DNA as a programming language for cells: one that engineerable and available for updates in the same way that a computer’s code can be. Companies, universities, and government agencies are applying genome-editing tools to meet global needs in healthcare, agriculture, sustainable energy production, and environmental remediation. The economic impact of these efforts is already valued at nearly $1 trillion and is projected to increase for at least a decade.

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed the importance of the bioeconomy into stark relief. The pandemic proved without a doubt that biological threats can send the world into turmoil. But the development of multiple astonishingly effective COVID vaccines in record time—and the associated ramp-up of biomanufacturing plants to mass-produce vaccine doses on a global scale—also proved that bioeconomic innovations can solve society’s most pressing challenges. The unprecedented impacts of COVID-19 make today biology’s “Sputnik Moment.” 70 years ago, the manned moon landing elevated the status of math and physics, triggering lasting change in public education and motivating young people across the country to become scientists and engineers. So too has the pandemic emphasized the pressing need to modernize biology education, training, and investment.

Indeed, as the bioeconomy has grown, so too have its difficulties hiring appropriately trained workers. A recent survey, for instance, found that nearly 80% of industry leaders in the biopharmaceutical sector struggle to find workers with science, engineering, and technical skills. Other countries are rushing to fill this talent vacuum. China’s investment into the bioeconomy is especially noteworthy. An April 2020 report from the Brookings Institution noted that China “intends to own the biorevolution…and they are building the infrastructure, the talent pipeline, the regulatory system, and the financial system they need to do that.” In the United States, conversely, most high schoolers and college students are still performing the same rote biology experiments that they did decades ago.

We as a nation must rethink how we teach and talk about biology in order to remain competitive. We need new curricula that integrate digital technologies and computational thinking alongside core biology concepts. We need to invest in regional infrastructure—including labs, startup space, product accelerators, and more—that will support robust and inclusive bioeconomies to flourish in all 50 states. And we need to create career pathways that enable all Americans to participate in the industry that has anchored the battle against one of the greatest challenges of our time. Concerted federal investment in the bioeconomy will simultaneously advance U.S. scientific capacity, modernize U.S. education, bring good jobs to more people, cement U.S. leadership in key industries, and improve our nation and our world.

Plan of Action

The Biden-Harris Administration should support a four-part Built with Biology Plan. Modeled on Obama-Biden Administration initiatives related to computer science (CS4All), technical education, and entrepreneurship, the plan will accelerate the U.S. bioeconomy through investment in “M.O.R.E.” educational and workforce programs that build lasting knowledge, skills, and professional competencies in bioengineering, biotechnology, biopharmaceuticals, and related fields. The plan will also help advance many of the Biden-Harris Administration’s top priorities, from mitigating climate change to implementing lasting economic relief. M.O.R.E is an acronym for changes in:

The sections below present recommended actions to catalyze change in each of these categories.

Part 1: Mindset

The federal government should move to establish biotechnology training as a core competency. In particular, the federal government should allocate persistent funding for relevant teacher training and high-quality instructional materials at the high-school level. A good goal would be introduce at least one million high school students each year to a modern mindset in life science by the year 2025.

Approaches to teaching high-school biology are remarkably similar around the country, and have remained relatively unchanged for the past 30 years. This temporal and spatial consistency both helps and hinders needed progress. Standardized education means that modernized approaches that succeed in one classroom are likely to succeed in another. But schools and educators alike may be resistant to depart from established curricula—especially when limited resources are available to help them make a shift.

The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS), for instance, were intended to improve K–12 science education for all students. But only 20 states have adopted these standards since they were introduced by the National Research Council in 2013. States forgoing adoption cite limited resources, underprepared teachers, and insufficient classroom time to implement new ways of teaching. Most enrichment programs that provide teacher training are expensive and require updated classroom and lab equipment, adding thousands of dollars to school budgets unless the programs are underwritten by private foundations.

A modern mindset in life science education—in which biology is perceived as both fascinating and engineerable—requires a pedagogical change beyond the NGSS. Simply updating standards is not enough. The challenge is to use existing, free, and/or low-cost resources to creatively reimagine how biology is taught, while respecting the constraints of overburdened educators and overstretched science programs.

The BioBuilder Educational Foundation serves as an excellent example of how this can be done. BioBuilder is a 501c3 organization that provides open-source curricular materials for teaching engineering biology at the secondary and post-secondary school level. BioBuilder trains teachers, provides online biodesign lessons for students, and develops investigative laboratory activities and simulations. Its open-access textbook has been translated by the publisher into Japanese and Russian and translated by local educators into Mandarin and Spanish. BioBuilder’s approach is a proven way to increase student engagement and open new opportunities in the bioeconomy for students who would otherwise face limited access.

To introduce a BioBuilder-like curriculum into every public school in America, the federal government should enhance the Department of Education budget with an additional $500 million to cover expanded investment in biotechnology education. This funding would supplement the Career and Technical Education (CTE) State Grant and the Elementary and Secondary Education for the Disadvantaged (ESED) Block Grant programs for teaching engineering biology in vocational and comprehensive public schools. The federal government can also move to establish a national initiative for DNA coding modeled on the Obama Administration’s “CS4All” initiative. CS4All aimed to provide computer-coding experiences to all students by activating funds in the Department of Education and at the National Science Foundation, as well as by directly funding states to support computer-science education.

Part 2: Opportunities

The federal government should launch an interagency Biology Career Pathways initiative that helps connect biology learning to real-world opportunities. Coordinated by Department of Labor, Department of Education and the NSF, this initiative would support paid high-school internships, technical training pathways, and first jobs in the bioeconomy.

In 2012, the Departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services issued a joint letter to promote the use of Career Pathways, which they defined as “well-executed alignment of education, training, and employment” in ways that help students gain marketable skills. A substantial body of research indicates that meaningful work helps students explore careers, put classroom learning into context, and build professional capacities needed for future jobs.

Unfortunately, many career-training programs are developed without partnership from future employers. Inefficiencies and mismatches frequently result. For example, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, an economic-development and investment agency funded through public-private partnerships, connects high school and college students with prospective employers through an online platform and subsidizes up to 12 weeks of summer wages. But company policies often limit appetite and ability to hire summer interns. Similarly, dual-enrollment and career-pathway programs, along with more traditional types of career and technical education, enable high-school students to earn class credit while training in high-demand technical fields. However, job-placement options for students during these programs and upon graduation depend on the abundance and strength of local industry. This presents a “chicken-and-egg” issue for the emerging bioeconomy and limits options for students in rural or economically struggling areas where bioeconomy-employment opportunities tend to be scarce

The Biden-Harris Administration should inventory, improve, and expand funding for programs that offer industry-informed work experiences in the bioeconomy as a way to recruit and retain regional talent. Lessons can be learned from successful models such as the NSF’s Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program and the Department of Labor’s Youth Apprenticeship. Both programs emphasize collaboration among academia, industry, nonprofits, and government. Industry partners co-develop and co-deliver technical training offered through the programs, and then commit to hiring program graduates. This collaborative model has enabled community-college students to perform industry-relevant product development for credit at school, while incentivizing employers in high-growth sectors to offer work-based learning experiences for high-school, out-of-school, and working youth.

Coordination and partnership do not happen by chance. Federal support is needed to provide organizational solutions, convene stakeholders, build consensus, manage and evaluate programmatic efforts, and accelerate the adoption of successful models. The Biden-Harris Administration should therefore increase funding for key bio-focused federal programs. We recommend allocating an additional $50 million to the Department of Education budget for Biotech Innovation and Modernization, an additional $25 million to the Department of Labor’s Apprenticeship Program for paid bioeconomy internships, and an additional $35 million to the NSF to support bioeconomy education and workforce development.

Part 3: Recognition

The federal government should establish a new competitive grants program to create bioeconomy-specific certificates and credentials that validate the quality and experience of their holders. This effort should be administered by the NSF, with guidance from the Department of Labor, the Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Individual advancement in the bioeconomy currently relies heavily on previously established professional networks and “pay-to-play” experiences, putting students who are traditionally underrepresented in science at a disadvantage. An accessible, industry-recognized credential is needed to level the playing field. An international competition in biotechnology called iGEM provides an example of what a bioeconomy credential might look like. The stated mission of iGEM is to educate students in modern biotechnology and to train them as independent researchers. But the value of participating in iGEM has grown beyond that. Past participation in iGEM is often used as a marker of commitment to biological engineering by undergraduate and graduate university admissions committees, and as a filter to narrow the field of applicants for internships and jobs at biotechnology companies.

But the cost for iGEM participation (estimated in 2015 to be $50,000 per team), as well as the technical sophistication required to be competitive, makes iGEM inaccessible to students from most high schools and colleges. Inequities are hence exacerbated by widespread use of iGEM participation as a de facto qualifying credential for academic programs and jobs in the bioeconomy.

A more inclusive alternative is needed. The federal government should work with industry leaders in the U.S. bioeconomy to define a recognizable credential, akin to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) certification and modeled on the Biotechnician Assistant Credentialing Exam (BACE) certificate, that is accessible to all U.S. students. With a modest allocation of $5 million (the same amount of funding it would take to support two iGEM teams per state for one year), federal agencies can create such a credential18 and develop a digital platform that connects (i) certificate-seekers to training providers, and (ii) certificate-holders to companies. In addition, open-access publications such as BioTreks, a peer-reviewed journal for high-school biological engineers, could be cultivated as an academic credential. Federal funding to index BioTrek issues and to provide small research grants that support high schoolers in carrying out scientific experiments will make it possible for all interested students to explore and publish their ideas.

Part 4. Entrepreneurship

The federal government should increase funding for the Department of Commerce Economic Development Association (EDA) to support regional programs and infrastructure needed to grow bioeconomy hubs. When combined with non-federal cost-sharing from states, companies, universities, nonprofits, and venture-capital groups, allocating $25 million per year for 3–5 years should be enough to kick-start bioeconomy hubs in a dozen new regions across the United States.

Successful precedent for this type of investment exists. A public-private investment of $10 million in 2013 established LabCentral as a shared lab and office facility for startup life-science companies in Cambridge, MA. Since then, LabCentral-incubated startups have raised $5.9 billion in private financing and created more than 2,000 jobs in Massachusetts. Other move-in-ready laboratory facilities for life-science startups have been built around the country, albeit mostly in locations with existing biotechnology clusters (e.g., North Carolina, California, and New York).

To encourage nationwide entrepreneurship19 and establish bioeconomy hubs in more rural communities and communities of color, additional funding should be allocated to a Department of Commerce grant program for regional alliances of academic, philanthropic, and business entities that aim to establish world-class biotechnology launchpads. This funding could, for instance, fund entrepreneurship workshops and grants, subsidize construction of shared lab space for startups, or provide incentives for faculty at local academic institutions to further develop their research discoveries into pilot programs, patents, and products. Over time, flourishing regional bioeconomy hubs will enable local students to pursue technical careers close to home wherever home may be, thereby distributing the benefits of the growing bioeconomy throughout the country. 

Conclusion

The Biden-Harris Administration can position the United States as a world leader in the bioeconomy through a four-part Built with Biology Plan that (1) revises legacy approaches to biology education, (2) promotes work-based learning, (3) develops accessible and meaningful credentials, and (4) invests in regional bioeconomy hubs. As the editors of Nature Biotechnology wrote in a March 2021 letter,21 U.S. investment in the bioeconomy must “not only promote technical excellence, but also foster equity, ethics, dialogue and social responsibility in how the fruits of…research are deployed.” Changes to biology education and investments in career pathways and entrepreneurship, as outlined in this memo, are central to achieving those goals.

Reduce Disaster Costs by Better Tracking Health Impacts of Wildfire Smoke

Smoke from wildfire disasters kills many more people than direct exposure to wildfire flames, and impacts many more communities than the communities located directly in wildfire perimeters. Direct exposure to the 2018 California wildfires caused 104 deaths statewide, but smoke from those fires were responsible for over 3,500 more. The United States currently lacks a systematic way to track health impacts (and associated costs) of wildfire smoke. This critical knowledge gap inhibits our nation’s ability to effectively recover from, respond to, and prevent future wildfire disasters.

The Biden-Harris Administration should address this gap by establishing a national public record of wildfire-smoke health impacts: a resource that would enable better accounting of wildfire costs and would support evaluation of the cost-effectiveness of efforts to prevent and mitigate catastrophic wildfires. Specifically, the Biden-Harris Administration should take the following actions to improve understanding of wildfire-smoke health impacts, better guide investments into wildfire management, and ultimately reduce the costs of wildfire disasters:

  1. Systematically track mortality and morbidity due to smoke from wildfire disasters.
  2. Fund research to better understand the scale of wildfire-smoke health impacts, and to develop cost-effective approaches for reducing those impacts.
  3. Ensure that approaches to respond to, recover from, and prevent wildfire disasters include goals to equitably reduce the wildfire-smoke health impacts.

Challenge and Opportunity

Deaths and costs due to wildfire smoke are typically excluded from reported assessments of impacts associated with wildfire disasters due to a lack of readily available data. However, a growing body of research has found that wildfire smoke represents a significant portion of the costs incurred by society from catastrophic wildfires. Wildfire smoke exposes populations to hazardous levels of air pollutants, including particulate matter of 2.5 microns or less (PM2.5). Increased PM2.5 levels caused by wildfire smoke are associated with increased cases of respiratory (e.g., asthma, pneumonia), cardiovascular (e.g., heart attacks), and cerebrovascular (e.g., stroke) complications. Costs associated with these health impacts include the cost of health care, the value of lost wages, and the value of lost lives.

Smoke from wildfires has been found to be more deadly and more costly than the heat and flames from those same fires. A recent study estimated that smoke from the 2018 California wildfires—including the catastrophically deadly Camp Fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise—were responsible for 3,652 deaths in California.4 This count is considerably greater than the 104 deaths reported due to direct exposure to the wildfires. Similarly, estimated costs of smoke deaths from the 2018 California wildfires represented a loss of $32.2 billion. This is greater than the capital losses from those wildfires, estimated at $27.7 billion. The relatively large impacts of wildfire smoke are due in part to the fact that smoke from a wildfire regularly spreads far beyond the fire perimeter, meaning that many more communities are exposed to hazardous levels of wildfire smoke than are exposed to fire heat and flames. Moreover, PM2.5 from wildfire smoke may be up to 10 times more toxic than an equal dose of PM2.5 from other sources of ambient air pollution.

Catastrophic wildfires that blanket large swaths of the country with hazardous levels of smoke have become a common occurrence: one that is only predicted to worsen in the future as a result of climate change. Burke et al. (2020) found that wildfire smoke in western regions now accounts for up to 50% of overall exposure to air pollution (PM2.5 levels) for people living in those regions, compared to less than 20% a decade ago. Long-distance transport of wildfire smoke from western states accounts for more than 50% of smoke exposure in the rest of the United States. Long-distance transport of wildfire smoke also means that the negative impacts of wildfire smoke—and the benefits of effective management—regularly cross jurisdictional boundaries. The federal government and local, state, and Tribal governments must therefore coordinate to effectively reduce wildfire destructiveness.

Impacts of wildfire smoke disproportionally affect vulnerable populations. Outdoor workers, those who are unsheltered, and other populations unable to access indoor clean-air spaces due to socioeconomic factors are at greater risk of exposure to hazardous levels of air pollutants during wildfire-smoke events. The elderly, children, pregnant people, and those with pre-existing medical conditions are at greater risk of health complications when exposed to wildfire smoke. Equitable implementation of disaster resilience policies must address these disproportionate impacts of wildfire smoke on disadvantaged communities and vulnerable populations.

A clear understanding of the scale of past disasters is important to ensure that public investments in prevention and mitigation will be effective at reducing loss of life and other negative outcomes of future disasters. However, our understanding of the scale of wildfire-smoke health impacts across the nation is poor. There is currently no systematic nationwide accounting of excess deaths and injuries due to smoke from wildfires. Without a public record of health impacts due to wildfire smoke, it is difficult to gauge the full scale of damage caused by wildfire disasters or to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of prevention and mitigation efforts. This critical knowledge gap inhibits our nation’s ability to effectively respond to, recover from, and prevent catastrophic wildfires.

Creating a national public record of wildfire-smoke health impacts aligns with the Biden-Harris Administration’s priorities to:

Plan of Action

The Biden-Harris Administration should take the following actions to reduce the destructiveness of catastrophic wildfires: 

Action 1. Systematically track the public-health impacts of smoke from wildfire disasters.

There is currently no nationwide, systematic tracking of mortality and morbidity due to wildfire smoke. The absence of robust tracking makes it difficult to compare wildfire disasters, draw conclusions about the scale of the problem, or assess effectiveness of prevention and mitigation efforts. The Biden-Harris Administration should direct relevant federal agencies, such as the Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), to develop appropriate protocols to collect, analyze, and publicly report estimates of population exposure to wildfire smoke, as well as of excess mortality and morbidity due to wildfire smoke.

A 2020 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine provides detailed recommendations for implementing a national framework for assessing mortality and morbidity of large-scale disasters. In addition, the CDC’s Health Information Innovation Consortium provides a useful forum in which to develop new approaches for surveilling the public-health impacts of wildfire smoke. The forum utilizes improved informatics, real-time sharing of electronic medical records, and an open-source, more integrated approach that enables cloud-based communication between data sets (e.g., data on health impacts and on smoke plumes). The CDC’s Flu View program, which tracks excess cases of pneumonia attributable to seasonal influenza activity, may provide a useful model for tracking excess cases of heart attack, asthma, stroke, and other health complications attributable to wildfire smoke. Development of protocols for tracking wildfires should be established immediately, perhaps starting by integrating relevant data from the state and local levels in western states. Integrated datasets should include sufficient geographic and demographic detail to identify disproportionate impacts to specific populations, such as disadvantaged communities. Efforts should also be made to retroactively estimate health impacts for past wildfire disasters to the extent feasible with existing data.

Action 2. Fund research and monitoring to better understand wildfire-smoke health impacts and to identify cost-effective strategies for preventing and mitigating those impacts.

Although a growing body of research has found that wildfire smoke is a serious public-health threat, there remain critical knowledge gaps that impede our ability to mount cost-effective prevention and mitigation campaigns. The federal government has mounted some laudable efforts to address these gaps. For example, the EPA—in partnership with 10 federal, state, tribal and local organizations—recently launched the “Cleaner Indoor Air During Wildfires Challenge” to stimulate development of new technologies to help address health impacts of wildfire smoke. The Biden-Harris Administration should continue to fund research, monitoring, and innovation to improve our understanding of the public-health impacts of wildfire smoke. Priority areas for investment include:

Action 3. Ensure that approaches to respond to, recover from, and prevent wildfire disasters include steps to equitably reduce wildfire-smoke health impacts.

Wildfire response, recovery, and prevention efforts should all strive to reduce losses from wildfire smoke as well as losses from wildfire flames in order to reduce the total destructiveness of wildfire disasters. For example, approaches to harden homes to prevent wildfire losses typically focus on installation of ignition-resistant roofs or ember-resistant vent screens to prevent houses from catching fire. Home-hardening approaches should also include steps to prevent losses from wildfire smoke (e.g., installation of whole-house HVAC systems with HEPA filters to maintain clean-air indoor spaces). Particular emphasis should be placed on reducing smoke impacts to vulnerable populations, including children, the elderly, those with pre-existing medical conditions, disadvantaged communities, outdoor workers, and populations unable to take mitigation actions due to socioeconomic factors. For instance, the federal government could subsidize installation of whole-house HVAC systems for households below a minimum income threshold.

Conclusion

Smoke from wildfire disasters kills many more people than direct exposure to the flames and impacts many more communities than the communities located directly in wildfire perimeters. Disadvantaged communities bear an outsized portion of the public-health burdens of wildfire smoke. The United States currently lacks a systematic, nationwide accounting of the scale of health impacts of smoke from wildfire disasters. Without a public record of wildfire-smoke health impacts, it is difficult to gauge the full scale of damage caused by catastrophic wildfires or to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of prevention and mitigation efforts to reduce wildfire impacts. This critical knowledge gap inhibits our nation’s ability to effectively respond to, recover from, and prevent future disasters. The Biden-Harris Administration should act to (1) systematically track mortality and morbidity due to wildfire smoke; (2) fund research and monitoring to better understand wildfire-smoke health impacts and to identify cost-effective approaches for preventing and mitigating those impacts; and (3) ensure that approaches to respond to, recover from, and prevent wildfire disasters include steps to equitably reduce wildfire-smoke health impacts. With climate change poised to increase the severity and frequency of wildfire disasters, our nation must act now to develop the deep understanding of wildfire-smoke health impacts that will support increased resilience to this aspect of global change.

Creating an Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA-L) for the Department of Labor

To create fresh and powerful new approaches to the complex challenges that America’s workers face, Congress and the Biden-Harris Administration should invest $100 million per year for 5 years to launch an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Labor (ARPA-L). ARPA-L’s mission will be to conduct high-impact R&D programs that create breakthroughs to meet America’s workforce challenges.

The COVID-19 pandemic has deeply exacerbated longstanding problems for America’s workers. Mismatches between workers’ skills and employers’ needs alongside persistent racial and gender inequities have long undercut opportunity. Moreover, work has continued to change due to technology and automation, globalization, and shifting relationships between workers and employers. Even before the COVID-19 crisis, many millions of Americans were not earning enough to support themselves and their families. These Americans are missing out on gainful work, while our economy and our society are missing out on their full contribution.

With current advances in information technology, data science, applied social sciences, and learning science, this moment calls for an ambitious initiative to tackle the longstanding challenges for America’s workers. The Federal Government should launch an ARPA-L to research, develop, and test breakthrough approaches that boost workers’ skills and harness data to open new opportunities. By drawing from the operating model of prior ARPA organizations and adapting it to these challenges, ARPA-L’s programs can make it possible to ameliorate underemployment and unemployment and transform the future of work.

To initiate ARPA-L, Congress should provide a budget of $100 million per year over a five-year period. The Biden-Harris Administration and the Secretary of Labor should appoint a highly qualified director and provide that individual with the support needed to succeed. By creating this independent agency at the Department of Labor (DOL), Congress, the White House, and DOL can create opportunity for the U.S. workforce for decades to come.

The Challenge

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed and deepened labor market problems that had already been compounding over decades.

A mismatch between workers’ education, skills, and training and the shifting needs of employers has led to shortages in high-demand occupations. The demand for digital skills has increased. In addition, local and regional economies across the country are experiencing shortages of workers in emerging and evolving trades vital to economic activity — such as clean energy and manufacturing — that increasingly require new technical capacities. And in some cases, a worker has the skill to succeed in a job but doesn’t have the credentials that the company has tied to that position. Without intervention, the skills gap will continue to grow larger within the labor market. For millions of Americans displaced from traditionally high-employment sectors such as light manufacturing and data processing, the need for reskilling and relocation to emerging sectors requires rethinking traditional models and experimenting with new approaches. To break the cycle of long-term unemployment and underemployment, new approaches to skills training, education, and credentialing are needed.

Although existing policies and practices have made progress in addressing inequity, these problems continue to plague the U.S. workforce, precluding many from gainful, meaningful employment. Today, women still earn less than men on average, while Black and Latina women experience even greater disparities. Men without college degrees, and especially men of color, have been disproportionately impacted by decades of shifts in the labor market compared to men with college degrees. Challenges in traditional education reinforce barriers to obtaining well-paying jobs with upward mobility for young people of color and those from low-income backgrounds. Inequities only persist as workers age, adding pressure when rapid upskilling and retraining is needed and leaving displaced workers even further behind. These communities of workers cannot continue to be left behind.

The term “future of work” encapsulates the anticipated disruption to jobs and the workforce from emerging technologies, global economic change, and the changing relationship between employer and worker. In reality, this disruption is already occurring, and U.S. workers in every sector of economy are feeling its effects. To save on labor costs, employers continue to outsource jobs to overseas workers and automate any task that a machine can handle. As computing technology and artificial intelligence proliferate and mature, this disruption will spread to more and more different types of jobs. Non-traditional workers, such as rideshare and delivery drivers, now form a significant percentage of the workforce, but antiquated labor practices and policies do not address the uncertainty of their work lives. As more and more Americans participate in the gig economy, we must change our approach to solving workforce issues and diversify how we craft solutions to solve them.

The COVID-19 pandemic has both illuminated and exacerbated these challenges. Service sector industries such as retail, tourism, restaurants, and hotels have been decimated by the pandemic, and many of these jobs will be slow to return. Other jobs can be done remotely, but many workers lack the digital skills to thrive while working from home. Furthermore, barriers to the digital economy stand tall: across America, too many workers lack reliable broadband or even a personal computer. Already at a disadvantage, underserved communities are falling further behind in their education and career development, undermining their opportunities in the years to come.

So where has all this left us? A failure to address long-standing labor problems has led to job instability and prolonged underemployment and unemployment that can be seen in the labor market today. Efforts to improve worker outcomes have met with only limited success. To address today’s pressing labor issues, the Federal Government must invest in the capacity to create powerful new solutions that can scale to reach the broad population of workers.

The Opportunity

Today, advances in information technology, data science, and the behavioral and social sciences provide new hope for these kinds of hard problems. Further, numerous regional and pilot projects are showing results from new approaches to training, certification, and matching workers to jobs. These are promising signs, but we are not turning the tide of national-scale labor problems. The purpose of an Advanced Research Projects Agency for Labor (ARPA-L) is to weave research advances together with lessons from the real world to create fresh, potent, broadly scalable new approaches for our workers’ challenges.

ARPA-L would be fully responsible for identifying promising opportunities and then designing and executing its programs. These are some examples of the types of high-impact programs it could undertake.

Next-generation Skills Assessment and Training

An ARPA-L would take a creative, experimental approach to closing the skills gaps. For example, ARPA-L programs could:

Such advancements would not only improve the effectiveness of training and skills assessment. They can also dramatically reduce the time and cost for workers to gain new skills and connect to good jobs, directly addressing major barriers to scale.

Information to Illuminate Better Decision Making

Today, all kinds of data about workers and jobs is everywhere: rigorously collected labor statistics, employee ratings of employers on crowdsourced websites, internal company data about employment, the records of community colleges and other service providers, and administrative data such as tax and census records. We have barely begun to use this data tsunami to address workforce challenges. ARPA-L could transform data into clear information that allows workers, employers, training providers, and policymakers to find new pathways and make better decisions.

For example, ARPA-L programs could:

Armed with a data-driven and experimental mindset, an ARPA-L would develop prototypes, conduct demonstrations, and rigorously evaluate their effectiveness, resulting in breakthrough methods targeted at solving workforce problems. The agency will perform this work by contracting with companies, universities, nonprofits, and other government organizations to harness and integrate their different capabilities. ARPA-L will also engage with a broad community of actors so that these solutions are ultimately implemented and scaled by a combination of commercialization by the private sector, policies created by federal state and local actors, and new practices adopted by other stakeholders such as employers and community colleges.

Plan of Action 

The Biden-Harris Administration should work with Congress to establish ARPA-L as an independent agency in the Department of Labor. To institute ARPA-L, Congress should appropriate an initial investment of $100M per year for the first five fiscal years. ARPA-L’s mission will be to conduct high-impact R&D programs that create breakthroughs to meet America’s workforce challenges. To this end, ARPA-L will adopt and adapt the core elements of the ARPA model.

To succeed in its unique mission, ARPA-L should be led by a Senate-confirmed Director who reports to the Secretary of Labor as well as a career civil servant Deputy Director. Within DOL, ARPA-L would need to be an independent organization. ARPA-L would collaborate with other parts of DOL, as well as federal, state, and local agencies. ARPA-L would draw on their expertise and that of other labor market ecosystem actors to understand workforce issues and current practices. These organizations will often be ideal partners to fully implement and scale successful ARPA-L program results.

Conclusion

An ARPA-L at DOL would conduct solutions-oriented R&D to create fresh, powerful approaches to the pressing workforce problems of today and tomorrow, such as market disruption, unemployment, and worker reskilling/upskilling. With the support of Congress, the White House, and the Department of Labor, this new organization can deliver bold advances that ultimately change what’s possible for America’s workers.

Revitalizing the DOE Loan Program Office to Support Clean Infrastructure Development

The Biden-Harris Administration should expand the focus of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Loan Program Office (LPO) to meet the demands of a changing energy industry. The LPO was established to serve as a backstop to private-sector financing for large-scale energy projects with embedded technology risk. The program’s success in scaling large scale power plants and manufacturing plants for next generation energy technologies is well documented. However, the energy industry has changed since the program’s beginning, and the needs for support from the Federal Government have evolved. For example, technology areas that were deemed risky in 2009 are now mature, and in some circumstances, for example in electricity generation, the industry structure that was historically highly centralized has become much more distributed. Modernizing the LPO is a critical means for advancing the Biden-Harris Administration’s climate agenda because the Office supports the development of clean energy projects at commercial scale, leverages private sector capital, and creates middle-class jobs. 

This memo recommends three important changes to the DOE LPO:

  1. The aperture of the LPO must be expanded to include a much larger set of technology areas. In particular, energy storage, hydrogen production and carbon capture, utilization and storage, among other nascent fields, should be supported. Authorizing legislation should be changed to give the Program Office the opportunity to support a technological area at its discretion.
  2. The Loan Program must reduce the cost of application to incentivize more deployment of smaller projects. This will expand the potential set of projects to be supported and align the Office with overarching trends in the energy sector.
  3. The Loan Program should expand its purview to support projects impeded by other financing risks in the energy system. These could include grid modernization, system hardening or smart grid updates (which often do not pass traditional cost-benefit analyses), and electric vehicle infrastructure deployment.

Challenge and Opportunity

The proposed solution solves two impending challenges to the President’s climate agenda. First, while innovation is necessary to meet climate goals, the private sector is reluctant to fund first generation projects for novel clean energy technology. As the US embarks on a pivotal decade with respect to managing the national carbon budget, deploying new technology at scale will become even more critical. In particular, reaching 2050 carbon goals will require successfully innovating in hydrogen production, carbon capture, energy storage, and load-following electric power — most of which cannot be currently supported under the Loan Program’s authorization. Second, the nation’s overall infrastructure deficit has been estimated to require an additional $2 trillion of spending by the American Society of Civil Engineers in their most recent 2017 assessment. In the energy sector, ASCE estimated the requirement for additional electricity infrastructure alone to be $177 billion. Simultaneously, the economic returns to investing in our nation’s infrastructure are significant. Recent studies suggest that for every $1 million invested in energy infrastructure, the Recovery Act created 15 durable jobs. The multiplier effect from infrastructure spending varies based on economic conditions, but as the country emerges from the COVID-19-induced recession, enabling the LPO to fund a broad swath of energy infrastructure would be a viable asset for job creation in the coming years.

Currently, the LPO is restricted to financing only the first three deployments of new technologies, and new technologies that are highly capital intensive, such as concentrated solar power. The LPO exists to absorb financing risk for the private sector, risks which often stem from capital intensity or technology uncertainty. As we consider the energy transition in the coming decades, a new set of technologies needs support for initial commercial deployment. Additionally, however, a broad array of infrastructure investments continue to go unfunded by the private sector for other reasons as well, particularly in geographies where commercial markets for offtakers are not fully developed. Expanding the technology and stage aperture of the LPO to include a broader array of projects would attract private capital and accelerate the transition to a decarbonized future.

Plan of Action

The Biden-Harris Administration should expand the DOE’s Loan Program Office (LPO) to enable the Federal Government to quickly make investments in a broad range of infrastructure categories through the pre-existing contracting authorizations at the LPO. Accordingly, we propose three changes to the DOE’s LPO. First, the technology aperture of the Loan Program should be expanded to include a broader set of technologies, including but not limited to energy storage, hydrogen production, carbon capture, utilization and storage, and carbon dioxide removal. Program staff should be granted the flexibility to support a wide range of technology areas at their discretion, in a manner not dissimilar to ARPA-E in the breadth of technical fields within staff purview.

Second, the Loan Program must be adjusted to account for a more distributed energy industry by reducing the cost of application and the corresponding size of project to be supported. For example, the first deployment of a novel grid-scale energy storage technology could be financed at the $10+ million level rather than the $100+ million level. A company looking to deploy that technology would be currently discouraged from applying as a result of the upfront cost of application. The Loan Program should support projects across the capital scale, with flexible application requirements depending on the order of magnitude of public support being requested. 

Finally, the Loan Program should expand to support projects impeded by other financing risks in the energy system. These risks could include high-risk project cash flows from uncertain offtake agreements, as for example with public transportation infrastructure or grid modernization, system hardening, and electric vehicle infrastructure deployment. A comprehensive list of infrastructure to support should include:

Conclusion

At the Roosevelt Project, we are developing action plans for communities that experience significant industrial upheaval, particularly in the context of forthcoming energy transitions. Though these transitions will vary in their nature as a result of local socio-economic realities, access to or distance from natural resources, and exposure to various climate risks, the transitions will most acutely affect communities of working-class, low-income, under-educated Americans. Federal support for the deployment of shovel-ready energy infrastructure can support the creation of high-quality jobs. For infrastructure deployment to positively contribute to both decarbonization and job creation, projects must be targeted to regions that are likely to be affected by the transition. The adjustments to the DOE LPO proposed here offer one important tool for quickly deploying infrastructure in the next four years.

Improving Learning through Data Standards for Educational Technologies

The surge in education technology use in response to COVID-19 represents a massive natural experiment: an opportunity to learn what works at scale, for which students, and under which conditions. However, without the right data standards in place we risk incomplete or inaccurate inferences from this experiment.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically increased use of educational technologies. There is evidence that this “emergency onlining” will lead to learning loss, especially among underserved communities. To understand and address the extent of learning loss—as well as to explore and support potential future uses of educational technologies—the U.S. Department of Education (ED) must systematically implement established open-data standards that allow us to understand how students engage with learning technologies. Widescale implementation of these standards will make it possible to combine and analyze validated data sets generated by multiple technologies. This in turn will provide unprecedented, on-demand reporting and research capabilities that can be used to precisely identify gaps and create targeted interventions. Specifically, we recommend that ED mandate the use of the open Experience API (xAPI) standard for educational technology purchased with federal funds. We further recommend that ED invest time, talent, and resources to further develop this standard and pilot efforts to leverage educational-technology data for insights through the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) and other agencies.

Challenge and Opportunity

The COVID-19 pandemic rapidly forced schools across the country to close physical campuses and convert all instruction to an “emergency online” modality for much of 2020. The situation will likely persist well into 2021. The emergency shift to online teaching meant that many teachers had insufficient preparation to successfully adapt classroom-teaching methods for digital formats. Moreover, many students—especially those from low-income families or from historically underserved racial and ethnic groups—lack access to high-speed broadband and technology assets needed to fully participate in online learning. These factors are combining to create learning losses that exacerbate our existing digital divides that may persist for years.

Robust educational research and development is needed to fully understand the extent and distribution of learning loss, as well as to develop interventions for addressing it. Educational technologies—which record all student interactions, from logins to mouse-clicks to assignment submissions—could provide a wealth of data on how online education is succeeding and/or falling short. Unfortunately, these data are frequently recorded in a way that is unique to each application. This lack of consistency makes it difficult to integrate educational data or make comparisons between institutions

The time is ripe to introduce new requirements for learning technology designed to ensure that parents, educators, administrators, and stakeholders at every level can assess where students are at, what they know, and what will best help them to advance. These insights could also significantly reduce the day-to-day demands on teachers’ time and attention, enabling them to focus on deeper student questions. The technology needed to implement such requirements are already available in the open-source xAPI standard, which is currently in the final stages of approval as an IEEE standard. Further, there are xAPI “profiles” that define specific data requirements for processes common to educational technologies, such as playing a video. While the concept of a learning-data standard was recommended by ED as early as 2015, adoption has been uneven in practice. This situation must change for us to immediately address COVID19 learning loss as quickly and accurately as possible.

Plan of Action

To address the challenges outlined above, we recommend including xAPI as a federal procurement requirement to encourage adoption among educational software and service providers. Widespread adoption will mean that most—if not ultimately all—providers consistently and automatically generate only the educational data that conforms to standards established by ED. Establishing consistent standards for educational data will make it easier for all parties to contribute meaningfully to key datasets, and for researchers to develop tools to track and exchange meaningful data. These outcomes together will deliver deeper understandings of how our nation’s students are doing, inform efforts to close achievement gaps, and facilitate tracking of changes over time. We also recommend investing ED time, talent, and resources into further developing the xAPI standard and participating in pilot projects that demonstrate its utility. Each of these recommendations is detailed further below.

Recommendation 1. Mandate use of the xAPI standard for ED-funded procurement.

We recommend that ED mandate use of xAPI for all educational technology purchased through ED directly as well as through federal grants. ED should also establish a process for ensuring compliance, including conducting conformance tests on educational software and services from different providers.

The IEEE is in the final stages of publishing the open-source xAPI standard. Mandating its adoption would demonstrate cutting-edge ED leadership. Widespread adoption of the standard will provide a common approach to collecting evidence about how students, parents, and teachers interact with education platforms, paving the way for much more rigorous, consistent, and reliable educational research.

Recommendation 2. Develop xAPI profiles to facilitate data integration and improve data quality for the educational sector.

IEEE is standardizing documents that help automate the data governance needs for a type of educational solution (“application profiles”). Standards developers are rarely familiar with learning sciences and educational research. As a result, xAPI profiles will tend to be general in nature unless domain-specific experts get involved. For instance, medical experts have worked to develop the MedBiquitious xAPI Profiles for Medical Education. Human-resources experts have developed the Human Resources Open Standards (HROS) xAPI Profile and, and work is ongoing for an Assessment xAPI Profile that supports the U.S. Chamber of Commerce T3 initiative.

ED should invest time, talent, and funding to develop xAPI profiles that are aligned with current research and national priorities. An xAPI Profile effort could help to normalize data collection from a spate of popular 5th grade mobile math applications, that properly identify the relevant ED standards, competencies or objectives are challenged by a student, which could provide such app developers with the automation that would simplify generating better, aligned data. Works like this could change online classrooms into opportunities to embed better pedagogy into practice at scale.

Recommendation 3. Invest in applied research and development.

ED should partner with schools and educational technology companies to invest in applied research that demonstrates insights from standardized educational data. ED should also work with partners to invest in public repositories of code to make it easier for all stakeholders to leverage insights. Such investments should focus both on the short term (e.g., providing immediate insights about use of educational technology and learning loss during the COVID-19 pandemic) and long term (e.g., providing examples of potential applications that could be scaled and replicated in the future). Such investments would not only advance our understanding of education, but would also help to develop a market for further development of data-based educational products. IES and ED’s Office of Educational Technology should partner to identify topics and approaches to conduct this cutting-edge research.

There are multiple examples of research using educational-process data that these investments could build on. IES recently issued a request for proposals (RFP) to use National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) process data to identify students with disabilities, to understand how those student use available accommodations, and to determine which are most successful. Predictive models of student dropout risk, course design analytics to identify areas for improvement, and course-taking patterns are all being conducting using this data at relatively small scale through academic societies, such as the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) and the International Educational Data Mining Society. All stand to benefit and leverage this data to dramatically improve research.

SoLAR recently published a position paper describing current challenges with these data.4 Larger educational-research societies such as the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) have launched specialized groups focused on working with educational-process data.

By investing in this area, ED could help to nurture this area of research and make a difference in the lives of students, parents, teachers and schools across the country. This approach would help to motivate better data quality and enable technologists to build more robust learning applications, thereby helping us to stem the COVID-19 learning loss as quickly as possible using contemporary science and technology.

Digitizing State Courts, Expanding Access to Justice

To overcome the unprecedented backlog of court cases created by the pandemic, courts must be reimagined. Rather than strictly brick-and-mortar operations, court must consider themselves digital platforms. To accomplish this, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) – with support from 18F, U.S. Digital Service, the Legal Services Corporation, and the State Justice Institute – must build and fund professional and technical capacity at the state level to develop and adopt standardized digital infrastructure for courts and other justice agencies. Due to the replicable nature of this solution across states, the federal government is perfectly positioned to lead this effort, which will be more cost effective than if each court system attempted this work on their own. The estimated cost is $1 billion. 

This once-in-a-generation investment will allow courts to collect granular, raw data, which can help overcome the current backlog, increase access to the justice system, inform policies that drive down mass incarceration, improve transparency, and seed a public and private revolution in justice technology that improves access to justice for all Americans.

Challenge and Opportunity

The COVID-19 pandemic brought physical shutdowns to American courts and an unprecedented backlog of cases. In Connecticut, pending civil and criminal cases jumped 200 percent, and many trials are not scheduled to start until 2021. As of June, New York City had 39,200 criminal cases in backlog. Meanwhile, San Diego, California has 20,000 criminal cases waiting to be heard. These are just a small sample of a widespread national trend.

In an attempt to manage this moment, courts rapidly moved online and opened Slack channels and Zoom accounts. Quick action like this should be applauded. However, these solutions are undercut by the justice system’s long-term lack of investment in digital infrastructure.

Across the country, courts fail at data collection, publication, and use. States like California, Colorado, and Florida passed laws in recent years to collect more data created by the justice system, but they are in the minority. Many states still operate on paper and have little-to-no digital data. In Massachusetts, a state that spent over $75 million to digitize court infrastructure, courts still don’t electronically track judges’ decisions, bail rates, or even a party’s gender. Nationally, a 2015 study found that 26 state court systems could not provide “an accurate report on how many cases were filed and disposed in any given year” — the most basic of court data. Meanwhile, public trust in the courts recently fell by double digits and the U.S. ranks 36th globally on access to civil justice— behind Rwanda and on par with Kazakhstan.

This lack of reusable data puts a ceiling on our understanding of individual courts and what courts can do with technology. Without data, software solutions like those that help analyze a court’s caseload, automate court processes, or provide assistance to people representing themselves without an attorney, are out of reach. While the relationship between data and improved court understanding and efficiency has been well-known for at least 30 years, the existing failures of the justice system compounded by the pandemic demand sweeping action.

Plan of Action

To fix this systemic problem at its foundation, the DOJ should support state courts in the adoption of open data standards, modern data collection methods, and application programming interfaces (APIs). Collectively, this is the digital infrastructure needed to help courts manage the tens of thousands of cases that have piled up, become more efficient, and increase access to justice.

This approach is different from how justice system actors currently conceptualize managing information. Currently, agencies generally think about data only in its finished form: a court order, a pamphlet, or a website. Thinking as a digital platform requires justice system leaders to consider data not only in its end form, but as raw data that is accurate, publicly available, secure, and reusable.

To make this a reality, the reconstituted Office of Access to Justice in the DOJ, with support from 18F, U.S. Digital Service, the Legal Services Corp., and the State Justice Institute, needs to offer grant and technical support so local court systems can digitize court data and services. To do this, three layers must be created: information, platform, and presentation. This proposal supports the creation of the first two layers, setting the foundation for the development of the third.

The information layer encompasses all of a justice system’s structured and unstructured data, including case filing and case outcome data. Creating this layer means collecting and cleaning the standardized data that exists across court systems, but also turning unstructured data – like court rules and orders that are usually housed in PDFs or on paper – into structured data. Creating this layer is time-consuming and painstaking, but the process is replicable across jurisdictions, which is why funding and technical support from the federal government is important and more cost effective than relying on each state to recreate this process. The National Center for State Courts published open data standards for courts in 2019. By using these standards across the country, court-to-court and state-to-state comparisons become possible, which can better inform local need and complementary federal support.

The platform layer gives the data utility. This includes the adoption of data management processes and software and APIs. This creates a multitude of benefits. Most significantly, it allows courts to quantify and manage the case backlog by giving them ready access to usable information about what types of cases are pending, for how long, and why. Having readily useable data will also increase transparency by allowing administrators, policymakers, and researchers to dig into how courts function.

Publicly available, structured data also lowers the barrier to entry for entrepreneurs and researchers building solutions to mass incarceration and the access-to-justice gap, thus creating the presentation layer. We’ve already seen this in other markets: data from weather.gov informs weather forecasts on our devices and local government transit data populates real-time information on map applications. For courts, this layer may include a court data portal where the public can see, in real time, what’s happening at the court. The presentation layer could come in the form of a text message reminder system that helps people appear for their court date, which would decrease bench warrants and pre-trial detention. This data will also assist the adoption of online dispute resolution software, which allows courts to quickly resolve high-volume, low-stakes cases without requiring in-court hearings, saving time, money, and trouble.

Conclusion

By focusing on data infrastructure, localities will have the information to uncover and tackle the most pressing issues that they face. However, if the justice system continues on its current path, fewer people will have access to the courts, people will continue to languish in prison, and faith in the justice system will continue to erode.

A Federal Adaptive, On-Demand Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Initiative

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgent need to address lags in American pharmaceutical manufacturing. An investment of $5 billion over five years will improve U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturing infrastructure, including the development of new technologies that will enable the responsive, end-to-end, on-demand production of up to half of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) list of 223 essential medicines by year two, and the entire portfolio by year five. Spearheading improvements in domestic manufacturing capacity, coupled with driving the advancement of new adaptive, on-demand, and other advanced medicine production technologies will ensure a safe, responsive, reliable, and affordable supply of quality medicines, improving access for all citizens, including vulnerable populations living in underserved urban communities, rural areas, and tribal territories.

Challenge and Opportunity

Urgent Need to Strengthen U.S. Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

COVID-19 has served as a wake-up call and an opportunity to bring pharmaceutical manufacturing into the 21st century. Production factory closures, shipping delays, shutdowns, trade limitations, and export bans have severely disrupted the supply chain. Yet the demand for vaccines and COVID-19 treatment options worldwide continues to increase. However, recent advances in manufacturing technology can be deployed to create a 21st century domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing economy that is distributed, flexible, and scalable, while producing consistent high-quality medicines that Americans rely on.

To improve national security and achieve the goal of medicine production self-sufficiency, the Biden-Harris Administration has an opportunity to address legacy issues plaguing the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry and usher in a technology revolution that will leapfrog our legacy 19th century industrial manufacturing processes. The Biden-Harris Administration should prioritize:

Improving the domestic production of small-molecule medicines, including Key Starting Materials (KSMs) and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (APIs) in order to reduce dependence on foreign manufacturers. China and India together supply 75- 80 percent of the APIs imported to the U.S.1 In March, during the largest spring spike in U.S. COVID-19 cases, India restricted the export of 26 APIs as well as finished pharmaceuticals. The U.S is the leading market for generic pharmaceuticals, with 9 out of every 10 prescriptions filled being for generic drugs in 2019, and a projected market value of $415 billion by 2023.2 An aggressive race to the bottom in terms of price has driven the vast majority of supply chain manufacturing overseas, where lower production costs and government subsidies, particularly for exports, benefit foreign suppliers.

Improving the scale, efficiency, and effectiveness of domestic biopharmaceutical manufacturing. The past decade has ushered in a significant shift in the nature of pharmaceutical products: there is now a greater prevalence of large molecule drugs, personalized therapeutics, and a rise in treatments for orphan diseases. New approaches to developing vaccines, such as the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine, are setting a new paradigm for future vaccines using DNA, RNA, adenoviruses, and proteins. There is an urgent need to scale up the domestic manufacturing of biologics, including vaccines, to address biomedical threats. In addition, innovation in manufacturing technology is critical to improving both scalability and time to market. New technology will improve yields while lowering costs and reduce waste through green chemistry.

Additional benefits associated with establishing a robust domestic manufacturing base, including distributed manufacturing capability, include:

Reducing vulnerabilities associated with an over-reliance on centralized manufacturing and processing models. In the food industry, a COVID-19 outbreak in just a few chicken and pork processing plants led to a nationwide shortage of these important foods. A more flexible, resilient distributed manufacturing model, such as one utilizing additive manufacturing and 3-D printing, would have prevented the need for such a disruptive response. 3-D printing, for example, has successfully delivered more than 1,000 parts to local hospitals during the pandemic.

Improving the reliability of facilities and the quality of products for the U.S. market through the development and deployment of advanced manufacturing technologies. Low-cost, offshore manufacturing raises quality risks; more than half of FDA warning letters issued between 2018 and 2019 were sent to facilities in India or China.4 There are numerous examples of risks to both the health and security of U.S. citizens in the recent past. In 2007, a Chinese company deliberately contaminated the blood thinner Heparin and 246 Americans died. In 2015, the FDA banned 29 products after inspecting a Chinese pharmaceutical factory, although it exempted 14 products over U.S. shortage concerns. And in 2018, a Chinese vaccine maker sold at least 250,000 substandard doses of vaccine for diphtheria, tetanus, and whooping cough.

Improving access for vulnerable populations living in underserved urban communities, rural areas, and tribal territories. COVID-19 created unprecedented pressure on the federal system when requests from 56 State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial (SLTT) authorities nearly simultaneously requested medical supplies. According to testimony presented by the RAND Corporation, the quantities of material in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) were not nearly enough to fill all of the requests, resulting in a heated competition and a failure to deliver products to all of the different parts of the United States equitably.

Reducing critical drug shortages that have plagued U.S. health systems for more than a decade. With COVID-19 cases on the rise, and hospitalizations increasing in more than 40 states, critical drug supplies are waning, with 29 out of 40 drugs used to combat the coronavirus currently in short supply. In addition, 43% of 156 acute care medicines used to treat various illnesses are running low. In 2019 the U.S. experienced 186 new drug shortages; 82% of which were classified as being due to “unknown” reasons, largely because of the intentional opacity and secrecy of the upstream supply chain. According to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) the U.S. health system spends more than $500 million a year on estimated costs related to drug shortages, with approximately $200 million in direct costs and up to $360 million on indirect costs.

Stabilize pricing by enabling ‘just in time’ manufacturing capability that reduces the need to stockpile large supplies of medicines and is more responsive to surges in demand. Furthermore, complex supply chains, procurement mechanisms, and the consolidation of U.S. buyers create ‘pay-to-play’ schemes that contribute to chronic drug shortages by driving manufacturers out of the market and contribute to price volatility. New technologies that enable responsive and efficient approaches to surges in demand, or to address drug shortages, will also stabilize pricing over time. Today, one in four Americans cannot afford their medication. Mylan, for example, increased the price of EpiPen by more than 500%, from $94 for a two-dose pack in 2007 to $608 in 2018.

21st Century Problems Require 21st Century Solutions

Advanced manufacturing technologies such as continuous flow, which allows for drugs to be produced in a continuous stream, can reduce the time it takes to manufacture a drug and ensure quality through advanced controls and process analytic technologies. These technologies can enable remote monitoring during production and real-time release testing. In addition, miniaturized manufacturing units that could easily fit in existing pharmacies would facilitate a distributed network for producing medicines that is flexible enough to rapidly pivot and make any therapeutic required for national security or emergency preparedness with short lead times. A distributed network of on-demand pharmaceutical manufacturing devices will improve supply availability without the need to stockpile large quantities of medications.

Automation will play a key role in advanced pharmaceutical manufacturing, as will 3-D printing. Automation will reduce manufacturing overheads and ensure quality, scalability, and increased outputs. It allows advanced connectivity of equipment, people, processes, services, and supply chains. The 3-D printing of pharmaceutical products, meanwhile, is accelerating following the FDA’s approval of the first 3-D printed drug in 2015. This technology accommodates personalized doses and dosage forms and other emerging technologies that enable bespoke tablet sizes, dosages, and forms (suspension, wafers, gel strips, etc.) to optimize patient compliance and ease of use. Another major advantage is the possibility of redistributed manufacturing–printing medicine much closer to the patient. 3-D printing and on-the-spot drug fabrication will have major implications in medical countermeasures and for medications with limited shelf-life.

Finally, investing in advanced biopharmaceutical manufacturing infrastructure and innovation would establish the capacity to produce domestically through a network of high-tech, end-to-end manufacturing and development solutions, which will ensure that the medicines of today and tomorrow, such as new vaccines, can be made quickly, safely, and at scale.

Plan of Action

The Biden-Harris Administration should launch a national adaptive pharmaceutical manufacturing initiative focused on the ambitious goal of achieving medicine production self-sufficiency. The Presidential Initiative should be led by an Ambassador who reports to the Secretary of Defense. The Secretary of Defense is already leading a whole-of-government effort to assess risk, identify impacts, and propose recommendations in support of a healthy manufacturing and defense industrial base – a critical aspect of economic and national security. The Department of Defense (DoD) coordinates these efforts in partnership with the Departments of Commerce, Labor, Energy, and Homeland Security, and in consultation with the Department of the Interior, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and the Director of National Intelligence.

Clear deliverables and timeline-dependent milestones are critical to the success of this initiative. New local manufacturing solutions — such as state-of-the-art facilities and devices for automated end-to-end pharmaceuticals to be deployed in a trailer — can augment ongoing efforts to reduce manufacturing ramp-up time, the need for strict environmentally controlled secure storage facilities, and waste from expired medications. Having stand-alone or mobile devices for automated end-to-end pharmaceuticals would empower local authorities to manage delivery and distribution protocols, ensuring that local populations have the lifesaving medicines they need when they need them.

To this end, the DoD, in collaboration with HHS and the FDA, should launch a national initiative to increase U.S. manufacturing capacity and accelerate the development of new technology, with an emphasis on the adoption of advanced analytical capabilities to ensure quality. These platforms should be able to produce precursors, APIs, and final drug products (small molecule and biologics) in multiple forms, enabling rapid response priority medicines on demand, targeting the creation of a self-sustaining domestic supply chain of the 223 medicines on the FDA Essential Medicines list, as well as new vaccines and medicines coming off patent in the next 5 years.

The establishment of a national pharmaceutical manufacturing network will facilitate a U.S. strategic asset that changes how we source, manufacture, and distribute medicines. This robust domestic network will mitigate drug shortages, ensure quality, and allow rapid response to emergency scenarios. Importantly, it re-establishes a domestic pharmaceutical manufacturing industry that relies less on overseas suppliers, advances our country’s innovation prowess, and will create thousands of new U.S. jobs.

Recommendations for the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense

To enable a more resilient, responsive and adaptive U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain and achieve medicine production self-sufficiency, the following actions are recommended.

First, sign an executive order that directs the formation of a Joint Interagency Task Force (JIATF) DoD, HHS and FDA, led by a Presidential appointee (Ambassador), with a $5 billion, 5-year funding commitment, to establish a more robust domestic responsiveness that includes advanced manufacturing technologies for biologics and small molecules. A key objective of the executive order and the formation of a JIATF is to ensure the U.S. can produce medicines stateside with improved responsiveness.

This initiative will:

Key milestones and deliverables of this initiative include the following:

  1. By year 2, ensure that 50% of the FDA’s Essential Medicines are manufactured from end-to-end in the United States, to include starting materials and APIs.
  2. By Year 5, the FDA will have the capability to manufacture all Essential Medicines in the United States.
  3. In this same time frame, the quality of every dose of the medicines produced can be provided to the FDA for oversight.
  4. All starting materials are sourced domestically or from trusted allied nations.

Conclusion 

Expanding critical U.S. pharmaceutical manufacturing infrastructure and establishing an adaptive, transparent on-demand pharmaceutical manufacturing capability guarantees safe, secure, high-quality, and reliable supply of affordable drugs and would create thousands of new U.S. high-paying jobs. By utilizing green technology, it could reduce hazardous material waste by as much as 30 percent over conventional manufacturing. It would also improve transparency and supply chain efficiencies that could reduce shortages, lower costs, and improve the quality of medicines. A distributed, modular, on-demand manufacturing network capable of making biologics and small molecules cannot be disrupted by the loss of centralized facilities, natural disasters, pandemics, or adversarial actions. New local on-demand manufacturing solutions will reduce manufacturing ramp-up time, the need for strict environmentally-controlled secure storage facilities, and waste from expired medications. It will empower local authorities to manage delivery and distribution protocols, ensuring that local populations have the lifesaving medicines they need when they need them. In addition, it would offer the potential to improve warfighter resilience and recovery by providing the groundwork for producing medicines on demand, and at the point of care, whether it be on a C-5, submarine, or at a forward combat support hospital.

Recruiting and Retaining Highly Effective Teachers of Color

The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to providing the best possible education to all students. Research has established that students of color experience benefits to social and emotional development and learning outcomes when taught by educators of color. Diverse educators and administrators are particularly important for schools with many students of color. Accordingly, schools across the country should prioritize hiring highly-effective teachers of color. This policy proposal identifies opportunities to recruit—and retain—highly effective K-12 educators of color.

As a first step, the Biden-Harris Administration should create an Under Secretary of Diversity at the Department of Education (ED), charged with organizing a White House Summit to establish the value of a diverse teacher workforce and convene leaders to identify best practices and a strategy for Federal Government support of state, local, and private programs. Following the summit, ED, led by the Under Secretary of Diversity, should revisit current programs that identify high need areas, such as math, science and special education to include the pressing need for diverse educators. Simultaneously, the administration must work with Congress to reauthorize the Higher Education Act, incorporating the previously introduced College Transparency Act to ensure robust data reporting and evaluate the effectiveness of financial incentives.

Challenge and Opportunity

A sense of belonging is widely accepted to be a basic human desire. Academic success can be heavily impacted by a sense of belonging in one’s academic environment. For students who do not feel that they belong, it can affect their mental and physical health, and future criminal activity. Schools have at least four racialized areas potentially affected by teacher composition: content, teaching methods, feedback type, and disciplinary practices. Teachers of color are one piece of the solution. Recognizing similarities between shared attributes and/or social identities of themselves and their teachers, connecting with people they can trust and be open with can help support a sense of belonging, which is critical to academic success.

Even as the demographics of the United States continue to shift, the teacher workforce remains overwhelmingly white, leading to a demand for teachers of color that far outweighs the supply. While certain states have had some success recruiting more teachers of color, individuals pursuing teaching careers face significant obstacles, causing many to leave the profession earlier than their white colleagues. For many first-generation students and students of color, the path to a profession in teaching can be perilous, with unsustainable wages and work conditions. Some federal programs designed to help teachers manage student debt and continue teaching have failed the very people who our students need to stay in the profession. The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated current inequalities in educational outcomes, presenting additional challenges to all teachers, and particularly teachers of color.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that college students are very interested in teaching but lack supported pathways and incentives to pursue a career in the field. Many passionate and talented state, local, and private leaders are working to support highly effective teachers of color, and a strong evidence base shows the potential for successful small-scale programs. However, programs and successes are inconsistent and piecemeal across the country. The Biden-Harris Administration should build on these opportunities to create a strong federal infrastructure that establishes teaching career pathways and supports teachers of color in the classroom.

The success of our country in meeting the needs of the future STEM workforce and productive labor market will depend on our ability to effectively educate a diverse population. Technology is the future—and the present. In STEM and other core workforce areas, the United States is trailing behind other industrialized nations. As the workforce of the future continues to evolve, we need to prepare our students. In our memo, we involve the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), as they, along with the Department of Education (ED), will want to prioritize the workforce of the future—ensuring that the United States is once again leading the world in breakthroughs in science and technology.

Plan of Action

On Day One, the incoming Secretary of Education should: 

Appoint an Under Secretary of Diversity, ED

On Day One, the Biden-Harris Administration should create a new leadership position at ED, an Under Secretary of Diversity. This individual will serve the role of a Chief Diversity Officer, tasked with examining the role of race at the agency, in curricula, teacher preparation and development, and in school and district leadership nationwide, and with ensuring that national education initiatives are inclusive and actively anti-racist. Once in place, the Under Secretary will launch a White House summit, revisit existing programs and practices at ED to increase support for highly effective teachers of color, and support passage of critical legislation.

Launch a White House Summit on how to recruit and retain a highly effective, diverse teacher workforce.

The Biden-Harris Administration should develop an interagency working group to coordinate efforts between ED, NSF, NIH, and the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), as well as education funders and business leaders who have named teacher diversity as a clear priority, to convene leaders who have been successful in finding, developing, and retaining educators of color. This effort would be led by the Under Secretary of Diversity at ED and the Assistant Director for the Education and Human Resources Directorate at NSF.

A White House convening would establish that delivering the best education to students of color is a national priority. The broad goal would be to quickly generate new ideas and learn from best practices toward the goal of establishing a teacher workforce that mirrors the diversity of the American student population. The more specific goals would be:

The Department of Education should prioritize supporting highly effective teachers of color.

ED should revisit current programs to include diverse educators in the requirements for high-need areas. The department currently provides incentives for states and school districts to hire and for individuals to pursue teaching. A comprehensive plan to substantially increase the diversity of educators must also consider retention and the professional experience after training. ED should promote retention by providing incentives for school districts to hire cohorts of diverse educators in order to reduce isolation and provide support. A “best-practices” grant program to ensure deep investment in programming also warrants renewed attention.

ED should:

Urge Congress to Reauthorize the Higher Education Act (HEA), incorporating the previously proposed College Transparency Act (CTA).

Sustained federal investment in achieving diversity of K-12 educators that align with the diversity of our students will lead to improved social and emotional development and learning outcomes of our diverse population. CTA legislation is needed to enable the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to develop and maintain a secure, privacy-protected postsecondary student-level data system in order to accurately evaluate student enrollment patterns, progression, completion, and post collegiate outcomes, as well as higher education costs and financial aid. The Higher Education Act should be reauthorized to expand access, improve affordability, and promote completion for all students, including prospective teachers of color. Reauthorization should include critical protections for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.