Preventing the Next Pandemics: An Upstream Approach to Novel National Security Threats

COVID-19 is estimated to cost the global economy between $8 to 15 trillion USD1, but it is not the first such outbreak, nor will it be the last. Since the 1970’s, 70% of emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) have been at the human-wildlife boundary2, with new infectious diseases emerging at a faster rate than ever before. Further, a common, defining feature of emerging infectious diseases is that they are triggered by anthropogenic changes to the environment. As natural environments degrade (specifically, due to climate change, loss of biodiversity and fragmentation of habitats, or invasive species), they are more likely to harbor infectious diseases and their vectors (animals or plants that transmit a pathogen)2.

This memo proposes a series of actions to shift the focus of our existing EID strategies from merely reacting to disease outbreaks – which is economically devastating – to detecting, addressing, and mitigating the major upstream factors that contribute to the emergence of such diseases prior to an outbreak, and would come at orders of magnitude lower cost. Recent analysis of the exponentially rising economic damages from increasing rates of zoonotic disease emergence suggests that strategies to mitigate pandemics would provide a 250:1 to 700:1 return on investment. Even small reductions in the estimated costs of a future pandemic would be substantial. This approach would have greater success at a much lower cost in reducing the impacts of EIDs.

The next administration should

  1. launch a strategy aimed at strengthening biosurveillance systems at home and abroad through a global viral weather system for spillover, including harnessing technology and data science to create predictive risk systems;
  2. eliminate existing barriers in international development and foreign policy between food security, global health, and environmental sustainability by establishing a coordinator for planetary health;
  3. address and alter the incentive structures that facilitate spillover, and create new incentives for investments to reduce the risk for spillover through institutions like the Development Finance Corporation; and
  4. through creating the world’s first climate & biodiversity neutral development agency, to ensure that our development investments aren’t facilitating spillover risks.

Challenge and Opportunity

COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic represents the greatest global public health crisis of this generation and, potentially, since the pandemic influenza outbreak of 1918. But it is not the only new pathogen to have threatened humanity in that time, nor will it be the last. Scores of infectious diseases threaten humankind: both familiar ones like malaria, tuberculosis, and neglected tropical diseases, and emerging viruses, fungal, and bacterial infections like Ebola, H5N1 avian flu, Zika, severe acute respiratory syndrome and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. Increasingly, emerging infectious diseases (EIDs) are zoonotic: 60% are shared between wildlife and humans3. Today, the frequency of epidemics is increasing, driven by surging populations, our degradation debt owed to the planet and climate, wildlife trafficking, and globalized trade and travel.

As we have seen with COVID-19, in a thoroughly interconnected world, those of us in developed economies cannot afford to ignore the developing world if we are concerned about disease outbreaks. The failure to address Covid-19 everywhere affects our ability to address it anywhere. Not enough is known about the trajectory of the transmission of COVID-19 in the Global South. Many developing countries, especially in rural communities, are limited in their ability to test and isolate patients due to under-funded healthcare systems that lack medical staff, training, laboratories, reagents, equipment, and trained personnel. They lack the resources and bio-surveillance capacity to identify spillover events, and outbreaks even with large mortality may go undiagnosed when their symptoms mimic other diseases.1 Moreover, EIDs can exacerbate chaos in failed and failing states, and failed states make ready homes for pandemics.4 COVID-19 in fact may have moved between 88-115 million people back into extreme poverty, and potentially 150 million by 2021, setting back efforts to end extreme poverty by 3 years.5 This is why the response to COVID-19, and the next pandemics, are not just health problems, but need be framed within a larger development and conservation context that requires investments in restructuring how we address the wicked problems facing our country and our planet.

Accordingly, as we respond to this outbreak, it is even more important to think about how we prevent the next one. The U.S. has invested significant resources to prepare for, monitor, and respond to outbreaks of existing infectious diseases. Although this investment has been insufficient as we have seen in COVID-19, there is a bigger issue: How do we avoid the next 10 pandemics? These “downstream” responses fail to address the origination of novel emerging infectious diseases, i.e. how such diseases initially arise, or the factors that accelerate their spread. We need to focus on factors that greatly contribute to disease emergence: our food systems & supply chains, environmental degradation, climate change, and the movement and trade of wildlife and wildlife products.

Much of the world’s population lives in close proximity to animals and natural environments; such proximity translates into greater disease risks. More than half of the 1,407 recognized infectious diseases are shared between humans and wildlife (“zoonotic”); such zoonotic pathogens are twice as likely to be emerging or reemerging, than are nonzoonotic pathogens. Since the 1970’s, 75% of EIDs have been at the human-wildlife boundary, with new infectious diseases emerging at a faster rate than ever before.6 Further, a common, defining feature of emerging infectious diseases is that they are triggered by anthropogenic changes to the environment. As natural environments degrade (specifically, due to climate change, loss of biodiversity and fragmentation of habitats, or invasive species), they are more likely to harbor infectious diseases and their vectors (animals or plants that transmit a pathogen). Understanding and addressing how such environmental changes may affect the spread of disease allows us to mitigate or even prevent outbreaks in the future.

It would be substantially more cost effective, efficient, and safer to prevent these diseases from initial emergence and spread. According to Dobson et al, the estimated cost difference of prevention would be $22.0 to $31.2 billion, compared to the expected costs of COVID-19 of $8.1 to $15.8 trillion, ranging from a 250:1 to 700:1 difference of costs. There are additional ancillary benefits to these upstream approaches, which include ecosystem services and reduced CO2 emissions.

COVID-19 presents us with an unprecedented opportunity to create a world where we anticipate, plan for, and mitigate pandemics before they happen, and even prevent them from emergence. We can address the challenge of EIDs by building the capacity and infrastructure needed to prevent future outbreaks and through addressing the root causes of EIDs. This requires us eliminate the barriers that separate global health programming from investments that address the root causes of environmental degradation, food insecurity, public health, and economic insecurity. It is also an extraordinary opportunity to take a problem-oriented approach to solving conservation & development problems, rather than a disciplinary one, and think about how we create new pathways for industrialization that meet the exigencies of climate change and sustainability.

Climate Change

Climate change expands the range and impact of pathogens, facilitating the spread of EIDs. Warmer temperatures enable pathogens and their vectors to survive and sometimes thrive in habitats previously outside of their tolerance range. It also serves to change weather patterns (like storms or rainfall) that lead to more standing water, and increase the population of mosquitos or other vectors. Climate change may also alter the range and fitness of host predators or competitors that would have limited spread of vectors under previous conditions. Vectors may also be active for longer periods of time during the day (e.g., mosquitos may have more opportunities to transmit a disease because they have more times to bite). Tropical diseases such as malaria, cholera, yellow fever, now reach previously unexposed human populations in South America, Central Africa, and Asia due to the spread of their vectors to new regions. Dengue is expected to reach New York and Washington DC by 2080.

Environmental Degradation and Disease Risk

The destruction and degradation of natural habitats and the stress and defaunation of species communities within them, facilitates the emergence of infectious diseases by increasing the opportunities for disease spread and spillover. 

First, reduced species diversity increases the relative commonness of those species that incubate, carry, and help spread a pathogen (“reservoirs”), increasing disease prevalence. Further, predators are the first to disappear after habitat degradation; the lack of a “regulatory” agent leads to an increase in reservoirs, increasing opportunities for transmission as with Lyme disease in the Eastern U.S. Lower resources could mean less competitors, another regulatory agent. Environmental degradation may also increase shedding rates by stressing animals, encouraging the spread of the disease. Deforestation and degradation of habitats may also facilitate the spread of infectious disease by increasing habitat that favors disease vectors, such as mosquitos (rice paddies around forest edges), or edge habitat that favors invasions by invasive species.

Finally, changes in landscape geometry and makeup, coupled with changes in density in domesticated and wild species, may draw together formerly isolated populations, increasing spillover risks to humans and domesticated animals from wildlife populations, and vice versa. Tropical forest edges create spillover opportunities for novel human viruses, as humans and their livestock are more likely to come into contact with wildlife when more than 25% of the original forest cover is lost.7 Environmental degradation, driven by forestry, mining, and agriculture, increases opportunities for hunting wildlife, and the potential for spillover.

Invasive Species, Wildlife Trade, Pet Trade, and Food Systems

The invasion of foreign species (pathogens, vectors, and reservoirs) into novel habitats also spreads infectious disease. Such introductions may happen due to increasing globalization of industry, trade, and tourism; through the pet trade (as what happened with the U.S. outbreak of Monkeypox), through legal or illegal trade in wildlife and wildlife products; or through habitat changes that facilitate invasions by alien plants or animals. Invasive alien species may carry disease into populations previously unexposed to those pathogens. Invasive species may also destroy native species or their food supplies, creating an unbalanced ecosystem more vulnerable to disease. As SARS-COV-2 has shown us, wildlife trade is especially prone to spillover, as the capture, handling, slaughter, and ingestion of wildlife can lead to the transfer of a pathogen from wildlife to humans. Ebola is thought to have arisen due to bushmeat hunting of bats and nonhuman primates; HIV is thought to have arisen due to bushmeat hunting of chimpanzees; MERS is thought to have arisen due to animal husbandry (camels).

Plan of Action

Currently, U.S. policies to combat and address EIDs are focused on costly responses to individual outbreaks, rather than reducing the chance for an outbreak to occur. Artificial barriers between public health responses, food security, animal health, biodiversity conservation, and national security also exacerbate the problem. On the international level, there is a total failure to standardize disease data, link it with environmental change, and assess risks despite scientific evidence linking disease emergence and environmental change. Confronting EIDs more effectively and efficiently requires a multifaceted and multidisciplinary approach. To better understand and address the threat posed by EIDs and develop more effective responses to this threat, this memo recommends the following steps:

Establish a biosurveillance system in the most biodiverse places

A first line of defense against emerging zoonotic viruses is dependent on countries having adequate capacities for monitoring and reducing spillover of viruses from wildlife to people (either directly or through intermediate animals such as livestock). Existing biosurveillance efforts are typically not sufficiently robust, as evidenced most-recently by the spillover of SARS-CoV-2 from animals to people in Wuhan, China.

Through massively better biosurveillance of targeted pathogens through new technologies, including low cost molecular testing to be able to understand opportunities for spillover in the United States, as well as in the Amazon Basin, Wallacea, and the Congo Basin, we can establish a global, integrated monitoring network that forms the basis of an actionable biosurveillance system. Key will be increasing world class lab capacity in the places where spillover is more likely to happen and development of new low cost technologies that can help identify new pathogens, and their reservoirs in situ. With this networked of networked devices, patterns of emergence and spread can also be monitored in near real-time, producing transformative data on the epidemiological and ecological progression of novel pathogens. However, this will require setting up a modern surveillance network in partnership with other health organizations with a large foot print on the ground. These include the CDC, FHI360, WCS, Veterinarians without Borders, and the World Health Organization. It will also require the US to create a Field ParaVets Program, a rapid training program for rapid response and paraveterinarian specialists that would be focused on one-health surveillance and outbreak detection.

Utilizing big data, machine learning, and models from epidemiology, ecology, and evolution, we can begin to develop the integrated frameworks and analytical capacity that will enable a global forecasting system for future pandemics and EIDs. Much like the Global Weather Services enterprise, we can create a system that provides information and services to front-line actors, governments, health agencies, civil society, and front-line communities that enables them to anticipate and respond to the emergence of new diseases. Furthermore, because of the integrated nature of such a Global Biosurveillance System, capitalizing on the ecological and evolutionary understanding described above, we can create actionable insights that will allow conservationists, public health officials, food system agents, and others to move upstream from the emergence of these novel pathogens to turn off the underlying drivers.

Implementation

Creating a Global Viral Intelligence Service for Predicting Pathogen Spillovers. We need a global surveillance network for emerging infectious diseases to gather information on the incidence of disease in populations of wildlife, humans, and domesticated animals, and agriculture, at every stage of the trade supply chain beginning with free-ranging populations and extending to wildlife farms, confiscated animals being smuggled, and animals legally being shipped at points of export, and create adaptive “weather” maps of the risks of disease transmission. This service, would be based within the NIH, and work closely with the Centers for Disease Control, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Branch, and the USGS National Wildlife Health Center 

Improving Monitoring and Prevention Internationally. The US must take a leadership role to strengthen efforts by UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), UNDP, UNEP, and the World Health Organization, to develop a systematic approach for early detection and rapid response to identify and control emerging infectious disease of human, wildlife, and domesticated animals, including delineating risks from wildlife trade, environmental degradation, and climate change. Through USAID, in partnership with the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, and the Navy Medical Research Centers in Egypt, Lima, and Singapore, the US would develop new funding and technical assistant programs for building disease monitoring lab activity and personnel, building on USAID’s IDENTIFY program, previous programs including PREDICT, PREVENT, IDENTIFY, RESPOND, and DTRA’s Cooperative Biological Engagement Program.

Expansion of Existing Authorities to Defend our Borders. The new administration should expand the mission of APHIS to address not only disease issues that affect agricultural animals but also those associated with zoonotic and wildlife diseases, and increased focus on disease prevention, preparedness, detection, and early response activities. We may give CDC the authority to use pre-import screening, such as a process that assesses disease risk by species and country and determines allowable imports on the basis of that assessment. We may also amend the Lacey Act to strengthen the USFWS’s ability to identify, designate and stop injurious species, including dangerous pathogens from entering the United States, and from moving in interstate commerce if and when they arrive here.

Breaking down barriers between food security, global health, and sustainability

It is clear that how we may address pandemics requires us to break down the barriers – such as the health accounts in USAID – that limit opportunities to take a transdisciplinary approach to how we may address pandemics. Emerging pathogens are not limited to human health or wildlife, but cross over into the disruptive pests and pathogens that address the crops we grow, the food we store, and ecosystems we value. Our solutions to EIDs require us to think more broadly than global health, but think about health systems, food safety and security, wildlife trade, and environmental change.

Implementation

Address the Drivers of Pandemic Emergence. Work with Congress to allow for greater multisectoral programming within USAID to address the underlying drivers of extinction. Proactive efforts that minimize risk of emerging diseases are less costly than the economic and mortality costs of responding to these pathogens once they have emerged. Harnessing intelligence from the Global Viral Intelligence Service, the US should also fund programs to mitigate the underlying factors that facilitate disease emergence, including addressing food systems and global production of feed, food, materials, and their supply chains, and environmental degradation. This includes looking at how we may reduce risk through (1) protecting habitats, conserving biodiversity, reducing deforestation, restoring degraded habitat; (2) prioritizing international transdisciplinary research collaborations under the Ecohealth, OneHealth, and Planetary Health Frameworks; and (3) using ecological interventions to reduce human disease burdens and pandemic risk through experimental management and conservation.

Encourage a whole of government approach through the leadership of the National Security Council. The National Security Council should coordinate both international and domestic approaches to take a multi-disciplinary approach to addressing the upstream factors of pandemics, working in consultation with PCAST, NSTC, CEQ, OSTP, and OMB, and through an interagency process with representation from State, USAID, DFC, DOD, Treasury, HHS, NOAA, NASA, USGS, ODNI, and other relevant federal agencies, through an interagency working group.

Changing the incentives that drive spillover

Regardless of the exact determinants of the origin of COVID-19, this pandemic is primarily due to human behavior. Wildlife wet markets bring together an array of wild animals, in stressful and confined conditions, that would not normally occur. This creates an environment conducive to the spread of disease. Consumption of these wild animals (such as bats, pangolins, and even primates) puts human health at risk by providing an opportunity for the virus to potentially spillover from non-human animals to humans. We need to change the incentives for human behavior, and facilitate that change through modernization of the food system, animal husbandry, and supply chains, and increasing the sustainability of systems to reduce the demand for wildlife products that produce pandemics and decimate wild populations.

Creating new technological systems to better protect the forests tied to direct payments for conservation systems & monitoring (whose value is based on spillover risks & biodiversity value) to change behavior for those at greatest risk of spillover, and who have few other economic choices. Some early attempts exist to change behavior around wildlife trade, such as campaigns in China to reduce the consumption of shark fin soup, that can serve as models for ways to leverage new technologies and behavioral science approaches (gamification, peer networks, positive and negative reinforcement, etc.) to reduce demand for wildlife products. This, coupled with market signals that incentivize proper behavior could produce significant benefit.

Implementation

End Implicit and Explicit Subsidies that Drive Spillover at home and abroad. Many threats to planetary health, including emerging infectious diseases, are unwittingly subsidized and facilitated by the government. These subsidies include those in water use, energy, agriculture, transportation, fisheries, land management, and trade. Ending subsidies domestically may not only support planetary health, but free up revenue to the program. Internationally, subsidies violate the underlying principles of global trade through the World Trade Organization and allow for countervailing measures. Further, parties to the WTO may implement trade related measures at protecting the environment. These would serve to benefit the sustainability of US industry and make our domestic and better regulated products more competitive.

Create new Financial Innovations & Encouraging Investment for Preventing Pandemics. Financial innovations are a powerful class of behavioral incentives. We should consider innovations such as Advanced Market Commitments, Direct Payments for Conservation, Social Impact Bonds & Direct Payments, Franchise Models, and Nutrient and Carbon Trading, coupled with mechanisms such as the Development Credit Authority within the new Development Finance Institution which guarantees up to 50% of “first loss” of an investment to encourage the development of new capital to support Planetary Health and addressing emerging infectious diseases. The SEC could also require companies to report measures on their environmental sustainability, and potential risk from environmental degradation, climate change or pollution on their operations.

Creating a climate & biodiversity neutral development agency

Climate change and biodiversity degradation will be a major driver of the spread of EIDs. To mitigate what is an increasing threat to human security, USAID needs to ensure that its entire portfolio of activities, do not on average, worsen climate change or undermine biodiversity loss. This requires us to think beyond just funding sporadic climate and conservation programs, but thinking about the systematic impact of the Agency’s activities on climate change, and ensuring that US development investments are generating a net impact of zero emissions of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, and are not driving species defaunation and extinction. Such an approach supports the SDGs, and will allow for countries to find new pathways to industrialization and development. It will enable the Agency to stop contributing to the very problems it is trying to solve such as weather-related humanitarian crises, livelihood re-engineering due to decreasing water levels, and conflict over arable land.

Climate & biodiversity neutrality does not detract from other development goals, such as economic growth. While the United States should invest heavily in encouraging sustainable economic growth –and it is in the environment’s interest to do so — it is imperative that we act in a way that does not worsen the effects of climate change or the extinction crisis. Future economic growth must work to reduce rather than expand emissions of greenhouse gases. Working towards climate & biodiversity neutrality would benefit the people assisted by USAID, as well as the environment. Certain USAID programs are inherently emissions-intensive, such as responding to disasters or building roads. Achieving climate & biodiversity neutrality across the entire basket of USAID foreign assistance activities allows development activities in one country that reduce emissions (such as forestry, biodiversity conservation, and renewable energy) to balance activities in other countries that increase emissions (humanitarian aid missions, roadbuilding). USAID can become, once again, the most forward-thinking development agency, shining as an innovative example among other donor organizations throughout the world.

Implementation

Create an annual estimate, through the annual budget process, of the approximate carbon impact of USAID programs, and create an office within the Policy Bureau to carry out this analysis. This office will lead a Climate Neutral Task Force (CNTF), with representatives from each Washington Bureau and, initially, those Missions that choose to participate in a comprehensive assessment of both their programs and operations. Bureaus will be represented by environment officers and experts in the key sectors — infrastructure & engineering, energy, agriculture, water, and natural resources, and our own operational management. One year appears a reasonable estimate for how long it would take for the CNTF to accomplish the work described in the proposal. We recommend undertaking the emissions assessment process in several self-selected, pilot Missions, in the first year, and then expand to the whole Agency in the next year.

Zero Emission Fueling Stations for Trucks and Buses

The next administration can achieve significant reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions by helping transition the commercial truck and bus industries to cleaner fuels like electric power and hydrogen. A key role for the Federal Government is to support the build-out of a nationwide network of zero-emission (i.e., alternative) fueling stations, including electric charging and hydrogen fueling stations. Achieving this goal will require federal leadership and significant collaboration with Congress, states, electric utilities, the private sector, and others. The amount of effort and time necessary for this effort means that it must be a day one priority to achieve meaningful progress within four years. A robust network of zero-emission fueling stations for trucks and buses will facilitate a significant and permanent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions, improve air quality for communities nationwide, result in safer highways, and help create of hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

Challenge and Opportunity 

The threat of climate change demands immediate action. The transportation sector is the top emitter of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the United States, outpacing the energy, agriculture, residential, and commercial sectors. Any serious effort to cut GHG emissions overall must therefore include serious efforts to cut transportation-related GHGs. 

GHG emissions from commercial trucks and buses contribute significantly to the transportation sector’s overall emissions. From 1990 to 2018, GHG emissions from commercial trucks and buses increased far more than emissions for passenger cars (emissions increased by 90.1% for commercial trucks, 158.8% for buses, and only 21.6% for passenger cars) despite the lower number of vehicle-miles traveled for commercial trucks and buses. In 2018, the collective emissions from medium-duty and heavy-duty trucks were the second-largest category of transportation-related GHG emissions.

Alternative fuels like hydrogen fuels, biofuels, and electric power present an enormous opportunity to cut transportation-related emissions while boosting the U.S. economy. Alternative fuels are gaining commercial acceptance in the freight and tourism industries. There is also an emerging U.S. industry around manufacturing alternative-powered vehicles that promises to create millions of new jobs in the years ahead. Domestic companies that have already seen success in this space include Workhorse, a company based in Lordstown, OH that is producing electric delivery vehicles for UPS, FedEx and DHL; Rivian has recently signed a contract with Amazon to provide 100,000 electric delivery vans; and Tesla, the world’s most valuable car company, is developing its own battery-powered long-haul trucks.

But there is a major barrier hampering wider deployment of these vehicles: fueling stations. Adoption of zero-emission trucks and buses will be slow until a robust, nationwide network of zero-emission fueling stations is available. Modest efforts are already underway in California and the northeastern United States to build new zero-emission fueling stations, but federal leadership is needed to accelerate and expand these efforts to a national scale. The Federal Government can facilitate build-out of the country’s network of zero-emission fueling stations by providing tax credits and other financial incentives for station construction and by providing the nationwide planning and coordination capacities that the private sector alone cannot.

Key considerations

The U.S. Department of Energy reports that there were 41 open retail hydrogen fueling stations in the United States in 2019, with an additional 36 stations in various stages of development. Most of these stations are in California and the northeastern states. Various electric-fueling stations—most designed for passenger cars—are scattered throughout the United States. The next administration should focus on building out the national network of zero-emission fueling stations in the Midwest and other parts of the United States that currently lack zero-emission infrastructure. The following considerations can guide this effort.

The commercial truck and bus industry. Most truck and bus companies are small businesses, utilizing fleets of seven to ten vehicles and operating on tight profit margins. Capital is limited for many of these companies, especially in the wake of the devastation that COVID-19 has wreaked on the larger economy and tourism industry. Therefore, it will be difficult for these companies to invest in new, alternative-powered vehicles. Moreover, the rate of fleet turnover for most trucking and bus fleets is slow – a company will typically retain their commercial trucks and buses for a decade or more, and often times these vehicles will then be sold to a secondary market where they will be utilized for several years longer. The next administration should work closely with stakeholders to craft financial incentives that allow commercial truck and bus companies to purchase new trucks and buses that run on alternative fuels.

Travel-plaza owners. Commercial travel-plaza owners are among the largest distributors of diesel fuel and gasoline in the nation. Travel-plaza owners also generate revenue by selling food and other items to truck drivers and other motorists. The deployment of zero emission fueling stations could represent an existential threat to many of these operators if handled poorly: for instance, if zero-emission fueling stations become direct competitors to existing travel plazas. But commercial travel-plaza owners could also be important champions of zero-emission fueling stations if deployment is handled well: for instance, if resources are provided to help travel-plaza owners incorporate zero-emission fueling infrastructure into existing facilities, or if operators who build out zero-emission fueling infrastructure are rewarded with grants to upgrade on-site food and retail establishments.

Congress. Congress must provide new tools for the federal government to accelerate deployment of zero-emission fueling stations. Specifically, Congress should amend title 23, United States Code (USC) so that federal dollars are eligible to support construction of zero-emission fueling stations, including at truck rest stops and via Community Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) projects.

Alternative-fuel types. There currently is no “preferred” alternative fuel in the commercial truck and bus industries. While some think hydrogen fuel has the greatest potential, others are betting on natural gas and batteries. For now, most businesses are making decisions based on current advantages and limits of different alternative fuels. For example, battery cells are less attractive for long-haul trucking and bus trips because of the batteries’ weight and their limited range compared to motor fuels. But battery-powered vehicles are ideal for city deliveries, where many daily trips can be completed on a single charge. The next administration should therefore work to expand the nation’s network of zero-emission fueling stations in ways that support multiple alternative-fuel types.

Fueling technologies and costs. The reality is that zero emission technologies are relatively new. There is still work that must be done to understand the emissions-reduction and fuel-reduction technologies that are available, the challenges to wider adoption of these technologies, where these technologies effectively fit diverse geography and efficient supply-chain needs, and the potential emissions reductions. But doing this work will result in significant impacts on truck freight emissions and fuel usage.

Existing federal regulations. The commercial truck and bus industries are highly regulated. New fueling technologies will need to work within these regulations, not against them. For example, federal requirements limit the number of hours a truck or bus driver may work per day. If refueling an alternative-fuel truck takes longer than refueling a diesel truck, drivers will lose valuable driving time. Additionally, weight limits on commercial vehicles designed to prevent damage to road and bridge infrastructure also discourage the use of heavy batteries for long-haul trips, as the weight of the batteries displace the amount of freight a truck can haul. The next administration should be aware of issues like these, crafting policies to encourage development of alternative-fueling technologies that do not inadvertently hurt businesses or undermine other priorities like highway safety or infrastructure maintenance. Truck and bus drivers should also be included in these discussions, to better understand how to successfully integrate existing practices.

Truck and bus manufacturers and dealers. A handful of companies manufacture the majority of commercial trucks and buses sold and used in the United States. Most of these companies are not significantly invested in alternative-fuel vehicles. The next administration needs to be mindful that it is not pitting established manufacturers against the startups referenced above in supporting the expansion of zero-emission fueling stations, lest it encounter serious opposition among the business community and Congress. Finally, the U.S. Department of Transportation reports approximately 12.5 million commercial trucks and buses are currently registered in the United States. There will need to be significant manufacturing capacity to support the wide-scale adoption of alternative-powered trucks and buses, and these manufacturers could be a valuable partner for this effort, especially if they understand the market potential.

Plan of Action

Keeping the considerations above in mind, there are several concrete actions that the next administration can take to build out of a national network of zero-emission fueling stations. In its first 100 days, the next administration should: 

Prioritize passage of critical legislation

This legislation should provide the Federal Government the authorities and resources needed to support the build out of this zero-emission fueling network. Specifically, this legislation should

Strong White House coordination

The White House should work closely with key agencies to ensure coordination and eliminate redundancy with respect to federal efforts to advance zero-emission fueling stations. These agencies include the Department of Transportation (DOT) for its partnership with the states to maintain the nation’s major roads and highways, the Department of Energy (DOE) for its ongoing work to deploy alternative-fueling stations, and the Environmental Protection Agency for its regulatory work on clean air.

Gather stakeholder input

The business community recently has adopted a new level of urgency in confronting climate change. To discuss opportunities for building out zero-emission fueling infrastructure, the next administration should harness this energy by convening key stakeholders, including vehicle manufacturers, truck and bus companies, metropolitan planning organizations, port authorities, labor organizations, truck-stop owners, and owners of large freight-generating facilities (like hospitals, universities, airports, and convention centers). Opportunities may include the following: partnerships with local utilities to integrate new electric-charging stations with existing electric infrastructure; strategic plans for developing infrastructure tailored to specific routes, applications, and duty cycles in order to minimize refueling costs; and joint efforts that distribute capital expenses of infrastructure construction across private fleets as well as government agencies.

Establish pilot programs and public-private partnerships

Highly traveled truck and/or bus corridors along the National Highway System are natural places to pilot policies and public-private partnerships (PPP) designed to support construction of zero-emission fueling stations. Because there are relatively few examples of real-world experiences and limited opportunities to test emerging zero emission technologies and the strategies for their deployment, these pilots and PPPs will provide immense benefit in sharing information and developing best practices. Immense benefits towards wider adoption will come from understanding the emissions-reduction and fuel-reduction technologies available, the challenges to wider adoption of these technologies, and where these technologies effectively fit diverse geography and efficient supply-chain needs will have. The next administration should partner closely with states and the private sector on initiating and overseeing such pilots and PPPs.

Cumulatively, these activities and authorities will spur development of a nationwide zero emission fueling network because they provide stakeholders with a federal partner in navigating the risks and challenges of this effort while also providing necessary incentives to accelerate stakeholder investment in zero emission technologies and fueling stations. But the benefits of this effort may take years to fully realize, so it is critical that the next administration begin work on this effort on day one to see this through.

Conclusion

Commercial truck and bus volumes will only continue to grow in the future and with it their GHG emissions. While changing CAFÉ standards for commercial trucks and buses will make modest reductions in their GHG emissions, the reality is that the only way to significantly reduce these emissions is to accelerate the deployment and adoption of zero emission technologies. But because these technologies are relatively new and untested, the Federal Government must help stakeholders navigate the challenges and opportunities that these technologies present while also supporting the build out of critical infrastructure like fueling stations to improve confidence in adopting zero emission trucks and buses. The steps outlined in this proposal provide a roadmap to making that a reality.

Improving Federal Management of Wildlife Movement and Emerging Infectious Disease

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed systematic vulnerabilities in the way that wildlife movement and emerging infectious diseases are managed at national and international scales. The next administration should take three key steps to address these vulnerabilities in the United States. First, the White House should create a “Task Force on the Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases”. This Task Force would convene agencies with oversight over animal imports, identify necessary policy actions, determine priority research areas, and coordinate a national response strategy. Second, the next president should work with Congress to pass a bill strengthening live-animal import regulations. Third, U.S. agencies should coordinate with international organizations to address global movement of infectious diseases of animals. Together, these actions would reduce the risk of emerging infectious diseases entering the United States, offer greater protection to citizens from zoonotic diseases, and protect American biodiversity from losses due to wildlife diseases.

Challenge and Opportunity

More than 60% of emerging infectious diseases in humans first originate in animals. More than 70% of these come from wild animals. HIV, for instance, jumped to human hosts from primates in Africa. MERS spread to humans from camels in the Middle East. Of present salience, experts believe that the virus that causes COVID-19 originated from wild animals in China (probably bats).

The risk of animal-to-human “spillover”—and the global spread of zoonotic diseases—increases when wildlife are traded and imported around the world (e.g., for food, traditional medicines, display, pets, etc.). The global spread of COVID-19 has drawn attention to problems such as lack of disease surveillance in wild animal populations and lack of disease testing in many live animals at international borders. International wildlife-trade laws do not account for public-health risks of wildlife trade. These laws also do not require collection of data on zoonotic diseases (i.e., diseases caused by germs that spread between animals and people): data that could help prevent the next pandemic. These problems are exacerbated by accelerating rates of habitat conversion and biodiversity loss coupled with increased volume and speed of international commerce.

The United States is especially susceptible to emerging zoonotic diseases because it is the world’s largest importer6 of legally traded wild animals, yet lacks domestic regulations requiring most imported live animals to be tested for diseases, pathogens, or parasites. Gaps in U.S. statutory and regulatory frameworks governing live-animal imports increase disease risks for humans while also threatening our country’s biodiversity and natural resources. In the United States, four agencies oversee some aspect of live-animal imports—but this oversight is far from comprehensive. The Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is responsible for assessing the risk of diseases in agricultural imports, but not wildlife species. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) oversees imports of only primates and some species of rodents, bats, or birds known to spread zoonotic diseases. The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) is responsible for regulating imports of all wildlife (and imposes stricter standards on species previously identified as injurious), but its mandate does not cover infectious diseases or parasites. The upshot is that imports of most wildlife species to the United States are not assessed for disease risk by any agency. Most disease agents that infect wildlife (except for a small number of known zoonotic diseases) are not monitored by any agency either.

Plan of Action 

The next administration should take three key steps to address systematic vulnerabilities in the way that wildlife movement and emerging infectious diseases are managed in the United States and around the world. 

Create a White House Task Force on the Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases.

This Task Force would convene agencies with oversight over animal imports (including the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Department of the Interior (DOI), and CDC) and those supporting research (NSF, NIH) or international assistance (U.S. Department of State, USAID) to determine global research priorities on wildlife disease, and facilitate international cooperation on mechanisms to reduce demand as well as disease risk in the live animal trade. The task-force would use the One Health concept that links human health with animal health and environmental health, and that applies a comprehensive approach to understanding the drivers of disease emergence, the spread of disease, and the impacts on human health.

Work with Congress to pass a bill strengthening live-animal import regulations.

This bill would build on past legislation (e.g., H.R. 6362/S. 3210;11 H.R. 3771/S. 1903;12 and S. 375913) related to wildlife disease. The bill should:

Coordinate internationally to address diverse aspects of wildlife movement and emerging infectious diseases.

The next administration should direct USDA (primarily APHIS) and the FWS to lead the following efforts:

Conclusion 

Regulatory gaps put Americans at risk of exposure to emerging infectious disease from unregulated and under-regulated imports of wildlife. The next administration should address these gaps by creating a White House task force, strengthening live-animal import regulations, and coordinating with international institutions to reduce the global movement of emerging infectious diseases. The result would be a nation that is healthier and safer—for humans and animals alike.

Earth Observation for Sensible Climate Policy

The United States lacks the basic information and digital infrastructure required to effectively respond to the emerging climate crisis. While the science and technology needed for sensible climate policy exists, efforts to leverage these technical resources are fragmented and undirected. Actors in the most important sectors of the U.S. economy are making long-term investment decisions based on inaccurate or outdated data as a result. In the past 10 years, for example, homes worth over $11.2 billion have been built in areas that are at risk from sea-level rise. Insurance companies have paid over $25 billion in claims resulting from the 2017 wildfires in California. Better information on environmental impacts of climate change will make it possible to mitigate losses from wildfires, droughts, floods, and extreme weather events. Therefore, the next Administration should invest in Earth observation to directly measure environmental change and greenhouse gas emissions.

The next Administration should also invest in modern data and information technology infrastructure to effectively and efficiently respond to climate change. Such digital infrastructure will make it easier to integrate climate science into decision making. These investments will not only strengthen the domestic economy, but will also reposition the United States as a global leader on one of the most pressing “moonshots” of our time—basic measurements of humanity’s impact on our home planet.

Challenge and Opportunity

By 2050, the cost of anthropogenic climate change to the United States is projected to be equivalent to the cost of a mid-scale pandemic, year-over-year. Yet American homeowners, small businesses, and even large enterprises are making investments with expected dividends in 10- 30 years as if the impacts of climate change are unknowable — they aren’t. The technology exists to measure the causes and effects of climate change at a resolution and frequency commensurate with economic decision-making. The challenge is to effectively organize disparate federal efforts to collect and distribute information about how our home planet is changing, so that Americans and American companies can make smart, forward-thinking choices.

Environmental information, especially about climate change, is a public good and should be provisioned by the public sector. In addition, there are sweeping economies of scale associated with Earth observation — with high upfront costs of data collection and data infrastructure, but low marginal costs to extend coverage from one state to the next. As such, the Federal Government is a natural home to lead and coordinate Earth observation.

Bolstering the Federal Government’s Earth observation will reposition the United States as a global leader on the most pressing “moonshots” of our time. Establishing capacity to collect basic information about the vital signs of our planet will be a clear diplomatic, scientific, and economic win for a new Administration. This document outlines feasible, measured, and near-term activities in support of that goal.

Plan of Action

The next Administration should take immediate and bold actions to elevate Earth observation at the federal level. Specifically, the next Administration should 

Deputize the next NASA Administrator to lead Earth observation for the Federal Government, with decisive support for budget-neutral reallocation of resources toward Earth science. NASA has the mandate, public trust, technical resources, and science budget to take a leading role in monitoring climate change. Currently, only 7% of NASA’s annual budget is dedicated to studying our home planet. The urgency of climate change requires that number to be much higher. The percentage of NASA’s annual budget allocated to Earth science should be doubled within the first year of the next Administration. Moreover, structures to support climate science within the Federal Government are insufficient. NASA leadership will organize, elevate, and operationalize existing efforts. For example, reallocation and refocusing of resources could be used within the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program to develop an ecosystem of firms capable of (i) collecting and processing climate data and (ii) creating decisionsupport tools to foster better understanding of climate change impacts and more effective adaptation responses.

Establish a Climate Corps to increase the pipeline of talent in climate-change mitigation and adaptation, with a specific branch dedicated to leveraging Earth observation data. The Climate Corps should adopt a tiered approach that puts members to work at the local, state, and federal levels, tailoring information and services delivered accordingly. The federal branch of the Climate Corps could be modeled on and work with existing programs such as the Presidential Innovation Fellows. The state and local branches of the Climate Corps would link federal investment in climate data and science with on-theground needs. Localities on the front lines of climate change require tailored scientific and technical expertise to support evidence-based decision-making. We recommend recruiting graduates with science and technical degrees to branches of the Climate Corps focused on serving such localities nationwide. Much like the Peace Corps embeds members within communities abroad, this Climate Corps branch would embed members within front-line communities at home to facilitate two-way communication about local needs, relevant scientific findings and capabilities, and informed investments at all levels of government.

Create a collaborative public-private partnership for climate data and science, much like the BRAIN Initiative brings together public and private entities to advance understanding of brain function. The partnership should be overseen by a civilian science board and should aim to allocate $5 billion over five years in applied research grants to universities and small businesses. These grants would spur development of innovative technologies to monitor Earth systems in response to community and industry needs. Supported by committed involvement from the Department of Defense (e.g., DARPA, IARPA), part of the partnership’s mandate should be to reinstate the MEDEA program (or follow-on incarnation) to make military data assets available to civilian researchers and data scientists.

Conclusion

There are moral and economic imperatives for the United States to take swift action, supported by consistent and credible data, on climate change. Global investment in Earth observation is insufficient to adequately respond to climate change. The United States can leverage its comparative advantage in scientific diplomacy and domestic talent to fill this information gap. By doing so, our nation can lead the world to the next great human achievement—a stable and productive climate.

Adopting an Open-Source Approach to Pharmaceutical Research and Development

The U.S. pharmaceutical industry conducts over half the world’s research and development (R&D) in pharmaceuticals and accounts for well over $1 trillion in economic output annually. Yet despite the industry’s massive size, there are still no approved therapies for approximately 95% of human diseases—diseases that affect hundreds of millions in the United States and around the world. The disparity between industry inputs and societally valuable outputs can be attributed to two key market failures. First, many medicines and vaccines have high public value but low commercial potential. Most diseases are either rare (afflicting few), rapidly treated (e.g., by antibiotics), and/or predominantly affect the global poor. Therapies for such diseases therefore generate limited revenue streams for pharmaceutical companies. Second, the knowledge required to make many high-value drugs is either underdeveloped or under-shared. Proprietary considerations may prevent holders of key pieces of knowledge from exchanging and integrating information.

To address these market failures and accelerate progress on addressing the overwhelming majority of human diseases, the next administration should launch a new program that takes an open-source approach to pharmaceutical R&D. Just as open-source software has proven a valuable complement to the proprietary systems developed by computer giants, a similar open source approach to pharmaceutical R&D would complement the efforts and activities of the for-profit pharmaceutical sector. An open-source approach to pharmaceutical R&D will provide access to the totality of human knowledge and scientific expertise, enabling the nation to work quickly and cooperatively to generate low-cost advances in areas of great health need.

Challenge and Opportunity 

Approximately 95% of human diseases (~9,500 in number) lack any approved therapies. At the current rate of discovery, it would take 2,000 years to find therapies for all known human diseases. The result is that hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the world lack medicines and vaccines that are essential to a healthy life.

Simply put, the status quo with respect to drug development has failed. The pharmaceutical industry expends huge amounts of money—often funded with taxpayer dollars—to develop and procure medicines and vaccines, straining national and personal budgets. Moreover, our legacy system of pharmaceutical R&D is unacceptably slow. It now takes 10–20 years for the pharmaceutical industry to develop a single new medicine or vaccine. Pharmaceutical R&D efficiency is declining exponentially: Moore’s Law in reverse. Finally, investment by the existing pharmaceutical industry is driven by profit potential, not societal need. Hence, diseases that afflict many but offer limited revenue streams continue to remain neglected.

It is time for a transformational change in how our nation approaches pharmaceutical R&D. COVID-19 has made it resoundingly clear that we need more medicines, vaccines, and antibody therapies—and we need them to become available fast and made accessible to all. The response to COVID-19 has also demonstrated the value of open R&D in medicine. Thanks largely to unprecedented levels of collaboration, information sharing, and grassroots innovation, our understanding of the disease and the efficacy of potential treatments has advanced at a remarkable pace. Progress on a vaccine for COVID-19 has been record-breaking in comparison with any previous vaccine. Such openness must be further expanded and become the new normal. Right now, most of our nation’s pharmaceutical R&D enterprise is divided among individual labs or companies, with little communication across disciplines or among different research teams. Pharmaceutical R&D is too often conducted secretly, separately, privately, redundantly, and chaotically. And public funds are given to private pharmaceutical companies without guarantees of affordability or openness. We must move instead towards a world in which pharmaceutical R&D is carried out collaboratively, cooperatively, transparently, flexibly, and efficiently. An important step is making key aspects of pharmaceutical R&D—especially publicly funded R&D that is supported or conducted by government—open source.

Plan of Action

The next president should launch a new effort to support an open-source approach to pharmaceutical R&D. Such an approach would differ from conventional approaches and compliment them in four ways: 

As explained in an influential 2006 paper, an open-source approach to pharmaceutical R&D would achieve these goals by integrating six foundational capacities: (i) public and open data and other informational resources; (ii) affordable and widely available tools, algorithms, and models; (iii) advanced computation; (iv) crowdsourcing and crowd commentary; (v) generics and low-cost drug manufacturing; and (vi) the power of sharing, collaboration, and community. 

A government-funded effort to support open-source pharmaceutical R&D could take several forms. This effort could be housed at an independent nonprofit center, or could comprise a new program within the National Institutes of Health (NIH)’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS). This effort could even exist as a part of a new global hub cofounded by the United States in collaboration with other countries and funders. Indeed, entities from Europe, Africa, Latin America, and South Asia are already working on the concept of open source pharmaceutical R&D. The United States should not be left behind.

However, it is important for the heart of this effort to exist outside of the academic and private sectors and their respective incentive structures. Universities are publication-oriented instead of product-oriented. Private entities are generally profit-seeking, and the consulting firms that often win government contracts typically do not conduct scientific research or create new products, let alone new paradigms. The effort should also be nimble and non-bureaucratic, focused on developing societally beneficial therapies, and characterized by an ethos of creativity, a deep feel for the subject, an open source and community spirit, and working for the public good. Possible implementation options could be recommended by a committee of accomplished innovators who have previously taken ideas from concepts to large-scale results in scientific and social realms.

There are five Initial areas of highest impact for open-source pharmaceutical R&D: (i) off-patent repurposing of existing medicines and vaccines, (ii) discovery of entirely new medicines and vaccines, (iii) creation of one or more scientific-information commons built on public data and resources, (iv) creation of open platforms (e.g., a Github for pharmaceuticals) to grow and connect relevant scientific communities, and (v) expanded artificial intelligence and computational capabilities to advance research. Clinical trial funding would be key, in order to translate research into interventions that have direct health impact. Partial precedents for open source pharmaceutical R&D are numerous and include the NIH NCATS COVID-19 OpenData Portal, the Government of India’s Open Source Drug Discovery Initiative, and a new U.S./Europe/South Asia/Africa/Latin America global hub led by NIH NCATS, the European infrastructure for translational medicine (EATRIS), and the Government of Brazil’s Fiocruz.

The next administration should fund this effort with a minimum budget of $100 million in year one and $200 million in year two. We believe that this funding level, a fraction of the billions per new drug required in traditional industry approaches, would be sufficient to first deliver multiple therapeutics that are affordable and serve areas of great health need, and secondly establish a firm paradigm of open-source pharmaceutical R&D. To be truly transformational, the federal government should eventually increase funding to a few billion dollars per year. This effort would directly improve health. But in addition, expect that it could generate four types of economic returns: (i) direct cash savings, in the form of reduced expenditures on health care and hospitalizations by government, with an ROI of potentially more than 100% annually;1 (ii) some direct revenues, while maintaining openness and affordability; (iii) indirect returns created by improved health; (iv) and other indirect returns.

Federal funding for open-source pharmaceutical R&D should be viewed as an investment with indirect but major returns. By efficiently integrating the capabilities and knowledge of individuals, academics, and industry players in the pharmaceutical sector, open-sourcing R&D will—as already demonstrated in the IT sector—boost markets while delivering materially useful products for all Americans. Initial public investment to create open-source infrastructure for pharmaceutical R&D and unlock new data troves could increase the commercial viability of certain medicine or vaccine opportunities. In turn, this could spur private-capital investment and trigger waves of innovation, similar to ARPANET’s evolution into the Internet. We envision bipartisan support for this powerful approach.

Reform Education’s General Administrative Regulations (EDGAR) and Grants Administration Processes

By strengthening state and local capacity to use data analytics, evaluation, and evidence in formula grant programs, the Department of Education (ED) could significantly increase the impact of its major investments in pre-K, K-12, and community college systems. Important changes could be made through coordinated regulatory and administrative actions that do not require congressional action, laying the groundwork for future congressional action to fill critical gaps.

Challenge and Opportunity

The Department of Education’s main initiatives to strengthen the use of data, evaluation, and evidence have focused on a small number of competitive grant programs (e.g., Education Innovation and Research, State Longitudinal Data Systems) with funding totaling less than $500 million annually. The vast majority of ED’s annual funding to state and local governments is allocated by formula to programs supporting pre-K, K-12, and community college systems (totaling over $39 billion). With the possible exception of a few recent ESSA provisions requiring states and localities to use evidence, ED lacks meaningful policies to strengthen state and local use of data, evidence and evaluation to improve the impact of formula grants. States and localities face multiple impediments to using data and evidence to make decisions, including impediments that stem from ED policies and practices:

Plan of Action

The Secretary should designate a senior ED policy official and an attorney to lead a task force to devise regulatory and administrative reforms that can strengthen state and local data, analytics, and evaluation capacity. To be developed through extensive consultation with state and local officials, these reforms would include:

Regulatory reforms. ED should revise EDGAR provisions to:

Streamlining data collections. ED should continue to work with state and local grantees: (1) to eliminate unnecessary reporting that does not help grantees improve programs; and (2) to standardize data to improve its utility to users at all levels.

Technical assistance. ED, in collaboration with non-federal partners, should provide proactive technical assistance to help state and local governments make effective use of increased investments in data, analytics, and evaluation, including:

Innovative Personnel Exchanges and Public Private Partnerships. ED should employ the use IPAs, public-private partnerships, and other partnerships with relevant community organizations to engage state and local perspectives and non-government talent in implementing the action plan.

Assessment of state and local capacity. With state and local partners, ED should conduct a thorough assessment of state and local capacity gaps that cannot be adequately addressed through the regulatory and administrative actions above. This assessment would inform potential legislative and appropriations proposals to Congress.

While the focus of this initiative would be on federally funded programs, the potential benefits would extend to activities funded at the state and local level. This ED initiative could be part of a White House-led strategy to strengthen state and local data and analytics capacity across a broad range of federally funded programs, particularly those serving vulnerable populations.

Focused Research Organizations to Accelerate Science, Technology, and Medicine

The next administration should rapidly create new Focused Research Organizations (FROs) to tackle scientific and technological challenges that cannot be efficiently addressed by standard organizational structures including academia, industry, National Laboratories, or Advanced Research Project Agencies (e.g., DARPA). FROs would be independent from existing universities or labs, focused on a single basic science or technology problem, and organized similarly to a startup. FROs would fill a key structural gap in our nation’s research and development (R&D) system, enabling major advances in areas that (i) require levels of coordinated engineering or system-building inaccessible to academia, (ii) benefit society broadly in ways that industry cannot rapidly monetize, and (iii) harbor opportunities for acceleration through innovative new technologies and processes. Each FRO would produce a well-defined tool or technology, a key scientific dataset, or a refined process or resource that would dramatically boost progress and help maintain U.S. competitiveness in a broad technological or scientific field. Relevant areas for FROs include brain mapping, climate technology, biological tool and reagent development, data generation for preventative medicine, novel antibiotic development, nanofabrication, and more.

Challenge and Opportunity

The U.S. government is ill-equipped to fund R&D projects that require tight coordination and teamwork to create public goods. The majority of government-funded research outside of the defense sphere—including research funded through the National Institute of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E)—is outsourced to externalized collaborations of university labs and/or commercial organizations. However, the academic reward structure favors individual credit and discourages systematic teamwork. Commercial incentives encourage teamwork but discourage the production of public goods. As a result, the United States is falling behind in key areas like microfabrication and human genomics to countries with greater abilities to centralize and accelerate focused research.

The solution is to enable the U.S. government to fund centralized research programs, termed Focused Research Organizations (FROs), to address well-defined challenges that require scale and coordination but that are not immediately profitable. FROs would be stand-alone “moonshot organizations” insulated from both academic and commercial incentive structures. FROs would be organized like startups, but they would pursue well-defined R&D goals in the public interest and would be accountable to their funding organizations rather than to shareholders. Each FRO would strive to accelerate a key R&D area via “multiplier effects” (such as dramatically reducing the cost of collecting critical scientific data), provide the United States with a decisive competitive advantage in that area, and de-risk substantial follow-on investment from the private and/or public sectors. Some FROs would lay the engineering foundations for subsequent government investment in programs similar in scope to the Human Genome Project.

Individual FRO-like entities have previously been established only occasionally and through disparate mechanisms. Most recently, the National Quantum Initiative Act established five FRO- like centers within National Labs, each funded at $25 million per year, to pursue advances in quantum-information technology. However, there is no systematic, agile process for the conception and creation of similar centers in a variety of fields. Establishing any FRO-like entity currently requires Congressional approval—an onerous and time-consuming process.

We expect FROs to attract broad bipartisan and popular support due to their potential to spawn new industries and establish American leadership. Precedent supports this expectation. The National Quantum Initiative Act, for instance, was co-sponsored by the bipartisan coalition of Lamar Alexander (R-TX), John Thune (R-SD), and Bill Nelson (D-FL), and passed the Senate by unanimous consent.

Plan of Action

The next administration should support the rapid establishment of 16 new FROs: four per year for the next four years, totaling 16 FROs. The next administration should work with Congress to secure new funding for these FROs, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) should oversee the development of a cross-disciplinary program to conceive and launch the FROs.

Funding

The total program budget for 16 FROs should be roughly $1 billion, or about $25–75 million per FRO allocated over 5-7 years (e.g., roughly $5–15 million per FRO per year). This is roughly 10 times the funding level accessible via a typical academic grant, yet comparable in cost to a DARPA project or to a philanthropic project like the Allen Institute’s Mouse Brain Atlas (~$55 million). Moreover, this level of funding is similar to the funding needed by a Series A/B “hard tech” startup to achieve proof of concept for a new technology prior to commercialization. Funding should be authorized for the FRO program as whole rather than for each individual component. This will enable the program to move quickly and independently, in similar fashion to DARPA. Funding the program as a whole will also support cross-disciplinary FROs and FRO initiatives. Agencies such as NIH, NSF, the Department of Energy (DOE), the various ARPAs, or the “Directorate for Technology” proposed in the Endless Frontier Act could be involved in the FRO program and could solicit or put forward specific FROs.1

Logistics

FRO organization and operations should be designed to make FROs as agile, flexible, and self- directed as possible. Each FRO should exist independent of existing organizations such as National Laboratories or labs at other government agencies and academic institutions. Each FRO would be run by a CEO/CTO and staffed by a centralized, startup-like team of well-trained professionals sourced from both industry and academia. This personnel structure will enable tighter alignment of team incentives and focus than would an externalized collaborative research program that uses existing entities (e.g., universities) as performers. This structure will also enable tighter alignment of incentives and focus than would a DARPA-like externalized effort coordinated by a single program manager (although some FROs could be created as an outcome or second stage of DARPA-like programs). Generally, FROs would rent commercial real estate for operations. In rare cases it may be appropriate for FROs to use National Lab facilities. Pay structure in FROs should be flexible to allow top talent to be recruited.

FROs should be expressly time-bound and outcome driven in order to prevent mission creep and organizational aging. This will require clear and pre-defined end-points/exits. As an FRO sunsets, stakeholders in that FRO’s outputs should be convened to maximize output deployment and uptake. Intellectual property should be out-licensed or released publicly for similar reasons. Transition support should be provided to outgoing FRO employees. Follow-on from FROs could include formation and/or incubation of new companies, larger public-sector projects, and/or creation of facilities designed to host and maintain FRO outputs (e.g., datasets or tools).

Mission Selection

FROs should pursue specific goals that, if achieved, will dramatically increase the R&D capacity and/or technological capabilities of the United States in a given field. To preserve the FRO program’s ability to pursue specific, focused innovation objectives, FROs would operate for defined time periods and would not ordinarily be renewed. Renewal would only be permitted in exceptional cases in which an FRO proves that an extension of that FRO would be as impactful as the initial investment. More frequently, we expect that an FRO might serve as proof of concept for a project or initiative that could then be separately pursued through an act of Congress or through a public-private partnership. All new FROs should meet following two criteria:

  1. FROs should be transformative. While FROs might occasionally integrate existing methods to directly produce a new dataset or clinical/scientific outcome, FROs should generally focus on developing transformative new technologies, systems, or processes. These capabilities should reduce the cost and/or increase the speed and reliability of subsequent scientific, clinical, or other downstream efforts, substantially increasing the rate of overall science and technology development in the United States.
  2. FROs should be focused. Each FRO should be established with a clear, goal-oriented purpose. FROs should driven by quantitative metrics and/or concrete design goals and should be limited in scope and duration. Serendipitous discoveries made during the course of FRO research that are outside of the mission scope should be shared freely with external researchers for follow-up. Though we expect FROs to work closely with universities, FROs must not become subject to academic incentives and must avoid mission creep. Although an FRO may maintain external (e.g., academic) advisors and consultants, core staff must be appointed full-time at the FRO.

To ensure efficient and decisive selection and oversight of FROs, a dedicated and innovative program manager—rather than a committee of peer reviewers—could be recruited to help drive the conception, selection and formation of a small number of FROs on the government side. DARPA similarly appoints program managers instead of committees to enable the embrace of visionary or divergent perspectives. Program managers should be willing to take risks on “moonshot” projects for which there is not a consensus on feasibility or likely value.

Please download the PDF version of this memo to view the FAQ Section.

Leveraging Machine Learning To Reduce Cost & Burden of Reviewing Research Proposals at S&T Agencies

With about $130 billion USD, the United States leads the world in federal research and development (R&D) spending. Most of this spending is distributed by science and technology agencies that use internal reviews to identify the best proposals submitted in response to competitive funding opportunities. As stewards of quality scientific research, part of each funding agency’s mission is to ensure fairness, transparency, and integrity in the proposal-review process. The selection process is a crucial aspect of ensuring that federal dollars are invested in quality research.

Manual proposal review is time-consuming and expensive, costing an estimated $2,000–$10,000 per proposal. This equates to an estimated $300 million spent annually on proposal review at the National Science Foundation alone. Yet at current proposal-success rates (between 5% and 20% for most funding opportunities), a substantial fraction of proposals reviewed are simply not competitive. We propose leveraging machine learning to accelerate the agency-review process without a loss in the quality of proposals selected and funded. By helping filter out noncompetitive proposals early in the review process, machine learning could allow substantial financial and personnel resources to be repurposed for more valuable applications. Importantly, machine learning would not be used to evaluate scientific merit—it would only eliminate the poor or incomplete proposals that are immediately and unanimously rejected by manual reviewers.

The next administration should initiate and execute a pilot program that uses machine learning to triage scientific proposals. To demonstrate the reliability of a machine-learning-based approach, the pilot should be carried out in parallel with (and compared to) the traditional method of proposal selection. Following successful pilot implementation, the next administration should convene experts in machine learning and proposal review from funding agencies, universities, foundations, and grant offices for a day-long workshop to discuss how to scale the pilot across agencies. Our vision is that machine-learning will ultimately become a standard component of proposal review across science and technology agencies, and improving the efficiency of the funding process without compromising the quality of funded research.

Challenge and Opportunity

Allocating research funding is expensive, time-consuming, and inefficient for all stakeholders (funding agencies, proposers, reviewers, and universities). The actual cost of reviewing proposals (including employee salaries and administrative expenses) has never been published by any federal funding agency. Based on our experience with the process, we estimate the cost to be between $2,000 and $10,000 per proposal, with the variation reflecting the wide range of proposals across programs and agencies. For the National Science Foundation (NSF), which reviews around 50,000 research proposals each year1, this equates to an average of $300 million spent annually on proposal review.

Multiple issues beyond cost plague the proposal-review process. These include the following:

  1. Decreasing proposal-success rates. This decline is attributable to a combination of an increase in the number of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) graduates in the United States3 and an increase in the size of average federal STEM funding awards (from $110,000 to about $130,000 in less than 10 years). Current success rates are low enough that the costs of applying for federal funding opportunities (i.e., from time spent on unsuccessful proposals) may outweigh the benefits (i.e., funding received for successful proposals).
  2. Difficulties recruiting qualified reviewers.
  3. Delayed decisions. For example, NSF takes more than six months to reach a funding decision for about 30% of proposals reviewed.
  4. Increasing numbers of identical re-submissions. With proposal-success rates as low as 5%, the results of selection processes are often seen as representing “the luck of the draw” rather than reflective of fundamental proposal merit. Hence there is a growing tendency for principal investigators (PIs) to simply re-submit the same proposal year after year rather than invest the time to prepare new or updated proposals.

There is a consensus is that the current state of proposal review is unsustainable.Most proposed solutions to problems summarized above are “outside” solutions involving either expanding available research funding or placing restrictions on the numbers of proposals submitted that may be submitted (by a PI or an institution). Neither option is attractive. Partisanship combined with the financial implications of COVID-19 render the possibility of an increased budget for S&T funding agencies vanishingly small. Restrictions on submissions are generally resented by scientists as a “penalty on excellence”. Incorporating machine learning could improve the efficiency and effectiveness of proposal review at little cost and without limiting submissions.

Incorporating machine learning would also align with multiple federal and agency objectives. On January 4, 2011, President Obama signed the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010. One of the purposes of the GPRA Modernization Act was to “lead to more effective management of government agencies at a reduced cost”. One of NSF’s Evaluation and Assessment Capability (EAC) goals established in response to that directive is to “create innovative approaches to assessing and improving program investment performance”. Indeed, two of the four key areas identified in NSF’s most recent Strategic Plan (2018) are to “make information technology work for us” and “Streamlining, standardizing and simplifying programs and processes.” In addition, NSF recognized the importance of reviewing its processes for efficiency and effectiveness in light of OMB memo M-17-26.9 NSF’s Strategic Plan includes a strong commitment to “work internally and with the Office of Management and Budget and other science agencies to find opportunities to reduce administrative burden.“ These principles are also mentioned in NSF’s 2021 budget request to Congress, as a part of Strategic Goals (e.g., “Enhance NSF’s performance of its mission”) and Strategic Objectives (e.g., “Continually improve agency operations”). Finally, longterm goal outlined in the Strategic Plan is reducing the so-called “dwell time” for research proposals—i.e., the time between when a proposal is submitted and a funding decision is issued.

Incorporating machine learning into proposal review would facilitate progress towards each of these goals. Using machine learning to limit the number of proposals subjected to manual review is a prime example of “making information technology work for us” and would certainly help streamline, standardize, and simplify proposal review. Limiting the number of proposals subjected to manual review would also reduce administrative burden as well as dwell time. In addition, money saved from using machine learning to weed out non-competitive proposals can be used to fund additional competitive proposals, thereby increasing return on investment (ROI) in research-funding programs. Additional benefits include an improved workload for expert reviewers—who will be able to focus on reviewing the scientific merit of competitive proposals instead of wasting time on non-competitive proposals—as well as the establishment of a strong disincentive for PIs to resubmit identical proposals years after years. The latter outcome in particular is expected to improve proposal quality in the long run.

Plan of Action

We propose the following steps to implement and test a machine-learning approach to proposal review:

  1. Initiate and execute a pilot program that uses machine learning to triage scientific proposals. To demonstrate the reliability of a machine-learning-based approach, the pilot should be carried out in parallel with (and compared to) the traditional method of proposal selection. The pilot would be deemed successful if the machine-learning algorithm was able to reliably identify proposals ranked poorly by human reviewers, and/or proposals rejected unanimously by review panels. NSF—particularly the agency’s Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) Program—would be a natural home for such a pilot.
  2. Showcase pilot results. Following a successful pilot, the next administration should convene experts in machine learning and proposal review from funding agencies, universities, foundations, and grant offices for a day-long workshop. The workshop would showcase pilot results and provide an opportunity for attendees to discuss how to scale the pilot across agencies.
  3. Scale pilot across federal government. We envision machine learning ultimately becoming a standard component of proposal review across science and technology agencies, improving the efficiency of the funding process without compromising the quality of funded research.

Reducing the numbers of scientific proposals handled by experts without jeopardizing the quality of science funded benefits everyone—high-quality proposals receive support, expert reviewers don’t waste time on non-competitive proposals, and the money saved on manual proposal review can be reallocated to fund additional proposals. Using machine learning to “triage” large submission pools is a promising strategy for achieving such objectives. Preliminary compliance checks are already almost fully automated. Machine learning would simply extend the automation stage one step further. We expect that initial costs of developing appropriate machine-learning algorithms and testing algorithms in pilots would ultimately be justified by greater long-run ROI in research-funding programs. We envision a pilot that could benefit the government but also foundations that are increasingly shouldering research funding. Ideally the pilot would be experimented in two different set-ups: a government funding agency and a Foundation.

Transforming Infant Nutrition to Give Every Baby a Strong, Healthy Foundation

Breastfeeding can provide important health and financial benefits for new families. But insufficient healthcare coverage, underlying medical conditions, and economic obstacles can make breastfeeding difficult or impossible for many parents. In this memo, a three-pronged approach is proposed—facilitated by an interagency collaboration through the National Advisory Council on Maternal, Infant, and Fetal Nutrition—to transform infant nutrition. First, to increase breastfeeding rates in the United States, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) should alter reimbursement policy by reimbursing tele-lactation and nutrition support for all babies covered under Medicaid. Second, the government should partner with the private sector to launch a “Synthesizing Human Milk Grand Innovation Challenge” to catalyze new extramural R&D and innovation efforts to accelerate commercialization of breast-milk alternatives for those that cannot breastfeed. And finally, the government should enact paid parental leave policies to give parents financial flexibility and dedicated time after birth to breastfeed.

Challenge and Opportunity

To ensure that all babies begin their lives on equal footing, swift action should be taken to give as many babies as possible access to breastmilk and high-quality breastmilk alternatives. Though breastfeeding and breastmilk represent only 0.04% of the National Institute of Health (NIH) budget, access to breastmilk and infant nutrition are issues that affect the health and finances of all American families with very young children. For babies, access to breastmilk has been shown to protect against respiratory illnesses, ear infections, gastrointestinal diseases, eczema, and sudden infant death syndrome. For mothers, breastfeeding may help reduce postpartum blood loss and may lower risk of post-partum depression, Type 2 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, cardiovascular disease, breast cancer, and ovarian cancer. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Economic Research Service has estimated that Medicaid would save at least $172.6 million every year if breastfeeding rates among women, infants, and children increased to medically recommended levels.1 More broadly, one study highlighted by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) estimated that increasing breastfeeding rates could save $3.6 billion annually in the costs of treating some childhood illnesses.2

While breastfeeding can provide important health and financial benefits for new families, not all babies can breastfeed. 1 in 8 mothers in the United States face lactation dysfunction, which means that they cannot produce enough breastmilk to provide sufficient infant nutrition.3 Medical conditions such as Insufficient Glandular Tissue (IGT), mastitis, postpartum depression and anxiety (PPD/A), and infant birth defects—to name just a few—present challenges to breastfeeding. Adoptive parents can only breastfeed in certain circumstances, and birth mothers may be confused about whether they can breastfeed while on certain medications, may dislike the process of breastfeeding, or face difficulty breastfeeding while transitioning back to work.

For these and other reasons, 75% of babies use infant formula instead of breastmilk to some extent by the time they are 6 months old. A 2007 report from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) found that existing formula-feeding solutions are associated with higher risks for chronic diseases including Type 2 diabetes, asthma, and childhood obesity.4 Formula feeding is also linked with higher rates of necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) for premature infants. More research is needed to understand the underlying biochemical mechanisms of human breastmilk to develop infant formulas that better mimic breastmilk. In addition, infant formula is a major expense for the federal government. Infant formula is the single most expensive item that the federal Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Woman, Infants, and Children (WIC) provides, and the program spends more on formula than any other food—a total of $927 million in FY 2010.

It is also important to note that paid parental leave is a critical part of the postnatal experience for mothers and babies. Increases in paid parental leave are consistently associated with better infant and child health, particularly in terms of lower infant mortality rates.5 Paid parental leave also gives parents the opportunity and flexibility to focus on breastfeeding, which can be extremely time-consuming. The children of educated, well-off mothers are more likely to breastfeed because they have access to paid parental leave, careers with access to breaks for breast pumping, and disposable income to hire support such as night nurses. However, according to a national survey of employers conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), only 18% of private industry U.S. employees had access to paid family leave through their employers. Paid parental leave in the private sector is voluntary and more prevalent among managerial and professional occupations.

Plan of Action 

CMS, USDA, NIH, state WIC agencies, and the private sector should work together through the National Advisory Council on Maternal, Infant, and Fetal Nutrition to transform U.S. infant nutrition for the better. The following specific actions are recommended:

First, to increase breastfeeding rates in the United States, CMS should alter its reimbursement policy to reimburse bi-weekly tele-lactation and nutrition support appointments for any baby covered under Medicaid during the baby’s first three months of life. Currently, the Affordable Care Act requires private insurance plans and Medicaid expansion programs to cover maternity care—including prenatal screenings and lactation consultations—without cost sharing by the patient. But there is no federal requirement to reimburse for telemedicine. Advocates should encourage the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight (CCIIO) at CMS to expand mandatory maternal-health coverage to include telehealth and for CMS to implement this policy change. This can be done in collaboration with WIC, which already provides breastfeeding support through state agencies.

Second, the federal government should catalyze new R&D and innovation efforts to accelerate commercialization of high-quality breastmilk alternatives such as

Third, in the longer term, the federal government should enact paid parental-leave policies that give parents financial flexibility and dedicated time after birth to breastfeed.

How much does the government spend on infant nutrition currently?

Regarding the federal government’s role as a buyer of infant formula, WIC currently serves half of all infants in the United States and infant formula is the single most expensive item that WIC provides, and the program spends more on formula than any other food — $927 million in fiscal year 2010 as an example. For reference, each year Congress provides USDA FNS with a specific amount of funds for state agencies to operate the WIC program. WIC leads an infant formula bidding process, which is a cost containment approach. It is highly effective because it allows for state WIC programs to receive significant discounts in the form of rebates. These rebates result in up to $2B a year in savings, which means that 2 million more people can participate in this program. The national WIC association provides more details on this breakdown. Surrounding the federal government’s role in research in this arena, breastfeeding, lactation, and breastmilk represent only 0.04% of the NIH’s budget ($85M in 2019) despite the fact that this impacts every single American.

How does increasing breastfeeding rates and improving infant formula improve economic benefits?
Along with improved health outcomes, breastfeeding improves economic benefits by
reducing costs for families, employers, health insurers, and taxpayers. As stated in the 2011 Surgeon
General’s Call to Action to Support Breastfeeding, “a study conducted more than a decade ago estimated
that families who followed optimal breastfeeding practices could save more than $1,200–$1,500 in
expenditures for infant formula in the first year alone (Ball et al, 1999). In addition, better infant health
means fewer health insurance claims, less employee time off to care for sick children, and higher productivity,
all of which concern employers (US Breastfeeding Committee, 2002).” By increasing breastfeeding rates
through paid leave and creating an infant formula closer to infant formula, this could save CMS at least
$172.6M in Medicaid costs alone.
Why should it be the federal government taking action on infant nutrition vs. a state or local government?
Because the government is the single largest buyer of infant formula, and infant formula is the most expensive
item as part of the WIC program funded by the federal government (USDA), the government has a uniquely
high leverage and is incentivized to take action to save both healthcare costs and buyer costs on infant
formula. Specifically, on the healthcare cost front, Medicaid would save at least $172.6M every year if
breastfeeding rates in the WIC population increased to medically recommended levels.
What is the first step you suggest to get this off the ground?
Currently, the Affordable Care Act requires private insurance plans and Medicaid expansion programs to
cover maternity care without cost sharing to the patient, including prenatal screenings and lactation
consultations, but there is no federal requirement to reimburse for telemedicine, and lactation support services
are rolled out inconsistently. As a first step as part of our policy proposal, we recommend extending this
policy to cover telehealth services to allow for more even and efficient delivery of lactation support services
to increase breastfeeding adherence rates.
What about internal and external partnerships?

We believe strongly that in order for impact to happen that this needs to be a collaboration between the public and private sector. In particular, we propose NIH to launch the ‘Synthesizing Human Milk R&D Summit’ (linked to NICHD Aspirational Goal identified in their Strategic Plan) to bring together the community to rally around this ambitious goal and build a coalition. The goals for the event include 1) gathering input and commitments from stakeholders to launch a “synthesizing human milk grand challenge” and 2) laying the groundwork to launch and celebrate a future grand challenge. During this Summit, we will identify the specific barriers to developing an infant formula closer to breast milk by bringing together the formula makers, academic researchers, clinicians, parent/infant advocacy groups, and public health community with government stakeholders. Government stakeholders include NIH, CMS, CDC, FDA, US Surgeon General, and US Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF). In addition, a white paper will be generated to summarize the current state of our understanding of the underlying biochemical mechanisms of human milk.


In addition, we propose NIH to launch the ‘Synthesizing Human Milk Grand Challenge’ to award prizes to new innovative approaches in human milk, which is jointly funded by the NIH and the private sector, including formula manufacturers.

How does this idea complement or conflict with existing actions you surfaced exploring the policy landscape?

This effort complements existing efforts identified as part of the NIH’s Pediatric Growth and Nutrition Branch’s strategic priority of synthesizing human milk, the Affordable Care Care Act’s effort requirement that private insurance plans and Medicaid expansion programs to cover maternity care without cost sharing to the patient, including prenatal screenings and lactation consultations, and the USDA funding WIC State Agencies who support breastfeeding and provide WIC lactation experts, WIC peer counselors, WIC breastfeeding classes.


Also this effort complements the existing National Advisory Council on Maternal, Infant, and Fetal Nutrition, and we propose that this effort is led through that council, which was originally specified as part of legislation (Section 17(k) of the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, as amended (S 42 USC 1786). This legislation mandates that the Council authorizes the Secretary of Agriculture to appoint the members.

Establishing a National Manufacturing Foundation

Emerging technologies developed in the United States are routinely scaled up overseas due to a lack of domestic engineering skills, manufacturing know-how, investment capital, and supply chains.1 A new national initiative is needed to ensure that discoveries and inventions made in the United States are manufactured at scale in the United States. Such an initiative will create good-paying jobs, strengthen defense preparedness, and protect intellectual property (IP) created through federally funded research. Building a strong manufacturing base at home will also strengthen the domestic innovation cycle, as the knowledge gained through manufacturing supports process improvements and new product iterations. 

Manufacturing cuts across multiple disciplines and the missions of multiple federal agencies, but no agency has the nation’s long-term manufacturing success as its sole objective. We propose creation of a new agency—a National Manufacturing Foundation (NMF)—to address this gap. The goal of the proposed NMF is not to restore lost industries, but to rebuild our lost capabilities and capacities to build and scale up products in the United States. 

Funding for the NMF should be at least five percent of the total annual federal research and development (R&D) budget, about $150 billion in 2018. Five percent for the NMF would be $7.5 billion annually appropriated as an increase in total funds, not as a carve out from existing funds.

The NMF would do the following:

  1. Engage with other federal S&T agencies to set technology priorities, mature promising product and process technologies funded through other federal agencies, access relevant expertise, and coordinate funding to ensure that promising technologies receive full support from discovery and invention to commercial-scale domestic production.
  2. Invest in translational R&D to help advance emerging technologies beyond the pilot stage. This would include awarding grants and contracts to U.S. universities and other research institutions to support translational engineering (not science) research and manufacturing process technologies common to multiple industrial applications. This would also include establishment of a series of Translational Research Centers (TRCs) affiliated with universities. TRCs would focus on advancing technology and manufacturing readiness of emerging technologies in order to enable successful hardware start-ups and to transform research results to new products and processes manufactured in the United States.
  3. Build connections between hardware start-ups and other federal agencies, especially the DOD, to support translational research in defense-critical technologies. This would include leveraging federal purchasing power and the federal government’s role as a customer to help American companies procure financing for plants and equipment to establish and ramp up production of new technologies.
  4. Facilitate public-private partnerships to create Manufacturing Investment Funds (MIFs). These MIFs would fill gaps in existing venture-capital markets, providing sufficient funding for hardware start-ups to scale production in the United States beyond pilot plants.
  5. Support small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) through technical assistance and financial support: including loans, grants, loan guarantees, and tax incentives. As the foundation of manufacturing value chains and the geographic distribution of diverse industrial clusters, it is essential that SMMs have the capacity to upgrade equipment, train staff, and fully participate in Industry 4.0.
  6. Grow engineering and technical talent at all levels by significantly increasing federally funded graduate fellowships in engineering for U.S. citizens, partnering with state and local governments to increase the number of four-year engineering technology degree programs and to expand successful apprenticeship and skillstraining programs.

The NMF will not be able to fulfill its promise and achieve its objectives if inventions continue to be manufactured abroad. Therefore, recommend a binding rule that if the intellectual property for a product or process is developed based on federally funded R&D, then that product or process must be manufactured substantially (e.g., a 75% minimum value-add) in the United States, without any exceptions or waivers.

Why a National Manufacturing Foundation

Thanks in large part to decades of offshoring manufacturing, the United States has compromised its ability to realize the full potential of its tremendous investments in research and development (R&D). An increasing amount of corporate R&D is done abroad, closer to where most factories are now located. Worse, products built on federally funded R&D in advanced technologies (such as organic electronics and nanomaterials) are increasingly manufactured abroad. The erosion of important industrial centers throughout the United States—machine tools in Cincinnati, steel in Pittsburgh and Youngstown, furniture in North Carolina—has resulted in a loss of engineering skills, infrastructure, supply chains, and production know-how domestically, limiting the ability of U.S.-based manufacturers to build and scale new technologies.2 Overseas manufacturing of products based on taxpayer-funded R&D essentially subsidizes foreign producers in creating jobs and wealth from American inventions. Because of these dramatic changes in the nation’s industrial base, it is difficult for the United States to establish—let alone lead—the industries of the future. The longstanding U.S. strategy of “invent here, manufacture there” is fast becoming “invent there, manufacture there”— a dangerous trend for our nation.

Restoring U.S. manufacturing leadership requires the public sector to step in to correct a market failure. Short-term profit incentives will drive the private sector to continue offshoring manufacturing (and R&D) as long as it is economically favorable. But because the societal benefits of domestic manufacturing (in the form of national wealth, jobs, and national security) exceed the concentrated benefits of offshore manufacturing (see Section 3.4), the U.S. government has a critical role to play in realigning incentives.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government is not well positioned to respond effectively. No single federal agency has the health of the nation’s manufacturing sector as its primary mission. Multiple agencies—Defense, Energy, Commerce, and others—have programs to support manufacturing.3 But these programs are neither strategic nor coordinated, poorly funded (relative to the need), and have not been successful at arresting the decline in engineering and manufacturing capabilities to support domestic production of emerging technologies.

In 2018, MForesight, a federally funded advanced manufacturing research consortium, conducted a nationwide study of challenges facing the United States in developing and implementing advanced product and process technologies. An overarching recommendation in the resulting report, Manufacturing Prosperity, is to establish a new agency, a National Manufacturing Foundation (NMF), tasked with (1) developing and implementing a national manufacturing strategy and (2) providing sufficient, sustained, and coordinated federal resources focused on ensuring the long-term success of U.S. manufacturing.

Additional work by MForesight in 2019, Reclaiming America’s Leadership in Advanced Manufacturing, confirmed the findings and recommendations in Manufacturing Prosperity, emphasizing the growing urgency to rebuild the nation’s capacity for manufacturing innovation. Creating a National Manufacturing Foundation would clearly demonstrate U.S. commitment to strengthening national manufacturing capacity and to the steps needed to achieve this goal. The proposed NMF would be an independent agency akin to the National Science Foundation (NSF). It would invest in translational R&D (engineering and manufacturing R&D) to advance promising results from the R&D investments made by other science and technology (S&T) agencies from bench/pilot scale to large/commercial scale. It would also coordinate early adoption of emerging technologies for national security, help small and medium-sized manufacturers invest in technology and equipment upgrades, and help build the pipeline of domestic talent for all components of a robust, modern manufacturing. Overall, the NMF would build the intellectual, financial, and physical infrastructure needed for the United States to regain its capacity to manufacture its inventions at scale and to leverage its R&D for economic growth and national security.

the State of U.S. Manufacturing

American manufacturing—especially in advanced technology products—is under threat. In 2017, as Figure 1 illustrates, the United States had a positive trade balance in only two advanced industries: aerospace and (minimally) engines and turbines. The United States does not maintain a positive trade balance even in industries such as medical devices and pharmaceuticals: industries where the U.S. federal government invests significant R&D and is the single largest customer. Furthermore, most domestic manufacturing industries use substantially more imported content than they did 20 years ago.4

Between 2006 and 2016, some of the largest reductions in U.S. manufacturing output were in advanced industries, including pharmaceuticals (down 3.1%), industrial machinery (2.9%), communications equipment (2.5%), and computers and peripherals (2.3%). Imports increased in all of these industries. Since 2013, imports from Asia have increased by 19% while U.S. manufacturing gross output has increased by just 1%.

It is worth noting that Japan, Germany, and South Korea have maintained trade surpluses in advanced manufacturing, are well ahead of the United States in their use of industrial robots, and have a greater share of high-technology production in their manufacturing sectors. In 2017, the U.S had a $859 billion trade deficit in goods, whereas Germany, Japan and South Korea (all high-wage countries with strict regulations and higher energy costs) had trade surpluses of $279 billion, $27 billion, and $95 billion respectively.

Since 2011, labor productivity in manufacturing has risen by only 0.7% total. Worse, total factor productivity in manufacturing actually fell by 5.8% between 2011 and 2015.

Much of these declines can be explained a nationwide drop in capital investment in machinery and equipment. Fixed assets fell from nearly 10% of U.S. GDP in the 1980s to less than 5% in 2018. The rate of investment in fixed assets by non-financial corporations averaged more than 5% between 1947 and 2000, but has been half that since then. The result is not only greater dependence on imports in virtually every industry (and especially in defense-related industries), but also an older capital stock that makes domestic production much less competitive than it could be.

Since the 1980s, when U.S. manufacturing competitiveness was initially challenged by Japanese automotive and electronics companies, a few economists made the case that manufacturing matters to the innovative capacity and overall health of the nation. Shifts in the composition of industrial production over time are to be expected in a healthy, dynamic economy. The United States was expected to shift from low-value, labor-intensive products to high-value, advanced technology products. But more than other advanced economies, the United States shifted away from advanced manufacturing, maintaining a consistent trade balance only in aerospace. Only recently have the negative consequences of this shift away from manufacturing been widely recognized: consequences that include precarious defense production, drug shortages, lost wages, declining communities, and missed opportunities. In too many cases, game-changing inventions emerging from U.S. labs have become blockbuster products manufactured somewhere else.

Factors Contributing to U.S. Manufacturing Decline

Generating knowledge but not wealth

Investments in basic research generate knowledge—scientific discoveries and engineering inventions. Innovation—technological and business—is the process of transforming a promising idea into a new product or a process at a large enough scale to meet societal needs. Investments in translational research generate engineering methods and manufacturing know-how to create national wealth and security. Unless the nation makes large and sustained investments in translational R&D, we will continue to offshore our innovation and manufacturing even if we double our investments in basic research or science.

The benefits derived from federal support for R&D are clear. Starting in the 2010s, nearly one-third of U.S. patented inventions relied on federal government funding.5 For example, research supported by the Department of Defense (DOD) underlies touch screens, the Global Positioning System (GPS), and other technologies used in smart phones. Research supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) underlies lithium-ion batteries, hydraulic fracturing, solar panels, and light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Research supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) underlies biopharmaceuticals, advanced prosthetics, and gene therapy. But these R&D investments made by the American taxpayers have generated significantly more national wealth in other countries than they have in the United States. Because many of the products resulting from these R&D breakthroughs are manufactured abroad. All of the economic activity associated with that production—factory construction, capital equipment investment, and wages across entire supply chains, as well as the associated multiplier effect—created wealth and spurred economic development in foreign countries, not here in the United States.

On the other hand, aerospace—an industry in which the U.S. continues to lead in advanced technology—is an instructive example of the power of strategic, long-term government support. Aerospace is the last major industry that continues to maintain a strong trade surplus in the United States. Not surprisingly, the aerospace industry is also more dependent on government customers (mostly the DOD) and is the beneficiary of substantial government R&D investments in basic, translational, and applied research. The aerospace industry is the successful beneficiary of a de facto industrial policy to support an industry critical to national defense.

Continued federal support for R&D is essential to American invention. But if U.S. industry does not manufacture the resulting innovations, most of the economic benefits are lost to other countries. Imagine how many millions of jobs were created abroad from products largely invented in the United States over in the past two decades. No smart phones are made here, and China dominates global production of solar panels, lithiumion batteries, and unmanned aerial vehicles (drones). There are other consequences to offshoring advanced manufacturing as well. For instance, growing dependence on pharmaceutical imports has led to recurring shortages of critical drugs such as Heparin.

In addition, offshoring manufacturing greatly diminishes the nation’s long-term capacity for innovation. Consider flat-panel displays such as those used in televisions. The technologies that enable most flat-panel displays were invented by U.S. companies and universities, emerging from basic research funded by the federal government. But few factories for LCD and LED large diameter flat panel displays were ever opened in the United States.6 Without that production experience, U.S. companies have been unable to manufacture the next generation of flat and flexible displays, despite significant R&D investments by the U.S. military.7

The unfortunate reality is that the United States is at the forefront of enabling scientific understanding, but lags when it comes to producing the resulting global output. Our inability to scale emerging technologies is not due to high wages and strict regulations, but to the loss of our “industrial commons”—i.e., the investment, manufacturing knowledge, suppliers, and skills needed to advance products beyond the concept stage. Indeed, nations such as Germany, Japan and South Korea have robust advanced manufacturing sectors despite also having higher wages, stricter regulations, higher levels of automation and higher taxes than the United States. These countries are weathering China’s rise far better than the United States. The difference is that multinational corporations based in these countries are not as focused on quarterly profits as U.S multinationals. These foreign corporations therefore often have longer investment time horizons, with greater concern for the interests of multiple stakeholders rather than just shareholders. In fact, many of these foreign corporations have been investing in manufacturing facilities in the United States, attracted by the large U.S. market and unencumbered by the same emphasis on financial objectives as U.S. corporations. Some of these same corporations are also taking on significant technical and market risk by investing in nascent but promising technologies developed in the United States. In many cases, these corporations believe that they can leverage the engineering skill and the manufacturing capabilities in their home countries—capabilities that have been lost in the United States—to scale these technologies abroad and realize a profit.

It is important to note that for advanced technologies, a common argument in favor of offshoring manufacturing—lower labor costs—does not hold. Labor is a minor share of production costs for virtually all advanced technology products. Production processes for new advanced technologies are sophisticated and highly automated, and even previously labor-intensive processes such as semiconductor packaging and circuit-board assembly are now fully automated. In the short term, after having lost decades of manufacturing experience, American companies do indeed face challenges in finding the requisite skills and support infrastructure to reshore crucial parts of the value chain for advanced electronics manufacturing. But in the long term, there is no reason why the United States cannot compete with other countries in this arena. Indeed, we must start to compete now, or risk repeating the pattern for critical emerging technologies such as 5G communications, quantum information systems, advanced energy storage, and synthetic biology.

Gaps in the national innovation cycle

The United States still leads the world across a broad spectrum of discoveries, publications, and citations. Being the best in the world in science is important—but it’s not sufficient to ensure success. As a nation, we’re not investing sufficient public resources in turning these basic discoveries into new products and processes. Gaps in our nation’s innovation cycle, from basic research to manufacturing, help explain why the United States is not capturing the full value of its investments in R&D. These gaps include:

  1. Brain drain. The United States has long been dependent on foreign graduate students in science and engineering (S&E). Over one-third of S&E doctoral degrees (56% in engineering) from U.S. universities are awarded to foreign students, a figure that is projected to grow to 50% in 2020 and beyond. Historically, most of these students have stayed and worked in the United States for at least 10 years after graduation, but there is evidence that this pattern may be changing as opportunities increase in students’ home countries. In particular, the Chinese government provides tuition and scholarships for many of its students to pursue advanced degrees in the United States with the expectation that those students return home after graduation. Many do, taking with them the cutting-edge knowledge, research experience, and results gained from their work.
  2. Foreign investments in translational R&D. The U.S. provides plenty of funding for basic science, but relatively little to support development and scale-up of commercial products. U.S. research institutions therefore partner with foreign entities to access capital and infrastructure needed to advance home-grown emerging technologies. Foreign investment often fills the gap. Many academic researchers establish research labs at foreign institutions to access funding needed to develop technologies created with initial support from U.S. federal agencies, sometimes in contradiction to U.S. laws and institutional policies.
  3. Willingly giving away intellectual property (IP). While IP theft by foreign competitors is an important concern, most instances of American IP use abroad are U.S. companies willingly licensing IP and U.S. startups voluntarily exporting their IP for production abroad, frequently by contract manufacturers in China. Foreign entities also access promising technologies from U.S. research institutions (as stated above), invest directly in high-risk, high-reward U.S. startups, and buy U.S. companies with specialized production processes (thereby gaining access to new technologies).
  4. Lack of investment, skills and know-how. Scaling new technologies to volume production is costly and often requires engineering skills, production know-how, and a comprehensive supply base that is not readily available in the United States. Investors therefore frequently push startups to produce in China. A recent study of 150 hardware startups based on MIT technology found that none scaled production domestically mainly the “industrial commons” (see previous section) needed to do so was not available.

For decades, our “strategy” has been to fund basic research and leave the follow-on activities to the magic hand of the free-market. As these gaps in the innovation cycle emerged, it has become increasingly clear that a new national initiative is need to convert research output into successful products and competitive industrial sectors in this country.

Conflating science with engineering

Science is not the same as engineering. Engineering involves not just analysis and discovery, but also synthesis and innovation aimed at turning abstract ideas into tangible products. Too frequently, engineering research at American institutions is hypothesisdriven rather than problem- or application-driven. This results in arcane, highly specialized investigations that lead to journal publications but little practical benefit.

Distinguishing between science and engineering may seem trivial but actually has profound effects on national R&D investments and outcomes. How a government allocates its resources among the two disciplines is both a reflection of and an influence on the prevailing national mindset.

The United States is already behind many foreign competitors in funding practical engineering research. Federal spending on manufacturing-related R&D is difficult to determine precisely due to insufficient information and inconsistent labeling. Estimates range from $773 million to $3.7 billion.8 A recent analysis by MForesight estimates that in 2017, $796 million of federal R&D spending could be reasonably attributed to manufacturing. Most of this money is federal spending through DOE’s Advanced Manufacturing Office, NSF’s Advanced Manufacturing Program, and DOD’s Manufacturing Technology (ManTech) programs. The remainder is federal funding (from DOD, DOE, and the Department of Commerce) and required non-federal cost share for the Manufacturing USA institutes. By comparison, Germany spends $4.34 billion on “Industrial Production and Technology” research (six times U.S. spending). Japan and South Korea spend three and eight times as much, respectively. 

Some would argue that manufacturing-related translational research is the role of private companies. However, American Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), other than in the semiconductor and pharmaceutical industries, do not invest much in the translational R&D needed to mature the nascent technologies coming out of basic research and to mature manufacturing capabilities needed to scale up technologies of the future. Over three-quarters of business R&D is development focused on incremental product improvements.

It is also important to recognize that the large companies that conduct the vast majority of R&D in the American private sector have interests that extend beyond the United States. Many of America’s largest OEMs derived between half and two-thirds of their revenue from foreign sales in 2018—including Apple (58%), HP (65%), GE (62%), IBM (63%), and Caterpillar (58%).9 Many of these companies employ more than half of their total workforce outside the U.S. and have more than half of their corporate assets outside the U.S. These companies have also been cutting costs by offshoring manufacturing and, increasingly, moving R&D abroad to their foreign affiliates. They cannot be counted on to restore American manufacturing.

Market failures

Restoring U.S. manufacturing leadership requires the public sector to step in to correct a market failure. Short-term profit incentives will drive the private sector to continue offshoring manufacturing (and R&D) as long as it is economically favorable—and it is. American firms are not concerned with the societal benefits that flow from domestic production in the form of jobs, national wealth, and national security. The manufacturing sector offers a wide range of job opportunities for blue-collar production workers and supervisors, as well as for white-collar researchers, design and manufacturing engineers, accountants, and business managers. In 2017, the average U.S. manufacturing worker earned $84,832 in pay and benefits, 27% more than the average worker in non-farm industries, and the multiplier effects from manufacturing exceed those of most other sectors. Manufacturing’s economic footprint is nearly three times as large as its share of direct economic output (value added in 2018 was 11.3% of GDP), and more than four times as large as its share of total U.S. employment. A significant portion of the domestic rise in income inequality, the long-term stagnation of personal income in the United States, and the redistribution of national wealth to coastal states is attributable to the loss of manufacturing employment, especially in the Midwest. Because the societal benefits of domestic manufacturing exceed the concentrated benefits of offshore manufacturing, the U.S. government has a critical role to play in realigning incentives.

Past efforts

Multiple defense programs and initiatives exist to address critical manufacturing issues in the United States. These include the Manufacturing Technology (ManTech) program, Title III, armories, the Manufacturing USA institutes, and the Defense Innovation Unit. Most of these are long-established programs that can at best address defense-specific production issues. They have not and will not arrest the long-term erosion of the U.S. innovation ecosystem and decline of broader U.S. manufacturing.

The Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) at NIST is one of the few nondefense programs targeting manufacturers. Created in the late 1980s and analogous to the Agricultural Extension Service, MEP provides business and technical assistance to the nation’s small and medium-sized manufacturers. Current funding is about $140 million, but through much of its history, MEP has faced strong opposition from Republican administrations as an example of “industrial policy”. Other advanced countries invest far more on programs to support SMMs and have had significantly better success than the U.S. in maintaining a strong manufacturing sector. Germany, for instance, invests 20 times as much as the United States on manufacturing extension services. Japan invests even more.

Beginning in 2014, the most recent initiative launched to benefit domestic manufacturing, the Manufacturing USA institutes illustrate both the extent of the challenge and the need for a more comprehensive approach. Currently there are 14 institutes, addressing a range of specific production issues and technology segments. Each institute is a public-private partnership that focuses on promoting robust and sustainable manufacturing research and development in a specific, promising advanced manufacturing technology area. The program advances American manufacturing innovation by creating the infrastructure needed to allow U.S. industry and academia to work together to solve industry-relevant manufacturing problems in research and development, technology transition, workforce training, and education.

The Manufacturing USA institutes are a worthwhile concept and deliver value for the niches that they address. But there are three main reasons why these institutes are insufficient to solve the broader manufacturing issues facing the United States. First, there are simply not enough institutes to have much impact across the national manufacturing sector. Federal funding for the institutes is less than $200 million and the total number of member companies, fewer than 2000, is less than one percent of U.S. manufacturers.31 Second, many of the institutes have yet to focus adequately on advancing technology and manufacturing readiness levels. Most of the institutes remain in start-up mode, focusing on building facilities and laboratories and increasing membership. Third, the scale of these institutes is such that only the largest corporations can provide sufficient matching funds and much of that has been in-kind support; larger cash contributions by members would increase research flexibility and strengthen members’ commitment to achieving tangible outcomes.

The NMF would address shortcomings these existing programs by creating a comprehensive support system for the nation’s manufacturing sector. A band-aid approach—spending more on the MEP program or creating a few new Manufacturing USA institutes, for example—will not restore the eroded industrial commons. A new agency with a national strategy and adequate and sustained investment could if we can act with some urgency. Other nations are not standing still.

Proposed Action: Establish a National Manufacturing Foundation

Based on research conducted in 2018 by MForesight,10 the U.S. manufacturing community agrees that bold steps are needed to ensure that the challenges facing U.S. manufacturing are met quickly and aggressively. Market forces alone will not achieve the needed change. In fact, market forces have made manufacturing challenges worse over time. With sustained, strategic investments, the United States can regain fundamental manufacturing capabilities, rebuild its industrial commons, ensure a return on federal investments in R&D, capitalize on technology changes broadly affecting manufacturing, establish leadership in new industries, and restore the broad-based supplier networks that are essential to economic and national security. The objective is not to re-shore lost industries but to rebuild our lost capabilities and capacities to establish and grow industries of the future.

An overarching recommendation in Manufacturing Prosperity is to establish a new federal agency, the National Manufacturing Foundation (NMF), to oversee and coordinate the federal government’s manufacturing-related investments, initiatives, and policies. Currently, no single federal agency has the health of the nation’s manufacturing as its primary mission. Although existing agencies have programs to support manufacturers (mostly targeting defense production) these programs are scattered, uncoordinated, and underfunded relative to the need. Most importantly, these small programs are always subordinate to the primary mission of their managing agency, be it defense, energy, labor, etc. Justifying programs to support manufacturing solely on the basis of national defense disregards the crucial high-wage employment, innovation, and wealth-building that only a strong, balanced commercial manufacturing sector can provide. A robust manufacturing sector is also essential to lessen our dependence on foreign countries for defense-critical technologies and security. And finally, the DOD alone can no longer build/rebuild the domestic industrial base on its own—defense procurement needs today are dwarfed by global commercial markets.

Although it might be politically easier to simply increase funding for existing manufacturing-support programs and to increase spending on engineering research, the results would be suboptimal. Such efforts would lack focus and likely lack the resources and breadth needed to make a meaningful difference. A separate, independent agency is essential to ensuring a bright future for U.S. manufacturing. Similar steps have been taken before. Consider DOE, the NIH, and the National Aeronautics and Space Association (NASA). Each of these agencies was established pursuant to a federal determination that the sectors they manage (energy, healthcare, and aerospace, respectively) are critical to national well-being and so deserve large, focused government resources to ensure long-term American leadership. These agencies have been successful in achieving this goal. Similarly, if national leaders agree that the United States must also be a global leader in manufacturing, then creating a National Manufacturing Foundation is a necessary step.

The NMF would develop and implement a national strategy to achieve a world-leading manufacturing sector and would drive federal policy, programs, and sustained investments in accordance with this strategy. Certain existing programs such as the Hollings Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) and Manufacturing USA would be transferred to the NMF. Other existing programs—for instance, defense-related programs—would retain their current organizational structure in order to avoid unnecessary disruption. The NMF would ensure close coordination among these programs. Most importantly, the NMF would provide strategic direction, fill programmatic gaps, maintain long-term focus, and track metrics to ensure federal efforts are making the expected difference in domestic manufacturing.

Specifically, the NMF would do the following:

  1. Engage with other federal S&T agencies to set technology priorities, mature promising product and process technologies funded through other federal agencies, access relevant expertise, and coordinate funding to ensure that promising technologies receive full support from discovery and invention to commercial-scale domestic production.
  2. Invest in translational R&D to help advance emerging technologies beyond the pilot stage. This would include awarding grants and contracts to U.S. universities and other research institutions to support translational engineering (not science) research and manufacturing process technologies common to multiple industrial applications. This would also include establishment of a series of Translational Research Centers (TRCs) affiliated with universities. TRCs would focus on advancing technology and manufacturing readiness of emerging technologies in order to enable successful hardware start-ups and to transform research results to new products and processes manufactured in the United States.
  3. Build connections between hardware start-ups and other federal agencies, especially the DOD, to support translational research in defense-critical technologies. This would include leveraging federal purchasing power and the federal government’s role as a customer to help American companies procure financing for plants and equipment to establish and ramp up production of new technologies.
  4. Facilitate public-private partnerships to create Manufacturing Investment Funds (MIFs). These MIFs would fill gaps in existing venture-capital markets, providing sufficient funding for hardware start-ups to scale production in the United States beyond pilot plants.
  5. Support small and medium-sized manufacturers (SMMs) through technical assistance and financial support: including loans, grants, loan guarantees, and tax incentives. As the foundation of manufacturing value chains and the geographic distribution of diverse industrial clusters, it is essential that SMMs have the capacity to upgrade equipment, train staff, and fully participate in Industry 4.0.
  6. Grow engineering and technical talent at all levels by significantly increasing federally funded graduate fellowships in engineering for U.S. citizens, partnering with state and local governments to increase the number of four-year engineering technology degree programs and to expand successful apprenticeship and skills-training programs.

This 6-point action plan is designed to address multiple shortcomings in the current U.S. manufacturing-innovation ecosystem. But to succeed, this plan must be complemented by policies ensuring that products based on the nation’s R&D investments are manufactured domestically. In particular, we recommend a binding rule that if the intellectual property for a product or process is developed based on federally funded R&D, then that product or process must be manufactured substantially (e.g., a 75% minimum value-add) in the United States, without any exceptions or waivers.11

Implementation

To accomplish these goals and fulfill its mission, we recommend funding the NMF with at least 5% of total federal R&D funding, or roughly $7.5 billion per year. These funds should be appropriated to the NMF as part of an increase in total R&D funds, not as a carve out. This could be reasonably accomplished by starting with first-year funding of $1 billion, then growing the NMF rapidly over 3–5 years until the 5% goal is met. To put these numbers in perspective, consider that the U.S. IP Commission has estimated the cost to the U.S. economy of IP theft, counterfeit goods, and pirated software by Chinese actors alone at nearly $2 billion per day. If we are serious about protecting our IP, bolstering our economy, and increasing defense preparedness, investing an additional 5% of federal R&D to create an NMF is necessary and urgent. Simply spending more on existing programs (e.g., doubling every existing S&T program for the next 10 years) will result in comparable costs but will not result in improved domestic industrial competitiveness—nor will it position the United States to establish the industries of the future. The NMF is the missing piece in our federal S&T programs.

An effective operational model is essential to meet stated goals. This not only includes sensible administrative structures and talented administrative personnel, but also strong mechanisms for engaging experienced engineers and business leaders. These experts would engage with researchers to identify promising technologies, design and conduct necessary translational research, and build the financial, legal, and technical mechanisms needed to transfer production to U.S.-based factories.

Metrics are also needed to assess progress on the NMF’s overall objectives of strengthening domestic manufacturing and advancing commercialization of new technologies emerging from federally funded R&D. Metrics to consider include the number of technologies successfully reaching commercial production, number of jobs created in the manufacturing sector, number of new manufacturing facilities built in the United States., domestic availability of critical defense technologies, exports of advanced technologies, and returns on investment for both public and private stakeholders. Programs and initiatives that fail to demonstrate progress according to these metrics should be adjusted or terminated.

Aggressive action is needed to ensure that any new innovation supports domestic job creation and other economic-development goals in the United States. As stated above, the United States should encourage domestic production through minimal licensing fees and through government-procurement contracts. Legislation may be needed to ensure that any technology based on federally funded R&D must be scaled (e.g., a 75% minimum value add) in the United States. The federal government must provide create clear, meaningful incentives to manufacture new hardware technologies in the United States—though it should not matter whether or not the entity that scales the technology is headquartered in America. In fact, many foreign manufacturers, such as BAE Systems (UK), Thyssenkrupp (Germany), Dassault Systems (France), and Ericsson (Sweden) have recently made large investments in the U.S., joining companies such as Toyota, Honda, Siemens, and Hitachi that have invested in U.S. manufacturing for decades. Such investments must be further encouraged.

Government has played an indispensable role in American industrial development throughout history. Federal investments in basic and translational R&D, combined with early defense procurements, enabled creation of the aviation industry, semiconductors, computers, and the internet. Other federal investments led to horizontal drilling of shale gas/oil human-genome sequencing and CRISPR, and most of our advanced medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and treatments. The leading U.S.-manufactured exports today are aircraft and weapons—areas in which the federal government invests considerably in basic and translational R&D, and areas in which the government is the dominant customer. 12

Congressional Action

The concept of establishing an NMF is receiving bipartisan support in the current U.S. Congress. Specific legislation is being developed to create the NMF and clearly define its role and mission. Senator Gary Peters (D-MI) has proposed the creation of a National Institute of Manufacturing (essentially the same as an NMF), modeled on the National Institutes of Health, that would consolidate existing programs and invest in translational R&D to fill the gaps in the innovation cycle. Other ideas are being discussed in Congress that could strengthen federal support for U.S. manufacturing.

Responses to Possible Criticisms

“Creating and funding a new agency is difficult in a tight budget climate”

Although a new agency would not fit within current budgetary constraints, the NMF should be considered a long-term investment in U.S. prosperity, not an additional cost burden. By defining the NMF budget as a percentage of the total R&D budget, funds would vary as Congress determines R&D appropriations. Perhaps a more important consideration is that the status quo is not sustainable. The nation’s R&D enterprise cannot continue to focus on basic science research with limited capabilities to engineer and manufacture results domestically. Eventually, political support for continued R&D spending could wane, leaving both the overall economy and the defense industry worse off.

“Government should not be picking winners and losers”

The argument that the government would be “picking winners and losers” by supporting domestic manufacturing is an argument that does not hold water. If anything, the opposite is true: without a robust domestic manufacturing sector, other countries have the power to pick our winners and losers by deciding which technologies developed here to mature and manufacture. The “picking winners and losers” argument also does not bear historical scrutiny. The United States has strongly favored specific industries in the past, through R&D spending, tax policy, and other policy levers. American leadership in industries such as aerospace, health care, oil and gas, and defense has depended on long-term government support. The fact that many advanced industries are now threatened by a weakening domestic production base and increasing dependence on imports indicates the need for a proactive role by government to restore American manufacturing. Furthermore, manufacturing ensures national security and provides greater employment opportunities for a larger number of people at higher wages than almost any other economic activity. Support for manufacturing will help boost percapita incomes, reduce income inequality, and restore the American Dream.

“There are so many manufacturing programs already. Why create a new one?”

The federal government has created a variety of manufacturing programs over the decades, and the DOD has long had internal programs to support defense manufacturers. Yet despite these programs, American manufacturing broadly has been declining three decades. None of the programs created to support manufacturing in the United States have had sufficient scale to make an impact beyond the edges. The 56 manufacturing programs across 11 federal agencies are not coordinated and are not motivated to do so. Unlike major foreign competitors such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea, the United States has never established a comprehensive set of programs and policies to nurture and support its manufacturing base and the innovation ecosystem. The United States cannot afford to continue a piecemeal approach to restoring its much-eroded industrial commons.

The NMF would also play an as-yet-unfilled role in ensuring that promising developments based on federally funded R&D are matured and ultimately produced at full scale in the United States. Too often, promising technologies emerging from basic research funding from one agency are sit idle instead of being commercialized. This may be because funding for continued development does not fit the mission of the original funding agency, other agencies that could fund further development are unaware of the new technologies, and the inventors do not know how to engage other agencies for continued funding. The NMF would be responsible for eliminating this situation through strategic coordination of S&T agencies.

Potential champions and advocates

The recommendation to create an NMF is the result of MForesight’s discussions (totaling more than 1,200 hours) around the country with nearly 200 industry leaders, academics, investors, and state and local economic developers. These discussions revealed an urgent desire for a coordinated, long-term, and well-funded national manufacturing initiative, led by the NMF, to compete with the ambitious plans and actions of international competitors, such as China 2025.39 Potential champions and advocates also include policymakers concerned about national security challenges, including the House and Senate Armed Services Committees; the DOD; the International Trade Administration; trade organizations including the National Defense Industries Association, the Association for Manufacturing Technology, and the National Association of Manufacturers; professional societies including the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers; and advocacy groups and think tanks including the Alliance for American Manufacturing, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, the Brookings Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Center for American Progress.

Opportunities for complementary action

Creating the NMF would clearly indicate that the government is ready to support manufacturing. But the weaknesses in the national industrial base are too widespread for the federal government to solve on its own. Rather, the federal government must recognize the unique part that other sectors can and must play to truly position the United States as a global leader in manufacturing. Private industry can attract matching funds, expertise, and commitments to maintain and build factories in the United States. The private financial sector—investment bankers, venture capitalists, and retail banks— can provide the financial capital needed to scale production at home. Universities can commit to channeling research results and IP to domestic producers, not foreign competitors. Universities can also ramp up efforts to recruit domestic engineering students, and can strengthen investments in engineering training and degree programs. OEMs can restore apprenticeships and internship programs to train the needed skilled workforce. State and local governments can provide matching funds, ramp up educational programs for skilled trades, and offer incentives to encourage development of manufacturing clusters. State and local governments can also work with the NMF to aggregate and accelerate place-based manufacturing initiatives for the benefit of the entire nation. The NMF provides a clear vehicle through which the federal government can work to ensure that all of these roles are filled.

Conclusion

The challenges facing American manufacturing have been building over decades as more and more industries have offshored production or been overwhelmed by imports. Dependence on imports matters relatively little for low-technology products.

But when that dependence encroaches on knowledge-intensive industries and defense production, the prospects for maintaining American defense superiority and a high-income, prosperous society come into question. Without a robust manufacturing sector, the United States cannot realize the full value—in terms of economic growth, job creation, national security, and capacity for continued innovation—of its investments in research and development.

Meanwhile, other countries are not standing still. China has set up a $21 billion national investment fund to promote the transformation and upgrading of its manufacturing industry. Japan, Germany, and South Korea all far outpace the United States when it comes to manufacturing investment and capabilities.

It is high time for the United States to restore its lost industrial commons and reposition itself as a global leader in product innovation, engineering, and commercialization. Establishing the National Manufacturing Foundation is a necessary and important step towards achieving this goal.

National Energy Storage Initiative

The next administration should establish a national initiative built around ambitious goals to accelerate development and deployment of dramatically improved energy-storage technologies. Developing such technologies would help establish a strategic new domestic manufacturing sector. Deploying such technologies would expand the range of low-carbon pathways available to fight climate change—especially those relying on variable renewable energy resources, like wind and solar power. Deploying such technologies would also improve the performance of smartphones, drones, and other vital electronic tools of the 21st century.

Challenge and Opportunity

Electricity systems, no matter how big or small, must instantaneously balance supply and demand, generation and load—or suffer blackouts. This imperative has long motivated scientists and technologists to seek the holy grail of affordable, reliable, durable, and safe energy storage. Yet, despite many decades of efforts, batteries remain expensive, fickle, short-lived, and dangerous for many applications. Other forms of energy storage, like thermal and compressed-air storage, suffer from major drawbacks as well. 

Radically improved energy-storage technologies would help the nation and the world solve some of their most pressing problems. Most urgently, improved energy storage would expand the range of low-carbon pathways to fight climate change and reduce dependence on fossil fuels by allowing the electricity grid to accommodate higher levels of renewable energy. Improved energy storage would allow electric vehicles (EVs) to better meet drivers’ expectations for value and performance, thereby speeding up EV adoption and further helping to address the climate challenge. Better batteries would also let people stop worrying about whether their electronic devices are charged, improving security and strengthening the economy in a world where these and other connected devices are ubiquitous.

Given the importance and magnitude of these opportunities, energy storage has become a critical industry of the future—one that nations around the world seek to capture. China and the European Union, for instance, are making significant strategic investments to build domestic capabilities for development and manufacturing of energy storage technologies. These and other international competitors are challenging the U.S. energy innovation ecosystem—our research universities, national laboratories, start-up companies, and established technology firms to invent, commercialize, and scale-up next-generation energy-storage technologies.

Opportunities by sector

Electric power

The rapidly dropping cost of wind and solar power has opened major pathways to decarbonize electricity systems. But these power generation technologies are variable: that is, their output fluctuates by the hour, day, and season. As the renewable share of generation rises on a grid, such fluctuations make balancing supply and demand increasingly difficult, threatening brownouts and blackouts. Grid-scale energy storage has the potential to address this challenge. Although one energy-storage technology (lithium-ion batteries) has been improved to the point that it has begun to make a significant impact on the grid, major gaps remain. Fully solving the grid-storage problem requires technologies that are much cheaper and last much longer than current systems. Grid-storage technologies must be able to hold enough electricity to power a grid for a week or more at a cost of just a few cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), while operating only a few times each year.

Transportation

Lithium-ion batteries are also kick-starting the electrification of transportation. Their declining cost is one of the key factors helping to bring EVs into the mainstream. EVs are cleaner than gasoline-powered cars if they are charged on low-carbon electricity grids. EVs are also easier to maintain and cheaper to operate. However, the ultimate triumph of EVs in the auto market is far from assured. Batteries that are safer, rely on more abundant materials, allow vehicles to go 500 miles or more on a charge, last for at least a decade, and are easily recharged and recycled would make the success of EVs more likely, with huge payoffs for the global climate.

Electronics

The suite of technologies sometimes lumped together as the “fourth industrial revolution” is another broad domain that would benefit from advances in energy storage. Robots, drones, sensors, and smartphones—and the systems by which they process and exchange information—have become essential tools in modern society.

Most of these electronics are more useful when they can operate without having to maintain a constant connection to the grid. Although batteries are becoming lighter and more efficient, the demands being placed on them are also rising, straining the limits of lithium-ion technology. An order-of-magnitude leap in the energy density of batteries— the amount of electricity stored in a given mass or volume—would unlock a diverse array of valuable new applications for a wide range of electronic devices. For instance, drones, whether they are being used by combat forces, farmers, or utility crews, would be able to stay aloft for days and carry more sophisticated payloads, such as weapons or sensors.

Domestic manufacturing

Paradigm-shifting improvements in energy storage technologies would also create opportunities to build domestic manufacturing capacity in a growing industry of the future. The supply chain for making lithium-ion batteries migrated to East Asia years ago. The largest battery factory for EVs in the United States, Tesla’s “giga-factory” in Reno, NV, is run by a joint venture with the Japanese-headquartered firm Panasonic. Tesla has been unable to fully master the finicky methods used to make battery cells. Other U.S.- based EV assembly plants rely on Asian-headquartered battery contractors as well. 

Nonetheless, the United States continues to generate new energy storage technologies, including some that could supplant the current generation of lithium-ion batteries. For example, Sila Nanotechnologies, founded in 2011 and based in the San Francisco Bay Area, raised $215 million in 2019 to scale up its manufacturing activity. A half-dozen other U.S.-based battery start-ups have also raised large funding rounds in the past year. Investors include not only venture-capital firms, but also big companies based in Europe and Asia as well as North America. It remains to be seen where the battery supply chain of the future will be located.

Plan of Action

The next administration, building on the Department of Energy’s (DOE) recently announced “Energy Storage Grand Challenge,” should establish a National Energy Storage Initiative (NESI) built around ambitious goals to accelerate development and deployment of dramatically improved energy-storage technologies. These goals should include widespread adoption of:

The NESI should also seek to achieve economic and international goals such as:

The NESI will require deep collaboration among key federal agencies and with the private sector, academia, and states and localities. This initiative would galvanize the still-thriving energy-storage science and technology community in the United States, spurring the development of better energy-storage technologies and ensuring that the next generation of storage devices are built here. The case for the NESI is two-fold. First, expanded research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) funding is needed to address market failures in the energy-storage domain. Expanded funding would enable scientific and mission agencies to pursue a diverse array of promising opportunities that have gone un- or under-explored. The result would be new energy-storage materials and concepts, breaking through barriers that have limited current technologies. Second, federal resources and leadership—as well as deep engagement with the private industrial and financial sectors and with key states and localities—are crucial for domestic scale-up and manufacturing made possible by this expanded RD&D portfolio. International competition surrounding energy storage is already fierce. China, in particular, has made no secret of its plan to dominate the global battery and EV industries. The United States must assert leadership on energy storage or risk being left behind.

Implementation

The NESI should include four key components: (1) White House leadership and coordination, (2) a federal RD&D budget commitment, (3) increased agency participation and use of an array of policy tools, and (4) mobilization of non-federal actors to undertake aligned actions.

White House leadership and coordination

An Executive Order (EO) from the White House, implemented by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), would be the foundational action to launch the NESI. White House leadership and attention would catalyze implementing agencies to identify lead units and staff members for the interagency initiative and to undertake internal coordination among their component units (e.g., the science and applied energy offices within DOE). OSTP, NSTC, and agency staff would spearhead the initiative, driving its progress throughout the executive branch and mobilizing support in Congress, industry, science, and the public.

Budget

Delivering on the aforementioned goals would require, at a minimum, tripling current spending on energy storage RD&D programs over five years. The most comprehensive estimate of federal RD&D spending on energy storage comes from a 2015 OMB interagency “crosscut”: $300 million. Increasing spending to $900 million or more per year would allow participating agencies to take the following actions:

Increased agency participation and use of other policy tools

In addition to DOE, the Departments of Agriculture (USDA), Commerce (DOC), Defense (DOD), Health and Human Services (HHS), Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and Transportation (DOT) as well as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) should be mobilized to accelerate innovation in energy storage. DOC, DOD, HHS, and NSF should collaborate with DOE in expanding the energy storage RD&D enterprise. The other agencies, along with DOE and DOD, should use policy tools such as procurement, regulation, and investment support (e.g., loan guarantees) to help “pull” nascent energy-storage technologies into markets and to assist in establishing domestic production capacity. Tax incentives, legislated by Congress and administered by executive agencies, may also be helpful to accelerate market growth and drive down costs for particular technologies.

Mobilization of non-federal actors

Academia and industry are critical to the success of energy-storage RD&D, manufacturing, and adoption. The vast scope of energy-storage applications amplifies the importance of engaging with a wide variety of end-user industries—especially power-system vendors, utilities, electronics manufacturers, and automakers—as well as producers of storage technology. States and localities, many of which have announced ambitious goals for grid-scale storage, should also be incorporated into the NESI. A few states could house federally supported manufacturing and innovation “clusters” for energy-storage solutions. All states could accelerate adoption of improved energystorage technologies by fostering receptive markets: for instance, by reforming electricity regulation.

Precedents

The proposed NESI is similar to successful efforts such as the Clinton administration’s nanotechnology initiative and the Obama administration’s advanced manufacturing initiative. Such initiatives mobilize and coordinate multiple agencies in pursuit of technological capabilities that will contribute significantly to a set of broadly agreed national goals. Success depends on strong presidential commitment at the start and cultivation of stakeholders across partisan, regional, and sectoral lines over time. Effective technology initiatives have major on-the-ground impacts and ultimately become self-sustaining. Two keys to success are (1) White House leadership and attention to foster interagency cooperation, and (2) increased agency budgets to limit resistance from incumbent programs.

Federal funding for energy-storage science and technology has a long track record, particularly with regard to basic research. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) expanded federal energy-storage funding considerably in the 2010s. ARRA funding supported establishment of the Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E), which has become a major source of funding for applied research and prototype development in energy storage. ARRA funding also supported the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) at Argonne National Laboratory; a collaborative demonstration program within DOE’s Office of Electricity that worked with utilities, states, and local governments; and loan guarantees for battery manufacturing and grid-scale storage projects. 

Many of these investments have paid off handsomely. For instance, an evaluation by the National Academies found that ARPA-E’s funding of energy-storage technology has been “highly productive with respect to accelerating commercialization” and led to the formation of at least six new companies in the field. JCESR was renewed for an additional five years in 2018. However, the demonstration and manufacturing elements of the ARRA-funded push were not sustained, primarily due to ideological objections by the Congressional majority that came in after the 2010 midterm elections. 

The Department of Energy announced an Energy Storage Grand Challenge on January 8, 2020. This initiative is a welcome step toward the broader initiative outlined in this paper. It seeks ambitious advances in technology, rapid commercialization, and the creation of a domestic manufacturing supply chain. But it does not extend beyond DOE, and whether it will be implemented with the appropriate resources and presidential support is uncertain.

International context

Many countries have made energy storage a priority. The European Union has embarked on a multi-billion-dollar battery initiative that led to the establishment of Northvolt, a European-owned battery cell manufacturing start-up. Volkswagen bought 20% of Northvolt and is working with it to build a second cell factory. Energy storage and EVs are among the sectors targeted by China in its Made in China 2025 program. Massive subsidies from all levels of the Chinese government have flowed through a variety of channels to energy storage projects and companies to fulfill this program, helping China become the world’s largest EV market (with more than 50% market share). Korea, Japan, and India are among the other countries undertaking national energy storage initiatives.

Although the global race to advance energy-storage technology is intense, the United States possesses many strengths that would allow a domestic energy-storage effort to succeed. These strengths include outstanding research capabilities at universities and national laboratories, a vibrant start-up ecosystem, and a strong industrial sector. The NESI would provide the leadership, funding, and coordination needed to realize the full potential of these assets. It is also important for the United States to foster international cooperation around science underlying energy-storage technology. Scientific knowledge is a global public good that will be under-provided without the leadership of the world’s top scientific nation.

Stakeholder support

The NESI has a wide range of potential champions and advocates on both sides of the aisle. Congressional Republicans have expressed their support for energy storage through expanded RD&D funding and more ambitious authorizations. The administration’s new grand challenge taps into this legislative support. Environmental advocates on the left of the political spectrum are also supportive, perceiving limited energy storage as the biggest technological barrier to expanded deployment of renewables. Similar enthusiasm may be expected from the research community and investors, as well as from states seeking to build a domestic energy-storage industry. These interests have been frustrated by the “invent here, produce there” outcomes of past breakthroughs, such as lithium-ion batteries.

Technology end users may be less enthusiastic or indifferent. Low prices in the short term may be more important to them than innovation in the long run. They may also see the location and ownership of production facilities as irrelevant or argue that the current global division of labor, in which Asian factories built with cheap public-investment capital supply U.S. needs, is favorable for the United States. Other skeptics may argue that when it comes to supporting expanded deployment of renewables, investing in demand response, larger grids, or other forms of low-carbon electricity generation, such as nuclear power or natural gas plants with carbon capture systems, are better options than energy storage.

Goals and metrics

The overarching (e.g., within 10 years) goal of NESI is to make the United States a major center for energy storage innovation and production. 

One essential short-term step towards achieving this goal is establishing key organizational components of the NESI, such as an interagency working group and a mechanism to engage with non-federal stakeholders, including industry, academia, and states. A second critical step is expanding budgets for relevant federal agencies to put them on a pathway to triple federal funding for energy-storage RD&D. 

In the medium term, metrics such as growth in scientific publications and patents, formation of new energy-storage companies, equity and project investment, product introduction, and manufacturing-cost reduction will provide insights on progress. 

In the long term, success of the NESI should be assessed by the level of market penetration of new energy-storage storage products across application domains including electric power, transportation, and electronics in the context of a growing overall storage market. Success of the NESI should also be assessed through consideration of the international trade balance related to energy storage and adoption of U.S.-developed energy-storage technologies.

Proposed initial steps

The next president should sign an EO establishing the NESI and directing the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to convene a federal interagency task force. The task force should prepare a strategic plan and develop a budget for the initiative in consultation with key stakeholders. The plan should identify technological needs and opportunities and set specific objectives, taking into account global competition and cooperation with respect to energy storage. Congress should support the NESI by appropriating funding needed to implement the strategic plan, and by providing additional authorization as required.

Implementing agencies should pursue energy-storage RD&D as it relates to their respective missions, while collaborating to manage overlaps and avoid gaps. RD&D activities should strengthen the intramural and extramural research and industrial communities. As innovative storage technologies reach maturity, DOC, DOD, and DOE should work with states and regional economic-development agencies to foster markets and develop manufacturing capabilities. Congress should provide tax incentives that help to pull these technologies into the market, thereby driving down cost and expanding deployment.

Conclusion

Energy-storage technologies in widespread use today are not good enough to meet fundamental 21st-century challenges, including climate change, economic growth, and international security. A national initiative to accelerate domestic development and deployment of dramatically improved energy-storage technologies would position the United States to lead the world in addressing these challenges while building its economy. Although global competition in energy storage is fierce, our nation has strong capabilities that—if used strategically—position the United States to catch up with and ultimately surpass its rivals in this vital emerging industry. The NESI provides a pathway for the next president to translate this vision into reality.

Making Computer Science Education Universal for All Students

The next administration should establish a national initiative to accelerate the implementation of rigorous computer science (CS) education for preschool through 12th grade (P–12) students in the United States. The initiative should include investments in evidence-based education pathways that incorporate computational thinking, computer programming (coding), cybersecurity, data science, social impacts of computing, and ethics. CS curricula should prepare students for future careers working with technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, virtual/augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, automation, cybersecurity, and other emerging and future technologies. This initiative will enhance the United States’ global competitiveness, economic growth, and technological innovation, and will better prepare the nation to address pressing challenges such as healthcare, social mobility, climate change, and national security in an increasingly technology-driven and innovation-based world.

Why computer science education?

The United States is facing a talent crisis in computing and information technology (IT). There are currently tens of thousands of open positions—in both the public and private sectors—related to information technology (IT), computing, and cybersecurity, but not enough workers with the skills to fill them. The (ISC), a cybersecurity professional organization, estimates that there is currently a shortage of 500,000 cybersecurity workers in the United States and a shortage of almost 3 million globally. Such gaps are likely to increase. The U.S. Department of Labor projects that there will be 3.5 million computing-related jobs in the United States by 2026. Yet our country’s current educational system will only prepare enough trained CS professionals to meet 19% of the demand. While 67% of projected STEM jobs are related to computing, only 10% of STEM degrees earned by U.S. students are in computing fields. In 2015, international students earned the majority of graduate degrees in mathematics and CS at U.S. universities.1

Preparing students in CS and related subjects is vital for the future of the United States workforce and economy. CS has applications in virtually all industries, including transportation, healthcare, education, entertainment, manufacturing, and financial services. There is also rapidly increasing demand for CS skills in growing areas such as cybersecurity, advanced defense technologies, and machine learning and AI. As such, recent years have seen parents, teachers, states, districts, and the private sector lead a growing movement to expand P–12 CS education. The Obama administration responded in 2016 by launching Computer Science for All (CSforAll), a national effort to increase student access to CS both in and out of school. CSforAll included investment of more than $135 million of existing federal funds into CS education, as well as a fiscal year (FY) 2017 budget request to Congress for more than $4 billion for states and school districts to build on federal investments at the sub-national level.

Yet while CS education enjoys broad bipartisan support and aligns with national goals for economic growth and workforce development, federal leadership, investment, and accountability on this front are still insufficient. Congress has not appropriated adequate funding to support development and implementation of rigorous and equitable CS education for P–12 students nationwide. As a result, access to quality CS education is often limited to affluent schools and students. This places low-income, minority, and rural communities at risk of being left behind. It also means that we as a nation are realizing neither the full potential of all students in the U.S. talent pool nor the global competitive advantage that the diversity of the U.S. population can contribute to technology and innovation. The next administration should address this issue by championing an ambitious, evidence-based, comprehensive, and inclusive CS education initiative. Such an initiative would rapidly and significantly upskill and grow the U.S. technical workforce, increase equity of opportunity and career readiness for millions of youth and their communities, and contribute to a computationally literate and cybersecurity-aware populace.

Challenges in Computer Science Education

There has been a sustained national effort over the last four decades to increase access to and participation in STEM disciplines. Yet opportunities for sequenced, rigorous CS education are limited, and compulsory CS classes remain rare in U.S. formal education. In 2019, just 18% of the Department of Education (ED)’s discretionary and research grants in STEM were awarded to CS-focused programs. While this represents a nontrivial dollar amount ($100 million out of $540 million total), it is important to note that ED has only recently begun to invest in P–12 CS education specifically. Compared to the decades of investments that have focused on developing P–12 pedagogy for other STEM disciplines like math, biology, physics and chemistry, investments in CS education are nascent at best.

Moreover, CS has historically been omitted from ED’s data-collection efforts, list of core STEM subjects, state educational standards, and teacher certification pathways. This inevitably pushes CS to the bottom of the priority list, especially for resource-constrained schools and districts. Less than half of U.S. high schools offered any CS classes in 2019.2 Only about 5,000 U.S. high schools offered Advanced Placement (AP) CS, compared to more than 14,000 schools offering AP Calculus and more than 11,500 offering AP Biology. And even in schools that offer CS, participation and success varies widely by demographic group. Of the 166,000 students who took an AP CS exam during the 2018– 2019 school year, only 29% were girls and only 22% were African-American or Hispanic. While AP CS scores for White and Asian students averaged 3.20 and 3.50 (out of 5.0) respectively, African American students averaged scores of 2.13, Hispanic students 2.45, and Native American/Alaskan Native students 2.38.

These data are especially troubling given that U.S. public schools have shifted to a majority minority (50.3% in 2019) and majority low-income (52.1% in 2016) student population, and women earn 57% of bachelor’s degrees in the U.S. Despite these demographic shifts in the talent pool, and affirmation by multiple research studies that diverse teams improve innovation, problem solving, and productivity,3 the U.S. tech workforce has remained majority White and Asian, and overwhelmingly male. This failure to include all students and capitalize on the competitive advantage that the unique diversity of the U.S. population adversely affects our nation as a whole. Affluent communities are disproportionately able to build robust tech-based local ecosystems— while low-income populations, women, minorities, people with disabilities, and those living in rural areas are excluded from opportunities in technology and innovation and remain sidelined in the global, technology-driven economy. There is a clear need for new approaches to CS education that better serve all populations.

One of the most significant barriers to universal access to P–12 CS education is a lack of qualified CS teachers, especially in rural and tribal schools. To date, most efforts to address the CS teacher shortage have focused on enlisting in-service teachers (often teachers of other STEM subjects like math or science) by providing professional development in CS curricula. This approach is incomplete. Addressing the CS teacher shortage by recruiting existing teachers creates new shortages in other high-need subjects, shortages that are exacerbated by overall attrition of teachers to school administration and to other fields. A comprehensive approach must include preparing a new CS teachers “from the ground up”. Yet the number of new CS teachers graduating from teacher-education programs is woefully low, largely due to the fact that teacher certifications in CS remain novel and preparation programs small. As of 2019, 38 states offered a state teacher certification in CS but just 19 states offer state-approved preservice teacher preparation at their institutions of higher education. From 2015– 2016, only 36 pre-service teachers in the entire United States were prepared to teach CS. More than 11,000 pre-service teachers were prepared to teach mathematics and science in the same year.4

Opportunity

Since the Obama administration’s launch of CSforAll in 2016, the community-led movement for P–12 CS education movement has made significant progress in raising awareness of the need for CS education, establishing educational standards for CS, developing CS courses and curricula, and implementing CS education policies at the state level.5 The number of states that count CS towards high-school graduation has grown from 28 to 48 (plus the District of Columbia), and 34 states have adopted CS standards.

The next administration can and should build on this work. The time is ripe for a “second wave” of CS education—one that expands CS education beyond the circle of early adopters and entrenches CS education as a fundamental component of P–12 education nationwide. Making rigorous, inclusive, universal, and comprehensive P–12 CS education a top priority in the next administration will prepare Americans to succeed in an increasingly automated and digital economy, help build a technology-literate society, increase economic mobility and social equity, and contribute to the talent pool needed to support U.S. cybersecurity and national defense.

Achieving these goals will require the next administration to provide visibility, funding, and resources for CS education. Specifically, the next administration should focus on expanding formal and informal CS learning pathways for all students; training and supporting a robust pool of skilled and highly valued CS educators; and emphasizing ongoing development innovative, evidence-based pedagogy for P–12 CS education. The result will be a world where we don’t need population-specific outreach programs to expand opportunities in CS because CS education and achievement will be an expected norm for all students, from all walks of life.

Proposed Action

A national P–12 CS education initiative should include four key components: (1) White House leadership and coordination, (2) federal budget commitments, (3) increased agency participation and use of diverse policy tools, and (4) mobilization of non-federal actors to undertake complementary actions. The following section expands on each.

White House leadership and coordination

The next administration should work through the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to oversee and strengthen federal support for universal P–12 CS education in the United States. An OSTP-led Interagency Working Group (IWG) should be established to coordinate relevant federal activities, develop a national strategic action plan, and convene non-federal stakeholders who can contribute through public-private partnerships. Agencies represented on the IWG would help identify offices and programs essential to the success of a national P–12 CS education initiative, and would ensure that federal activities are complementary rather than redundant.

Federal budget commitments

Federal spending on CS education to date has largely been limited to CS as a component of STEM. This includes research funding through the National Science Foundation (NSF) and ED’s Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant program; discretionary grants from ED that include CS within the STEM designation; and investment by the Department of Defense (DOD) in military-impacted schools through the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) College Readiness Program for Military Families, DOD Education Activity (DODEA) schools, and the recently formed Defense STEM Education Consortium (DSEC).

But it has become apparent that CS often suffers when lumped in with the other STEM disciplines. Because CS is newer than many STEM disciplines, CS proposals often fail to qualify for funding from federal or state STEM programs. The rapidly evolving state of CS means that many CS programs—and the technologies they teach—are too new to qualify for strongly evidence-based programs such as ED’s What Works Clearinghouse. Additionally, there is a shortage of professionals with CS backgrounds working in federal funding agencies or serving on funding committees. Further, schools and districts without the resources to start a CS program from scratch are often at a disadvantage in applying for awards from funders that require applicants to meet high baseline requirements (e.g., specific teacher qualifications and certifications, established program history, etc.).

To be successful and equitable, a national P–12 CS education initiative must include dedicated funding for CS education distinct from STEM education. Achieving meaningful change would require Congress to invest approximately $4 billion over four years, including funding for:

Increased agency participation

The two agencies most important to a national P–12 CS education initiative are ED and NSF. However, many other federal agencies, offices, and programs could contribute to such an initiative as well. The next administration should make full use of the federal authorities and policy tools at its disposal. Federal efforts that could be leveraged to support CS education nationwide include:

Mobilization of non-federal actors

Engaging non-federal actors is critical to a successful national P–12 CS education initiative. The White House and participating agencies should convene and collaborate with non-federal actors to amplify the impact of such an initiative through public-private partnerships, collaborative campaigns, and co-investments. Key community champions include:

Precedents

A national P–12 CS education initiative would expand on the Obama administration’s comprehensive CS4All initiative launched in 2016, and would also extend efforts by the Trump Administration to direct ED funding towards STEM and CS. Such an initiative would align with the National Science & Technology Council (NSTC)’s STEM Strategic Plan6 of 2018, President Trump’s 2019 Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence,7 and DOD’s science and technology priority areas. Such an initiative also complements established efforts to improve the efficiency of the federal government through technology, efforts such as the Presidential Innovation Fellows and the U.S. Digital Service.

Implementation

This section outlines recommended federal actions that should be taken under the next administration to achieve rigorous, inclusive, universal, and comprehensive P–12 CS education in the United States.

The White House

The next president should sign an executive order launching a national P–12 CS education initiative led by OSTP. OSTP should establish an IWG comprised of federal agency representatives to oversee and coordinate this initiative, including by (1) convening non-federal stakeholders who can contribute through public-private partnerships and (2) developing a strategic national action plan that includes metrics to monitor the initiative’s success. The IWG should report regularly to the Executive Office of the President on the initiative’s progress.

Department of Education

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) should:

National Science Foundation

The National Science Foundation (NSF) should:

Department of Defense

The Department of Defense (DOD) should:

Department of Labor

The Department of Labor (DOL) should:

Other agencies

Many other agencies can contribute to a national P–12 CS education initiative. For instance:

Goals and targets

The initiative described herein will be a success when:

Quantitative targets that can be used to assess progress towards these goals include:

Conclusion

The next administration should build on community-led momentum around CS education by launching a national initiative to establish rigorous, inclusive, and comprehensive CS learning as a standard component of P–12 education in and out of school. CS education enjoys broad bipartisan support, supports federal economic development and workforce goals, and contributes to an educated digital citizenry. Advancing inclusive CS education will increase employability, economic opportunity, and equity for American youth. At the same time, improved CS education will bolster cybersecurity and national defense by preparing Americans to fill critical technical roles in both government and industry, and will foster innovation by the diversifying the technology workforce. Overall, a national P–12 CS education initiative will better prepare our country and our society to address pressing challenges such as healthcare, social mobility, and climate change in an increasingly technology-driven and innovation-based world.