This piece is the first of a series of conversations hosted by FAS CEO Daniel Correa aimed at highlighting issues ripe for deeper discussion, and bringing together thinkers with valuable perspectives on how to drive positive change in public policy. The following transcript has been lightly edited for concision and clarity.

Daniel Correa, FAS CEO: Thank you both so much for joining me for this conversation. Seemay, I’m going to start with you. So you’ve practiced science. You’ve taught and now you are running several organizations that have as their mission a desire to encourage more experimentation, and to provide more funding and support for ambitious, scientific and useful breakthroughs. At the same time, you’ve done a decent amount of writing about how research institutions that perform and support science need to be more experimental.

So I would actually just like to start there. Why is the point about experimental, at the institutional level, so important?

Seemay Chou, co-founder of Arcadia Science and Astera Institute: For a really long time in the U.S., we’ve had just one main type of [research] institution. It’s very monolithic. And I think experimentation is important for a couple of reasons. One is that we don’t actually know: what are the right solutions? And the opposite of what people do is not necessarily correct.  Also, I would argue that there’s not one solution. We need to learn a lot more about the heterogeneity of solutions that could exist that are fit for purpose. It’s very difficult to even explore that space, without just trying things. And what does it mean to do an experiment?

Is there some level of uncertainty where it could fail? Number one, that framing allows you to try many more things that in each case don’t have to hedge as much. Because if you do a bunch of things that hedge, you actually don’t shoot yourself into any new space to actually test some new hypothesis.

There’s so much we don’t know still, because of how few things we’ve tried. 

You have to go far out enough [from institutions] where people actually behave differently, and do something differently, and that creates a level of risk for everybody involved. And then you have to find the kinds of funding sources where they’re okay if it doesn’t go well.

So when are the moments in history where [experimentation] might be the most important? I would argue right now. This is the most important time to do it because the technological and sociological contexts in which we established these institutions has completely blown up. 

Correa: This very much resonates with me. I would love an example of what it looks like to do meaningful experimentation within scientific institutions.

Chou: Why don’t I just draw from my own example? But I’ll caveat it by saying the reason I will draw from my own examples is because I know the most about them. It is not because I think that they’ve fully succeeded, because I think that we’ve gone through a bunch of iterations where most of the experiments that got initiated in the last decade, we don’t actually have enough information to know if they’re full success.

Correa: Caveat accepted.

Chou: At Arcadia, one hypothesis we’re trying to test is that we think that there’s a whole lot of basic science that could be happening in the upper right hand quadrant of Pasteur’s quadrant, which is like a combination between basic and applied.

That is actually why we have set Arcadia up as a for-profit. If we have enough capital and different investment metrics, it’s basically self-funded to want to see a return on investment way later – like we can give it at least a decade. That’s very different from how capital usually flows today in the for-profit sphere.

Then the question is, can we see a win-win here that’s actually both good for science? Because you see more money coming in from the for-profit space, you see better connection with for-profit outcomes, like product outcomes that have true utility in the world. 

It’s very different from what you see in current institutions. It’s not quite “company” and not quite “academia”. There’s no “Oh, let’s start out as a nonprofit and then if it goes well, we’ll become a for profit,” right?

We have to go for it. This is the thesis. We’re going to have to make sure we find the right capital that’s aligned for it, and then we can really try it. And the jury’s still out on whether we’re going to succeed. But what I can tell you is that, I think we would have behaved very differently if we hadn’t done it exactly in this way.  We would have recruited a very different set of people, the outcomes would have been different in terms of the activities that we’re doing and the behaviors we’re seeing. 

Pasteur’s quadrant represents scientific research that aims to improve fundamental uderstanding, while having immediate use for society

If you talk to actual academic scientists, their ultimate deliverable right now is a journal article. That deliverable drives a whole lot of behaviors and activities that happen, because that is the incentive.  Besides money, there’s journal articles and prestige. 

And so that was a test at Arcadia: no more journal articles.  It’s not even an option. How would that fundamentally shake up how people are approaching their science? Incentives alone may not change people – but the most important thing this did was filter for the right people who are willing to approach things differently.

If you look at my track record, I’m not like an open science warrior.  Before this, I was definitely publishing in journals. I knew from my own experience and the scientists around me that this was extremely influential to how we did things, sometimes subconsciously.

So [at Arcadia] we took that off the table, and actually it was remarkable. It was surprising to me the degree to which it changed the game. Even more so than funding – this was number one.

For one, the thing that was the simplest to remove was the ranked authorship hierarchy  that creates an incredibly zero-sum prestige game that really changes the way you think about your cost-benefit analysis of where you’re going to put your time. You want to make sure you own things, you want to make sure you only work on things where you have the potential to be a higher up author. 

There’s no ranked order; it is just listed, alphabetically. Overnight, every single scientist at Arcadia told me that was the biggest game changer for them, because then when they thought about working together as a team – it was truly as a team. 

And I’ve seen this over and over even with other things we funded outside of Arcadia. When I take [journal publishing] off the table, people then actually have to go back to the drawing board and think, ‘All right, like, what should we do then?’ Because if that’s not part of the calculus, they literally come back and propose something entirely different. That’s maybe the strongest piece of evidence I have. 

And I do want to clarify: I don’t think these are the types of experiments government should take the first step on because government has a huge responsibility to think about lasting infrastructure. This is where I feel like philanthropy or private public partnerships are really helpful to be like, ‘What are the things that we need to try out for the first time?’

There’s a bunch of de-risking that should happen to develop conviction and tactical strategies and infrastructure and all that before you ask the entire ecosystem to do it. 

Correa: You put a lot on the table.  So let me just synthesize a little bit. So, institutional innovations and institutional experimentation – that is actually downstream of a broader exercise that you described, which is finding intervention points in the entire ecosystem of what it would take to change the system. I think it’s relevant to how federal agencies should think about their missions and their work.

Because the condition you put on publication in journals is born out of an experiment you wanted to run on an insight about what was wrong with the system broadly. Then you also built an institution that was itself designed to be experimental as an intervention. And these things go together, but they come from a common systems level, thinking about what’s needed to drive change.

Chou: Yes, that’s absolutely right. What is worth building incentives around? You really need to identify those ‘first principles’. And then the closer you can stick to those ‘first principles, the better off you’ll be.

Correa: Loren, I want you to react. Are our federal institutions capable of this type of experimentation?

Loren DeJonge Schulman, FAS Director of Government Capacity: I think the answer is: maybe. 

The simplest question is, ‘What do you want federal institutions to be there for?’ They could do this, but is that actually the role that we want them to play? 

And that’s very related to something that I often think as people are talking about federal innovation or reform, no matter what it is: ‘Who is your customer? What are you actually trying to do? And who are you trying to do it for?’

Because odds are, as you’re thinking about incentives and trying to manage them, you’re not actually thinking about who else is going to come in and mess with the dynamics in your ecosystem no matter what kind of incentives you try to build.

For federal science institutions, you’ve got a lot of customers, and it’s often hard to consider what those incentives are to serve each. It’s something where we need to make more active choices and fewer tacit  choices. You’ve got Congress, you’ve got the scientific community, you’ve got the public – hopefully, the public matters! And then you have industry that you’re trying to actually keep alive, and you have universities.

But we are not usually explicit about the master that we’re trying to serve most; or we try to serve them all, and serve all of them badly. And as a consequence, you end up designing incentives around things that are either more convenient or match the master of the time. 

The other challenge I see in federal institutions is so often we turn to: “We’ll bring in a new leader that will make everything better.”  Which is not a wrong choice short term, but all the experimentation that you are trying to drive with that new leadership change will probably end when they leave, unless you’ve actually rearchitected the incentives and the understanding of what you’re trying to innovate around – change management. 

I think that your point on budget is an interesting one, because most of the people outside of the federal space tend to think of there being a lot more funding in the federal government to invest in things than there actually is. Or, if they’re right about the amount, they’re wrong about the flexibility.

So much of [federal funding] is already sort of pre-baked. So the amount of resources and flexibility you have to do new tiny things goes into a smaller and smaller and smaller box. And with that comes all of the administrative burden requirements that we lump on top, and in government that’s often, “Well, since you’re wanting to innovate in this particular way, can you also do it also in this region of the country, with these particular innovators in mind ,and with also these sorts of outcomes?”

 [Public servants] tend to get to the end of that process and feel like, “I’m not really innovating, I’m just sitting here treading water in place,” even if it’s all very, extremely well-intentioned. 

Loren DeJonge Schulman speaking at the Data Policy Institute launch party

That’s where I think talent ends up being like the final constraint on innovation. The ways that we bring people in and out of the federal space, and particularly in the science space, is all very well-intentioned in terms of particular rotator programs, and particular civil service programs. But none of which allows you to accumulate the kind of knowledge you need in order to drive change consistently and sustainably, and also makes it so these people are incentivized to do the least innovative thing possible. 

All that said I believe the federal government can also be a really good vehicle for carving a space that no one else could before – and so I’ll guess I put it back to you two, should I be thinking about this in a drastically different way – that federal government should be carving a space no one else can or that the federal government should be the slightly conservative infrastructure behind the scenes?

Correa: I have thoughts on this, but I’d love to hear from [Seemay Chou].

Chou: The thing you said about talent really resonates with me. 

But the thing I have found most useful in, like, any of my interactions with government so far with our experiments is thinking of the government in one way as my customer. So I’m thinking, “What do I need to test to de-risk this [institutional experiment]?”

In some cases, the government has, actually, enormous power to sort of anoint something as potentially acceptable. Like preprints is a good example of that, right? Like when the government started basically paying attention and changing certain language and policy to basically say, ‘we accept this,’ that can move the Overton window. That is actually really helpful. 

Your comment about talent is very related to that. What I have found in every arena that I’ve worked in is that there is no training people how to be risk-tolerant.

If you want to do the crazy experiments, you need to find crazy people, because otherwise it’s going to continue coming towards the middle. And the people who are least crazy are the ladder climbers and so institutionalist. So now, when I hire for stuff like this, the more radical of a thing that we’re trying, the more I push on this with people – I’m trying to get a sense of them innately.

Do they have a stomach for this? Because otherwise, they’re not the right person to lead this. And this is part of the reason why we have such a sharp line on the open science stuff about being outside journals. It’s a sharp line that only a maniac would cross, and that’s the right kind of maniac for me.

Correa: I’m imagining three categories of experimentation for government and for research institutions.  I think one is where we started, which is government itself is not actually doing anything experimental at all. Things are being de-risked elsewhere. So I think a good example of this is the way in which the philanthropic community directs new funding models or new vectors of research.

Focused research organizations (FROs) are a good example – de-risked by philanthropic dollars, as a model for team-based time-bound science that now government is adding to its portfolio, at least at a modest size. An earlier example of that was, the work that HHMI (Howard Hughes Medical Institute) did to fund people, not projects, [to the point] where we now see NIH adding it to the portfolio.

We can quibble about whether those are the right level of adoption amid the portfolio in the government. But you can see that this move where someone else experiments, gets some success, and government can go take it and say, ‘Hey, this thing benefits from scale that only government can deliver.’ That is a move. 

Category two is explicit experimental function. So we’re talking now about things like a metascience unit at the National Science Foundation. There are antecedents to this in government through the Evidence Act, that gave agencies a mandate to ask questions and to evaluate whether the answers and have them inform the way that they work, and other movements before that.

There’s a piece of that that’s deeply relevant to the state of the field. And what we understand about how to fund breakthrough science and how to organize it and what works. We actually don’t know enough.

And then the third piece is where you want to empower talented people to be the living embodiment of a vibrant, experimental approach to shaping a field. Our institutions on the research side are not organized this way. 

It’s a very different structure, talent model, and level of empowerment that would get us to that.  You don’t even need to call it experimentation. It just looks like empowering field leaders and tackling bottlenecks as a substantial part of what government research does.

DeJonge Schulman: The thing that struck me most immediately as you were talking is the explicit experimental functions that government can create space for: the metascience unit, the Evidence Act, the ARPAs, and things like that. Government needs to get better at being able to provide the behind the scenes infrastructure for that kind of work, and to acknowledge that sometimes it’s going to start a new team, a new organization, a new ARPA, whatever it is, and that’s going to last for like three years.

Not necessarily because it was a bad idea, but because momentum will fade – the right leader is not there. You may have the right moment in time for a thing, and it doesn’t need to be forever. But what you need to get good at is starting it, and making sure that whatever incentive you’re trying, you’re getting that perfect, whether that be the get-the-money-out-the-door function, which is hard in government, or the hiring function that gets you the right kind of people in quickly. 

If I said, “I’m going to go start a totally new experimental research institution in government,” people might say, “Okay, cool. That’s going to be like ten years from now,” because it just takes forever to do.

Let’s get better at doing the shorter-term stuff with the acknowledgment that it may be shorter term. 

Chou: There has to be an on and off rate. Otherwise there’s not really innovation. I have often found that the startup space does way better than the nonprofit space: if you talk to founders, they’re not that nervous if their first company fails, because that just happens.

Then they found a new company or find a new job. There’s more of a market around that. So none of it’s that scary. The metascience stuff would benefit from that, and it makes sense why the government would benefit from it too.

Things fail and things also expire as the world changes. 

Correa: It’s not like this is a novel thing that only science is grappling with. We sit here and talk about Vannevar Bush – that was 75 years ago, but think about how long the Department of Interior has been around. Everyone’s grappling with aging institutions and mechanisms and trying to fit them to a changing mission.

Loren, are there any examples outside of our research institutions that we should be grabbing on to, for how our federal reasons from some situations can do this better?

DeJonge Schulman: Some of the newer institutions that have kicked off in government have done reasonably well: U.S. Digital Service, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a few others. They have tried to find the systems and authorities that made the most sense for them to operate, as opposed to just accepting whatever authority was handed over to them.

So whether that be around the amount that you could pay people, how quickly you can hire them, the way you do procurement, your enforcement power – one key thing is being able to mine the authorities that are available to you. You hire a bunch of genius lawyers who are ‘yes’ people, ‘yes-and’ people, to find what is available for you to actually go out and do. You either build those into the system that you’re trying to create, or be as flexible as you can in order to adopt them in some way.

Something else these sorts of organizations have done really well is be really purposeful about learning and adapting. In the federal space, that’s a really nice-to-have phrase. But what I mean by that is that there’s a cyclical moment in those organizations where they’re saying, “Hey, we set up this process that really sucked for everybody. Let’s redo it, not just on an every-year basis, but iterate every couple of weeks, every week or so.” Check on things that you have power over in those moments, as opposed to putting them off. 

You can’t just rely on your superstar celebrity leader being the person who takes you over the innovation curve. You’ve probably got to have something like them at a key stage, but you also have to build up the cadre of, like, the most boring administrative functions you can think of who make their vision happen. They’ve got to be your champions, too.

When Seemay was talking about, ‘you need the crazy people,’ – I think you also need the crazy people who are building the safe space for that crazy person. I don’t mean ‘safe space’ like I’m going to limit you, but let me give you the infrastructure around you to make sure you succeed. So that they are always there to kind of have an internal absorption rate of the crazy [innovators] that come in, and so that they are not maybe safe, but like they are not likely to totally go off the rails.

The ‘point five’ to that last point is having really, really, really strong recruitment pipelines. Federal government doesn’t invest in that. They just wait for people to apply. Having and investing in people whose job it is to recruit and find the weirdest and most amazing possible talent for you is something that would get us so much gain in the federal space.

Correa: And so you could imagine something coming into focus that is a more experimental, agile form of federal research institution. Can you all help me understand what the core components of an agenda like that might be in your mind? Where do we start?

Chou: There are existing examples to draw on outside of government. I think a lot about pharma because I’m in biotech. There’s a whole bunch of innovation labs within companies like Johnson and Johnson, and Pfizer. They hire the right people, with guardrails.

Biochemist and microbiologist Seemay Chou showing off ticks in her UCSF lab

But they’re really trying to figure out how to increase the surface area and touch points between them and the startup ecosystem. It can be anything from them going out and literally funding startups, to just advising them. 

[Eli] Lilly is doing this with the new Lilly Tunelab. They provide basically the [AI-driven drug development] models and the data, or they provide the models and the infrastructure. And then outside folks come in from all over, whether it’s startups, academia, and sometimes they can have access to the models, but they at least introduce data. It’s a win-win. It’s also a great way to ‘date’ and see who’s out there, doing what. 

Is there something like that that the government can help with, through data infrastructure or something like that, that actually creates like an awesome scaffold to have people trying lots of different things that [government] may not even need to directly fund, but that draws people in that are innovating in different arenas and for different problems to kind of learn from that?

DeJonge Schulman: To build on that, something that we talked a lot about in the tech talent space is that for a while – actually probably still – government would hire incredible technology talent into the federal government, and they would be brought in and it would take three months to get them an actual working computer, or the printer would never work.

Then it took ten minutes to load up the software in the morning to get them to log in. And the analogy we use for that was, ‘you’re bringing in World Cup players and asking them to play on a concrete field at an elementary school.’  Don’t even think the mission is going to be possible until you’re willing to invest in whatever that playing field is.

I think some of the other obvious [elements for success]: independence of some kind, whatever that means when you’re operating in a political context because it’s always going to be political in some way. And figuring out ways to have failure tolerance, and being really clear upfront all the time in every possible conversation about what that means, not only with Congress and the appropriators, but also with leaders, and the people that are doing your hiring for you.  

We talked about talent, we’ve talked about hiring authority a whole lot. But we should also be really clear on not just the kinds of folks you want to bring in and how long you want to have them there, and how you want to grow them – but what a healthy organization looks like to you. How do you want people to feel at the end of the day? Do they have what they need to succeed? We’re not thinking about that a lot in the federal space. It’s just more, ‘Here’s your cube. Show up.’

We would have a far more productive, and often experimental, federal government if we were more focused on the health of the organization – not just how a few people feel about it, but how you know you’re actually doing the right work and are actually building that environment around it.

Correa: Going back to where we started the conversation, there’s a north star for what the National Science Foundation should be doing, and what its role in the research system is or can be. And this is like the bleeding edge of pushing the frontier, and there are a vast number of ways to effectuate that, but there are some common sense things that can get us closer to what it might look like to do that really well. 

A couple of examples that I can think of are: in the global development context, for a long time, there’s there’s a nonprofit organization called UnlockAid. Back in the days of USAID, this nonprofit was both a source of programmatic ideas and accountability for actual evidence and ROI of what USAID was doing. 

There’s no ‘Unlock NSF’, for example, where it is like a friendly partner on the outside that has capacity and expertise in how to think about how to make what you’re doing even better, given that some of those functions are hard to endure in government.

That strikes me as  a little bit similar to the models that Seemay was just describing. By the same token, an aligned, philanthropic foundation like what DOE (Department of Energy) has and a bunch of other research institutions have. NSF doesn’t have one where you can imagine resources being deployed in a really aligned way.

In addition to some of the core attributes that we would want to include, just to continue to pull this thread for the National Science Foundation: it is up for a reauthorization just next year. So there’s an actual opportunity to kind of interrogate the DNA of the institution at a moment.

As Seemay pointed out, we are in one of these founding moments for federal institutions, by choice or not, where you can actually pull a number of different levers that could shape how an organization like that functions [and make sure that it’s] rooted in a more experimental approach. 

Chou: One thing that really strikes me is just how difficult it is to move that process in conversation, because it’s getting really conflated with political polarization in this moment. The way I think about an institution like NSF, I actually feel like the shift in the technological landscape is actually bigger, even though the political landscape is louder.

If we can try and move past some of the political polarization to actually talk about what needs to happen, because there needs to be a lot of change, actually. And it’s kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity for that. 

Correa: I think that’s why ‘experimental’ is the right Northstar. It’s not in the political sense. But like in reality, as a metric, an agile, self-learning institution is one that is equal to the challenge that our science endeavors present.

What excites me is that it’s very tempting to be very discouraged, and say, ‘Oh, we’ve got these archaic institutions that are calcified and you could never change them.’ But I think we’re in the middle of a technological revolution that will upend lots of things, and does provide a window.

But we have to be really intentional about building that experimental capability into the institutions, and it gives me hope. 

DeJonge Schulman: I think this NSF moment is both good unto itself, but also it’s a good moment for us to think about how to do this on any number of levels with federal institutions. One of the things that is true of every federal institution is there’s just a ton of mythology built up around it, some of it kind of close to true, and some of it maybe not as much true.

There’s probably a lot of mythology at NSF around what is the right kind of instrument mix. What is it that we actually know about? What works in terms of funding mechanics and getting money out of the door, not just at NSF, but in the overall R&D enterprise. We know a little bit about that, and we have a lot of biases about it.

But that’s an example of something where we really need to interrogate our mythology around NSF, and around similar institutions before we go in and say, here’s where this has to be. Something that often happens when Congress gets a chance to relook at something – their instinct is, ‘What do I want to protect and keep, and constrain and keep in a box?’

We need to do as much as possible to get [Congress] to think about what they’re trying to empower and incentivize overall. That’s a much better platform to start from. But it’s harder. It requires looking at questions like: ‘What slowed us down before that we had wanted to do? What is it that we always want to be true about this institution? What is it we would want a chance to be able to revisit on a regular basis as the science changes?’

Because reauthorizations may end up taking forever because of how Congress works. They just delay things and kick it down the road. It’s something where there’s a lot of trust and mistrust that is resident in this space right now.

Rethinking how public accountability, public feedback, public participation in science and design work. It doesn’t have to be a radical rethinking, but at least opening the door to that is really important, as is thinking about what the public wants to know about boundaries within R&D. As we look at artificial intelligence, like in health care, or look at quantum, or biosecurity, any number of issues where there’s a lot of fear in this space and there doesn’t necessarily have to be. There is an opportunity to have a dialogue, and we miss those chances when we don’t take this moment to say, ‘How might this work better? 

Correa: I think it’s a great place to leave it. Thank you both.

One of the great innovations of the American experiment is the federation of the organization of government at scale. For all the advantages to science and technology governance that federalism has promoted, the decentralization of responsibilities within the federal government makes speaking with one voice difficult. While differences between government agencies has been a source of strength for the U.S. federal research and development (R&D) ecosystem, those differences can also manifest as tribalism in the governance of programs administered and regulations promulgated by those agencies.  

We firmly believe that it’s possible to “stack the deck” in such a way that produces better governing outcomes with stronger public impact while maintaining the strength inherent in interagency deliberative processes. To do that, this memo hopes to demystify the way that decisions are made inside agency bodies while providing a roadmap that can help decisionmakers and their advisors achieve those better outcomes. Our recommendations encourage senior policymakers and policy influencers, alike, to maintain a strong teleological focus, to embrace economic impact assessment, and adequate resourcing and troubleshooting gumption to deliver tangible policy outcomes. 

Differences in R&D priority implementation between agencies can be subtle, such as a discrepancy in legal interpretation over a federal statute, or they can be overt, such as one agency taking a position seemingly at odds with another, or procedural such as when two agencies require redundant paperwork to collect information. This lack of cohesion can ultimately lead to significantly increased administrative burden for stakeholders, slower deployment of Administration priorities, and increased costs for the R&D ecosystem. To address this, R&D stakeholders frequently ask for more harmonized rulemaking between agencies. Unfortunately, the incentive structures supporting institutional autonomy frustrate harmonization and simplification efforts, further slowing the work of the government and (in some cases) magnifying the administrative burden experienced by stakeholder organizations.

Challenge and Opportunity

Coordination among federal science agencies is essential to ensure government-wide alignment on R&D investment priorities and policy agendas. However, the federal R&D enterprise suffers from some of the most egregious siloization of process and procedure in the administrative state.  

To give one specific example, non-governmental space activities are covered by multiple agencies, with the Federal Aviation Administration covering launch and reentry, the Federal Communications Commission and Department of Commerce covering spectrum-related issues, the Office of Space Commerce covering remote sensing technologies, and the Federal Communications Commission (strangely) covering orbital debris.  If a company wishes to engage in remote sensing activities, they need to engage each of these licensing processes, separately, which may operate on different timelines and with different levels of priority. Both the Trump administration’s executive order on commercial spaceflight and the Biden-Harris administration’s novel space activities proposal maintain the separation of licensing processes between crewed and uncrewed space activities, protecting the equities of both the Department of Transportation and Department of Commerce rather than resulting in regulatory rationalization and placing them at odds with with Congress’ proposals.

Disharmony in the regulatory system may result in differentiation of federal grant, contract, and cooperative agreement requirements that organizations need to navigate; oftentimes requiring multiple and substantially different layers of expertise and government-service provider relationships that organizations have to manage.  When the government does coordinate, interagency bodies frequently develop recommendations that maximize the flexibility of the government institutions, but may avoid addressing fundamental ethical issues or the concerns of impacted communities.

To address these complaints and ensure alignment, both formal and informal interagency deliberative bodies are often formed within the Executive Branch. These may take the form of committees, subcommittees, and working groups of Congressionally mandated interagency fora, such as the National Science and Technology Council or the Interagency Council on Statistical Policy. Or, they may arise from the convening power of components in the Executive Office of the President, in what are known as, policy coordination committees in the current administration. 

Less often, they form organically through recognition for the need of coordination by the agencies themselves, such as Commerce, Energy, NASA, Defense Information Managers Group (CENDI). These bodies, and other ad-hoc working groups, are almost always formed by enterprising individuals in more junior government roles when there are clear mission requirements which need to be addressed.  Such groups can be incredibly effective, especially if organically-formed groups are well-acquainted with legal and funding constraints, but can also be relatively limited in overall ambition.
To navigate thorny issues and resolve interagency disagreements, senior staff, members of Congress, and even members of federal advisory committees often turn to these bodies, or seek their creation. Take the recent example of the National Academy of Science, Engineering and Medicine report “Simplifying Research Regulations and Policies”, whose recommendations focus primarily on increasing regulatory harmony between government agencies rather than actually removing or changing government requirements.

Incentive Structures Favor the Status Quo

Agencies have enormous incentives to protect their turf – particularly their legal authorities – under these coordination bodies.  Given the uncertainty of funding and legislation, and the risk that dedicating work toward a particular task might result in a reallocation of resources from something that agencies are already assigned to do, the most common output created by these interagency bodies is a line of best fit that deftly navigates the specific interests of each federal agency, sometimes with compromises that water down Executive or Legislative intent. 

Worse, agencies in question might not have available time or resources for officers to dedicate the type of high-level attention needed to actually implementing an ideal solution.  As a result, the chair for these committees often takes the lead in developing a work plan, which is usually heavily-shaped by individual experiences within a single government agency or even single industry.  If there is significant political support or pressure for the interagency organization to produce a product, like a proposed regulation or report, other government departments and agencies might not even weigh in substantively to maintain plausible deniability.  Instead, such agencies may seek to minimize the number of new requirements or dilute requirements to avoid affecting agency operations.

In an extreme example of the consequences of understaffing an interagency coordination body while concentrating one agency’s perspective in a single individual with little actual authority, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) unwound nearly eight years of bilateral negotiations between the United States and the European Union during the Biden administration because their subject matter expert unexpectedly and unfortunately passed away during the negotiation’s final stages. Ironically, this was a topic of great HHS interest – improving the ability for US and EU researchers to share human health-related data across the Atlantic. HHS’ failure to appoint a new champion effectively ended the negotiation, fueled by the agency’s claims that appropriate vetting of the final policy could not be prioritized given staffing demands and a lack of expertise.  The impacts of this non-decision were not localized to government laboratories, but also stakeholders across industry and the biomedical research ecosystem.

The products of these coordination committees generally favor the experience of the chair, moderated primarily by the government’s ability to respond to a new (usually unfunded) demand within existing resources.  This seldom answers the mail requested by the Executive Office of the President, Congress, or the recommendations offered by outside advisory groups, and can place costly new requirements on the rest of the ecosystem.

Thou Shalt Not Suggest Future Financial Commitments are Needed

One of the perennial challenges that interagency coordination groups face is the fact that recommendations for action may conflict with the annual President’s Budget Discretionary Request (PBR). This is based on the expectation that the Executive Branch speaks on budget issues with one voice. Likewise, the Anti-Lobbying Act is generally understood within the Executive Branch to prohibit agencies from seeking additional funding or appropriations.  Responses to Congressional requests are often vetted by the Office of Management and Budget.

This is complicated by the fact that when Congress asks an agency for a proposal on how to do something, there is a general expectation that the Executive Branch provide a clear and comprehensive answer that will allow legislators to act expeditiously on resolving the problem, particularly with respect to how Congress can help. This also happens when agencies respond to crises, when political appointees seek to open new lines of effort, or when international partners come to the U.S. government with a proposal that is generally favorable to the President.  Even if the President favors acting on the proposal, it can be difficult for agencies to support action that is not accounted for in the PBR.  

Because these requests generally lack funding information that would place the recommendations outside the scope of the PBR, there are four possible outcomes:

The interagency group will often:

1. Develop a recommendation that places resource burdens on entities that are not a part of the federal government (e.g., through the establishment of additional unfunded mandates placed on organizations seeking federal grants, contracts, or cooperative agreements);
2. Provide with a “zero cost solution” that minimizes the resource expenditure required of the government institution but may not actually solve the problem; 
3. Remain silent or blame Congress (or the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB)) for not providing sufficient funding to achieve a particular objective, sometimes forcing committee staff to seek outside advice on what implementing recommendations might cost.  Such efforts could represent a de facto information collection, increasing the burden placed on the affected stakeholders; or
4. Fail to answer the request after the interagency coordination effort breaks down or loses its champion.

Obviously, these results inherently mask the true cost of the government’s activities and minimizes the work undertaken by the executive agencies.  One specific example that we encountered in our time in government involved a suggestion that the interagency group explicitly state that individuals stranded in space or on other planets on commercial space missions would not be rescued because the government had not and would not request funding for such an eventuality.  The interagency group ended up not releasing their product.

Former staff who served in the current administration have offered their solution to the coordination issue: only request input from agencies when their perceived equities are in play.  The problem with such an assumption is that other government agencies frequently have equities that are not immediately visible to the Executive Office of the President or other government bodies, creating a probability that the exclusion of that agency could result in them becoming a process spoiler sometime in the future. Sometimes agencies use this as a tactic to kill or stall an initiative by intentionally falling to staff participation on an interagency body and then complaining at the 11th hour that they weren’t consulted on the group’s policy product. When rulemakings are in play, the interagency deliberative processes defined by Executive Order 12866 are supposed to be followed to prevent this type of skullduggery. However, even then OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA), which coordinates and enforces the process, often provides agencies (and even external organizations) with a great deal of latitude to effect their delay tactics. 

Agency Staff Feels the Need to Protect their Decisionmaking Authorities

In the words of one of our former coworkers, “agencies will do anything to protect their ability to make an independent decision.”  Coordination bodies frequently are expected to set priorities that could tie the hands of a government agency (or the Presidency) at a future date.  This is particularly acute in science, when the funding cycle and normal life of a scientific project usually doesn’t align with the political calendars of Congress or the Presidency.  As a result, agency staff and their political leadership are disincentivized to make recommendations that would limit their ability to make a different decision at some point in the future, or encouraged to non-concur to protect the ability of current staff to interject.  Some agencies, particularly the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense, are particularly aggressive in using these tactics given their substantial resources and long-mission timelines which may be vulnerable to future political disruption.

Ultimately, the aspiration for a unified federal vision often founders on the jagged rocks of agency tribalism. When agencies prioritize the preservation of their legal, administrative, or cultural turf and discretionary autonomy over the broader implementation of top-down mandates, interagency coordination transforms from a tool of progress into a performative exercise in risk mitigation. This protectionism creates a gravity well of inertia, where the resulting vector rarely points toward innovation or rationalization, but instead toward a diluted status quo that safeguards agency equities at the expense of (potentially) good governance. Until the incentive structures of the administrative state are realigned to reward cross-cutting outcomes over parochial independence, even the most robust top-level policies will continue to be slowly hollowed out by the very departments tasked with their implementation.

Plan of Action

Governing is hard. It forces organizations to make difficult decisions, accounting for tradeoffs and mitigating internal and external organizational risks.  When Congress or the President ask an organization to provide recommendations on how to solve a problem, ideally the result should include a credible solution. Here, we recommend a path forward that protects the benefits of a federated system (strategic redundancy, checks-and-balances, etc) while minimizing tribalism that works against efficiencies of interagency coordination and implementation of policies.

Recommendation 1. Formal advisory committees to the government should be limited from deferring actions within their scope to interagency deliberative bodies.  

This could be achieved simply through a White House-level policy memorandum, though it could also be accomplished in agency practice through charge letters to advisory groups, updates to policy for the National Academies and DC think tanks, or instructions in Congressional charging legislation.

When advisory groups like the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine produce recommendations or reports for the executive branch, the advisory committees formed to do the work will frequently recommend that an interagency body coordinate, develop strategies, or produce recommendations aimed at resolving a high level policy objective.  For instance, the 2022 report “Protecting U.S. Technological Advantage” produced four recommendations that requested the creation of six new government processes to create new definitions, assess vulnerabilities, identify essential elements, develop a national strategy, and develop a new policy framework. By doing so, the advisory committee delegates its responsibility to recommend action and sets up a cascade of additional administrative burden that flows to the federal agencies (if they accept the challenge in the first place).

In the case of the “Protecting U.S. Technological Advantage” report, the end product implicated multiple government organizations that were not involved in the creation of the report (including numerous White House components) making it less likely that the recommendations would be adopted. Recommendations focusing on the outcome members of the Committee wanted from the government, in addition to the authorities or processes required to effectuate the outcome, would have made it easier for individuals in the government to support the recommendations and seek Congressional support.  

Similarly, recommendations that suggest stronger interagency coordination, for instance to harmonize interagency policy and practice to reduce administrative burden, tend to ignore the factors cited earlier about the various factors that pull against successful policy coordination efforts.  Instead, recommendations that weigh the tradeoffs associated with specific policy options and suggest answers to hard decisions are more likely to provide the information sought by policymakers and lawmakers, alike.

Decadal surveys, on the other hand, tend to provide science agencies and congress with relatively straightforward lists of priorities under different budget scenarios that are easily understood by budget officials and appropriators.  While these recommendations are seldom followed in total by government agencies, they are proven delivery tools for program and policy implementation.

The government already takes similar measures in multilateral international activities. “Instruction cables” provided to members of U.S. delegations to international working groups contain express instructions to limit the creation of new working groups or bodies under the international organization to limit the proliferation of such mechanisms in international fora.  Charge letters from agencies, language in Congressional authorizing legislation for National Academies studies, and other directives limiting the proliferation of new working groups and committees could include similar language.

Recommendation 2. Recommendations from interagency bodies that invoke new agency or impacted entity actions should include economic impact assessments. 

Congress should require that interagency bodies identify and publicly disclose the costs to implement the group’s recommendations, including any expected costs to non-government organizations when those recommendations involve any changes to agency or impacted entity behavior. Interagency reports often set ambitious goals without accounting for the unfunded mandates they create for agencies and the private sector. The National Science and Technology Council’s October 2022 National Strategy for Advanced Manufacturing outlined sweeping goals for industrial decarbonization and supply chain restructuring, yet it lacked a granular economic impact assessment regarding the capital expenditures required by small to medium enterprises to comply with suggested standards. Without this data, recommendations risk becoming aspirational documents rather than actionable blueprints because the entities responsible for execution are left to discover the true costs only after the policy momentum has already shifted. Moreover, this leads to further fragmentation, redundancy, and increased burden across regulated sectors as any resulting rulemaking acting on these recommendations would have to engage its own separate cost analysis.

The consequences of omitting economic analysis are evident in recommendations regarding cybersecurity protocols often generated by Policy Coordination Committees. For example, the interagency implementation plans following Executive Order 14306 on Sustaining Select Efforts To Strengthen the Nation’s Cybersecurity often encourage agencies to adopt stringent data sharing frameworks without quantifying the compliance drag on regulated entities in the energy and telecommunications sectors. When recommendations do not account for the labor hours or hardware upgrades necessary for implementation, they can lead to significant market friction and cost surprise. By requiring an assessment at the outset, Congress can prevent the adoption of technically sound, but economically disruptive, policies that may stifle the innovation they aim to protect.  Congress did enact the Unfunded Mandates Reform Act of 1995 to limit the impact of these types of interventions, but the application of the act is limited to state, local, and tribal governments (as opposed to industry or academic sectors).

Conversely, when interagency bodies integrate economic assessments, the resulting policy is more resilient and credible. The Interagency Working Group (IWG) on Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases serves as a primary example of a body that centers its output on economic modeling, as seen in its February 2021 Technical Support Document: Social Cost of Carbon, Methane, and Nitrous Oxide. By providing a quantified value for the social cost of carbon, the IWG ensured that any subsequent agency actions are grounded in a rigorous benefit-cost framework. Similarly, certain Federal Advisory Committee Act committees such as those advising the Department of Transportation frequently include economic subcommittees to vet recommendations. These examples show that when the economic price tag is transparent, stakeholders can provide more meaningful feedback and agencies can prioritize actions that offer the highest return on investment.Integrating economic impact assessments into the interagency process aligns these high-level recommendations with the gold standard of federal regulatory governance found in Executive Order 12866 and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs review process. Currently, a significant gap exists where a policy may be developed in an interagency report without the rigorous economic and regulatory impact analyses required during rulemaking. By requiring these assessments earlier in the deliberative stage, this recommendation ensures that the logic of balancing societal benefits against compliance costs is present from the moment of inception. This prevents regulatory path dependency where an agency feels compelled to codify a recommendation that has not yet faced the scrutiny of economic trade-offs, which enhances both transparency and fiscal responsibility.

Recommendation 3. Congress should fund its reporting demands on the interagency, particularly to ensure adequate staffing and to avoid diverting resources away from mission-focused activities. 

Congress should appropriate resources when it makes reporting mandates, including to already-established reporting programs and interagency deliberative bodies. This would ensure the project actually happens and can be carried through to completion.  This also frequently means that staff are diverted from their core duties to produce these reports, creating an additional drain on agency resources.

This challenge is particularly acute for White House components like OSTP, which are not budgeted to fulfill the number of recommendations and reporting obligations placed on the organization by Congress.  Such reports are often left to the initiative of short-term detailees and Intergovernmental Personnel Act (IPA) appointees who may be unable to thoroughly answer the reporting requirements relevant to their portfolio while they are also satisfying Administration demands. As a result, reports connected to immediate political demand signals are generally prioritized over longer-term planning exercises and strategic assessments, leaving much work – including work tasked by Congress by law – frequently incomplete.

Recommendation 4. “Center of government” organizations, like OMB, OSTP, and the National Security Council (NSC) should actively seek and provide funding and direction to support Administration goals and objectives.

Such efforts should be supported by champions, both at the senior level in the center of government organization as well as champions within the interagency who have the authority to clear bottlenecks and sufficient top cover to seek necessary funding and other resources.

It is an oft-stated maxim in government “show me your budget and I’ll show you your strategy.” When agencies are asked to do something based on a top down directive, political resources should be aligned with ensuring that the effort succeeds.  Frequently this is not the case.

In international affairs, the visit of a high-level foreign official will frequently trigger requests, most often from the NSC and the U.S. Ambassador to a country for projects or programs that can be offered to demonstrate to the foreign partner the value of the bilateral relationship between the two countries. There is just one problem–with the exception of defense and some security programs, government agencies almost never have dedicated resources to support such requests. The situation becomes worse when you realize that there are literally hundreds, if not thousands of visits to the United States over the course of an Administration. Interagency officials responsible for a priority administration program or working on headline-grabbing material are likely to be sequestered by these requests, diverting attention away from the execution of their programs. During our time in government, we would frequently find ourselves fending off such requests from other White House components or the State Department in the interest of protecting the time and resources of agencies in our respective domains. The urgency to provide something usually results in low-effort or empty commitments that are easily placed in contrast with those of foreign governments like the European Union or People’s Republic of China.

While we certainly understand the demand that administrations be able to produce examples of how they are delivering on the President’s priorities, it is important that such requests be properly staffed and resourced. When there are obstacles, the “center of government” organizations should provide sufficient support from champions to overcome those obstacles in order to ensure their successful completion. A good press release is seldom a substitute for the delivery of an actual result.

Conclusion

The persistent failure of interagency coordination is a systemic result of an administrative state that structurally prioritizes parochial autonomy of specific agency equities over collective efficacy. As demonstrated by the fragmented governance of space activities and the “zero-cost” compromises of underfunded committees, the current coordination framework incentivizes performative alignment rather than meaningful reform. These failures place an undue administrative burden on the public and stifle innovation and good governance.

To bridge the gap between policy aspiration and implementation, the federal government must push back against tribalism that currently defines interagency coordination. By barring advisory committees from delegating their responsibilities to the interagency, mandating rigorous economic transparency for new proposals, and ensuring that Congress provides the specific resources required for coordination, the Executive Branch can finally coordinate policy priorities. We’ve proposed that the federal interagency deliberative process requires a fundamental realignment of incentives, ensuring that the Government speaks with “one voice,” expressed through decisive action rather than just diluted reports, unfunded and unimplementable mandates, and perennially delayed policymaking. Such reforms will provide solid ground on which policy recommendations can be more safely landed.

Report provides research questions and calls to action that bring science closer to local communities

Washington, D.C. – April 7, 2026 – Today the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a non-partisan, nonprofit science policy organization dedicated to developing evidence-based policies to address national challenges, released a long-anticipated report, The Civic Research Agenda: A national study of local government research needs and roadmap for university collaboration.

“Local governments are a juggernaut of policy delivery. The Civic Research Agenda underscores that giving cities and counties more ways to access the best and most relevant research produced by technical experts is crucial to driving that progress. Deeper connections between universities and local governments can unlock innovations from the mundane to the monumental,” says Dr. Jedidah Isler, Chief Science Officer at FAS. “Not only does this report include 432 research questions, it provides recommendations on how we can improve the actionability of research into communities.”

In addition to the Civic Research Agenda, this effort also produced seven (7) priority policy research agendas, one (1) Research-to-Impact Ecosystem report, and nine (9) city-specific science R&D reports.

“We know that science and research can bring catalytic impact to local policy making. Publishing an agenda to the university community breaks down the myths and assumptions of true knowledge gaps and research needs. Communities stand to benefit directly from the calls to action cited in this report.” says Kate Garman Burns, Director of State and Local Innovation at FAS.

Key Findings

The number one research need of cities and counties concerns housing. 

The other priority areas of research needs include: community engagement, economic development, service delivery, climate and energy, transportation, and human services (education, public safety, and health). 

Incorrect perceptions are stalling trust between these institutions. University faculty and staff fear being seen as too intellectual and disconnected. Local government staff fear being seen as not intellectual enough. 

Beyond any specific policy domain, local governments expressed the desire for support from the research community in three overarching areas: 1) evaluation; how can the research community measure and provide evidence that a policy intervention has achieved desired (or negative) impacts; 2) efficiency; how can the research community help local governments do more with less; and 3) data generation; how can the research community create and provide access to useful data that do not currently exist. 

“The City of Lincoln welcomed the opportunity this convening presented to catalyze our research partnership with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Following the workshop, we have continued to collaborate with UNL to develop the City’s Research Agenda.” – Mayor Leirion Gaylor Baird, Lincoln, NE

Tracking the Demand and Supply of Research

The Civic Research Agenda considers the demand and supply of research: what are the research needs of local governments, and how can research outputs improve to “supply” or provide answers to better serve that audience?  FAS’s State and Local Innovation team hosted nine (9) in-person workshops in cities/counties across the country, and partnered with the National League of Cities and Porchlight Insights to produce two (2) national surveys.

“Research is essential to us. We hosted six university institutions at our workshop and are keen on continuing these conversations. We want to have the data to provide tailored solutions to each of our individual neighborhoods, we want to know what programs get the best outcomes, and we hope to partner with our universities to better our evaluation capabilities so that we know what’s working and what needs to be improved.” – Mayor Matt Tuerk, City of Allentown, PA

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ABOUT FAS

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) works to advance progress on a broad suite of contemporary issues where science, technology, and innovation policy can deliver transformative impact, and seeks to ensure that scientific and technical expertise have a seat at the policymaking table. Established in 1945 by scientists in response to the atomic bomb, FAS continues to bring scientific rigor and analysis to address national challenges. More information about FAS’s work at fas.org.

The State and Local Innovation (formerly, MetroLab) team within FAS aims to take good ideas from the lab to local governments through intentional, regular and impact-driven policy alignment. This mission is two-fold: to put science in cities and to understand, support, and enable transformative partnerships between cities and universities. More information about the State and Local Innovation team’s work at https://fas.org/issue/metrolab/. 

There is an urgent need to manage the escalating costs of federal R&D infrastructure and the increasing risk that failing facilities pose to the scientific missions of the federal research enterprise.  Many of the laboratories and research support facilities operating under the federal research umbrella are near or beyond their life expectancy, creating significant safety hazards for federal workers and local communities.  Unfortunately, the nature of the federal budget process forces agencies into a position where the actual cost of operations are not transparent in agency budget requests to OMB before becoming further obscured to appropriators, leading to potential appropriations disasters (including an approximately 60% cut to National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) facilities in 2024 after the agency’s challenges became newsworthy).  Providing both Congress and OMB with a complete accounting of the actual costs of agency facilities may break the gamification of budget requests and help the government prioritize infrastructure investments.

Challenge and Opportunity 

Recent reports by the National Research Council and the National Science and Technology Council, including the congressionally-mandated Quadrennial Science and Technology Review have highlighted the dire state of federal facilities.  Maintenance backlogs have ballooned in recent years, forcing some agencies to shut down research activities in strategic R&D domains including Antarctic research and standards development.  At NIST, facilities outages due to failing steam pipes, electricity, and black mold have led to outages reducing research productivity from 10-40 percent.  NASA and NIST have both reported their maintenance backlogs have increased to exceed 3 billion dollars. The Department of Defense forecasts that bringing their buildings up to modern standards would cost approximately 7 billion “putting the military at risk of losing its technological superiority.”  The shutdown of many Antarctic science operations and collapse of the Arecibo Observatory have been placed in stark contrast with the People’s Republic of China opening rival and more capable facilities in both research domains.  In the late 2010s, Senate staffers were often forced to call national laboratories, directly, to ask them what it would actually cost for the country to fully fund a particular large science activity.

This memo does not suggest that the government should continue to fund old or outdated facilities; merely that there is a significant opportunity for appropriators to understand the actual cost of our legacy research and development ecosystem, initially ramped up during the Cold War.  Agencies should be able to provide a straight answer to Congress about what it would cost to operate their inventory of facilities.  Likewise, Congress should be able to decide which facilities should be kept open, where placing a facility on life support is acceptable, and which facilities should be shut down.  The cost of maintaining facilities should also be transparent to the Office of Management and Budget so examiners can help the President make prudent decisions about the direction of the federal budget.

The National Science and Technology Council’s mandated research and development infrastructure report to Congress is a poor delivery vehicle.  As coauthors of the 2024 research infrastructure report, we can attest to the pressure that exists within the White House to provide a positive narrative about the current state of play as well as OMB’s reluctance to suggest additional funding is needed to maintain our inventory of facilities outside the budget process.  It would be much easier for agencies who already have a sense of what it costs to maintain their operations to provide that information directly to appropriators (as opposed to a sanitized White House report to an authorizing committee that may or may not have jurisdiction over all the agencies covered in the report)–assuming that there is even an Assistant Director for Research Infrastructure serving in OSTP to complete the America COMPETES mandate.  Current government employees suggest that the Trump Administration intends to discontinue the Research and Development Infrastructure Subcommittee.

Agencies may be concerned that providing such cost transparency to Congress could result in greater micromanagement over which facilities receive which investments.  Given the relevance of these facilities to their localities (including both economic benefits and environmental and safety concerns) and the role that legacy facilities can play in training new generations of scientists, this is a matter that deserves public debate.  In our experience, the wider range of factors considered by appropriation staff are relevant to investment decisions.  Further, accountability for macro-level budget decisions should ultimately fall on decisionmakers who choose whether or not to prioritize investments in both our scientific leadership and the health and safety of the federal workforce and nearby communities.  Facilities managers who are forced to make agonizing choices in extremely resource-constrained environments currently bear most of that burden.

Plan of Action 

Recommendation 1:  Appropriations committees should require from agencies annual reports on the actual cost of completed facilities modernization, operations, and maintenance, including utility distribution systems.

Transparency is the only way that Congress and OMB can get a grip on the actual cost of running our legacy research infrastructure.  This should be done by annual reporting to the relevant appropriators the actual cost of facilities operations and maintenance.  Other costs that should be accounted for include obligations to international facilities (such as ITER) and facilities and collections that are paid for by grants (such as scientific collections which support the bioeconomy). Transparent accounting of facilities costs against what an administration chooses to prioritize in the annual President’s Budget Request may help foster meaningful dialogue between agencies, examiners, and appropriations staff.

The reports from agencies should describe the work done in each building and impact of disruption.  Using the NIST as an example, the Radiation Physics Building (still without the funding to complete its renovation) is crucial to national security and the medical community. If it were to go down (or away), every medical device in the United States that uses radiation would be decertified within 6 months, creating a significant single point of failure that cannot be quickly mitigated. The identification of such functions may also enable identification of duplicate efforts across agencies.

The costs of utility systems should be included because of the broad impacts that supporting infrastructure failures can have on facility operations. At NIST’s headquarters campus in Maryland, the entire underground utility distribution system is beyond its designed lifespan and suffering nonstop issues. The Central Utility Plant (CUP), which creates steam and chilled water for the campus, is in a similar state. The CUP’s steam distribution system will be at the complete end of life (per forensic testing of failed pipes and components) in less than a decade and potentially as soon as 2030. If work doesn’t start within the next year (by early 2026), it is likely the system could go down.  This would result in a complete loss of heat and temperature control on the campus; particularly concerning given the sensitivity of modern experiments and calibrations to changes in heat and humidity.  Less than a decade ago, NASA was forced to delay the launch of a satellite after NIST’s steam system was down for a few weeks and calibrations required for the satellite couldn’t be completed.

Given the varying business models for infrastructure around the Federal government, standardization of accounting and costs may be too great a lift–particularly for agencies that own and operate their own facilities (government owned, government operated, or GOGOs) compared with federally funded research and development centers (FFRDCs) operated by companies and universities (government owned, contractor operated, or GOCOs).

These reports should privilege modernization efforts, which according to former federal facilities managers should help account for 80-90 percent of facility revitalization, while also delivering new capabilities that help our national labs maintain (and often re-establish) their world-leading status.  It would also serve as a potential facilities inventory, allowing appropriators the ability to de-conflict investments as necessary.

It would be far easier for agencies to simply provide an itemized list of each of their facilities, current maintenance backlog, and projected costs for the next fiscal year to both Congress and OMB at the time of annual budget submission to OMB.  This should include the total cost of operating facilities, projected maintenance costs, any costs needed to bring a federal facility up to relevant safety and environmental codes (many are not).  In order to foster public trust, these reports should include an assessment of systems that are particularly at risk of failure, the risk to the agency’s operations, and their impact on surrounding communities, federal workers, and organizations that use those laboratories.  Fatalities and incidents that affect local communities, particularly in laboratories intended to improve public safety, are not an acceptable cost of doing business.  These reports should be made public (except for those details necessary to preserve classified activities).

Recommendation 2: Congress should revisit the idea of a special building fund from the General Services Administration (GSA) from which agencies can draw loans for revitalization.

During the first Trump Administration, Congress considered the establishment of a special building fund from the GSA from which agencies could draw loans at very low interest (covering the staff time of GSA officials managing the program).  This could allow agencies the ability to address urgent or emergency needs that happen out of the regular appropriations cycle.  This approach has already been validated by the Government Accountability Office for certain facilities, who found that “Access to full, upfront funding for large federal capital projects—whether acquisition, construction, or renovation—could save time and money.”  Major international scientific organizations that operate large facilities, including CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), have similar ability to take loans to pay for repairs, maintenance, or budget shortfalls that helps them maintain financial stability and reduce the risk of escalating costs as a result of deferred maintenance.

Up-front funding for major projects enabled by access to GSA loans can also reduce expenditures in the long run.  In the current budget environment, it is not uncommon for the cost of major investments to double due to inflation and doing the projects piecemeal.  In 2010, NIST proposed a renovation of its facilities in Boulder with an expected cost of $76 million.  The project, which is still not completed today, is now estimated to cost more than $450 million due to a phased approach unsupported by appropriations.  Productivity losses as a result of delayed construction (or a need to wait for appropriations) may have compounding effects on industry that may depend on access to certain capabilities and harm American competitiveness, as described in the previous recommendation.

Conclusion

As the 2024 RDI Report points out “Being a science superpower carries the burden of supporting and maintaining the advanced underlying infrastructure that supports the research and development enterprise.” Without a transparent accounting of costs it is impossible for Congress to make prudent decisions about the future of that enterprise. Requiring agencies to provide complete information to both Congress and OMB at the beginning of each year’s budget process likely provides the best chance of allowing us to address this challenge.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Alliance for Learning Innovation (ALI) applauds the increases proposed for education research and development (R&D) and innovation in the President’s budget request. These include the $870.9 million proposed for the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), including $75 million for a National Center for Advanced Development in Education (NCADE), the $405 million proposed for the Education Innovation and Research (EIR) program and the $1.4 billion for the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Directorate for STEM Education. These investments represent real commitments to advancing an inclusive education research system that centers students, teachers, and communities.

These recommendations build upon the bipartisan interest in utilizing education R&D to  accelerate learning recovery, increase student achievement, and ensure students and teachers are prepared for the continued impact technology will have on teaching and learning. National and economic security depends on the success of our students and ALI appreciates the priorities this budget request places on fostering innovations in education that will support U.S. competitiveness.

Dan Correa, CEO of the Federation of American Scientists and co-lead of ALI notes, “Investments in education research and development hold so much promise for dramatically improving gaps in student achievement. Learning recovery, workforce development, and global competition all demand a pool of talent that can only come from an education system that meets the needs of diverse learners. The President’s budget request recognizes that more robust education R&D is needed to support bold innovations that meet the needs of students, teachers, families, and communities.”

This budget will allow IES and other federal agencies the ability to build on boundary-pushing efforts like the National AI Institute for Exceptional Education, which is supporting advancements in AI, human-AI interaction, and learning science to improve educational outcomes for children with speech and language related challenges.

For too long, federal support for education R&D has languished while resources and attention have been devoted to R&D in health care, defense, energy, and other fields. Today’s budget represents a critical step forward in addressing this deficiency. The Alliance for Learning Innovation looks forward to championing the continued development of an education R&D ecosystem that will lead to the types of groundbreaking developments and advancements we see in health care and defense; thus affording students everywhere access to fulfilling futures.

For more information about the Alliance for Learning Innovation, please visit https://www.alicoalition.org/.