Advancing the U.S. Bioindustrial Production Sector

Summary

The bioindustrial production of chemicals and other goods is a critical sector of the U.S. bioeconomy. However, the sector faces challenges such as drawn-out research and development timelines, low profit margins, the requirements to produce and sell product in vast quantities over long periods of time, and barriers to accessing scale-up capacity. Companies can find it challenging to rapidly exchange helpful knowledge, attract early-stage investors, access pilot-scale infrastructure to generate evidence that forecasts cost-effective production at scale, and obtain the financing to build or access domestic commercial-scale bioproduction, biomanufacturing, and downstream bioprocessing infrastructure and facilities.

The federal government has already recognized the need to take action to sustain and extend U.S. leadership in biotech and biomanufacturing. The recent Executive Order on advancing the U.S. bioeconomy and relevant provisions in the CHIPS and Science Law and the Inflation Reduction Law have put forward high aspirations, as well some funding, that could help stimulate the biotech and biomanufacturing ecosystem.

The U.S. government should create a Bio for America Program Office (BAPO) at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) to house a suite of initiatives that would lead to the creation of more well-paying U.S.-based biomanufacturing jobs, spur economic growth and development in areas of the country that haven’t historically benefited from biotech or biomanufacturing, and ensure more resilient U.S. supply chains, the more sustainable production of chemicals and other goods, and enhanced U.S. competitiveness.

Challenge and Opportunity

The bioeconomy—the part of the economy driven by the life sciences and biotech, and enabled by engineering, computing, and information science—has the potential to revolutionize human health, climate and energy, food security and sustainability, and supply chain stability, as well as support economic growth and well-paying jobs across the country. Indeed, the sector has already produced many breakthroughs, such as mRNA vaccines that help counter the devastating impacts of COVID-19 and genetically engineered microbes that provide nutrients to crops without the pollution associated with traditional fertilizers. Valued at over $950 billion, the U.S. bioeconomy accounts for more than five percent of the U.S. gross domestic product—more than the contribution from the construction industry and on par with the information sector.

However, without sufficient federal support and coordination, the U.S. risks ceding economic, national security, and societal benefits provided by a strong bioeconomy to competitors that are implementing cohesive strategies to advance their bioeconomies. For example, China aims to dominate the 21st-century bioeconomy and has prioritized the growth of its bioeconomy in its five-year plans. From 2016 to July 2021, the market value of publicly listed biopharmaceutical innovators from China increased approximately 127-fold across several major stock exchanges, to more than $380 billion, with biotechnology companies accounting for more than 47 percent of that valuation.

Bioindustrial manufacturing (nonpharmaceutical) is a critical segment of the bioeconomy but faces low profit margins combined with the need to produce and sell product in vast quantities over long timelines. It is challenging for companies to translate research and development into commercially viable efforts and attract investors to finance access to or construction of domestic bioproduction, biomanufacturing, and downstream bioprocessing infrastructure and facilities such as fermentation tanks and bioreactors. Furthermore, many biotech and synthetic biology companies face difficulty acquiring capital for scale-up, whether that requires building custom demonstration- or commercial-scale infrastructure, contracting with fee-for-service bioproduction organizations to outsource manufacturing in external facilities, or retooling existing equipment.

All this has the potential to lead to yet more instances of “designed in America, made elsewhere”: microbes that are engineered by U.S. companies to fabricate chemicals or other products could end up being used to produce at commercial scale abroad, which is not a recipe for economic growth and improving quality of life for residents of the U.S. Domestic manufacturers should be executing bioindustrial production so that more well-paying jobs are accessible in the U.S., with the added benefits of contributing to a more stable supply chain, which bolsters U.S. national and economic security.

The federal government has recognized the need for U.S. leadership in biotech and biomanufacturing: the recent Executive Order on advancing the U.S. bioeconomy and relevant provisions in the CHIPS and Science Law and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)  provide high-level aspirations and some actual dollars to bolster the biotech and biomanufacturing ecosystem. Indeed, some funds appropriated in the IRA could be used to meet biomanufacturing goals set in the CHIPS and Science Law and EO.

To reach its full potential, bioindustrial manufacturing requires additional support at various levels and may need as much as hundreds of billions of dollars in capital. There is an opportunity for the U.S. government to be intentional about accelerating the growth of the bioindustrial manufacturing sector, and reaping the economic, national security, and societal benefits that would come with it.

Public-private partnerships aimed at providing resources and capital for experimental development at early-stage companies, as well as bioindustrial production scale-up and commercialization projects that are techno-economically sound, would be a strong signal that the federal government is serious about leveraging bioindusty to meet human health, climate and energy, food security and sustainability, and supply chain stability needs, as well as support economic growth and well-paying jobs. Many of the investments by the U.S. taxpayers would be matched and multiplied by investments from nongovernment sources, amplifying the impact, and generating high return on investment for Americans in the form of well-paying jobs, breakthrough products, and more stable supply chains. Furthermore, the investment would show that the U.S. is committed to leveraging advanced manufacturing to raise quality of life for Americans and retain leadership in biotech and biomanufacturing.

Plan of Action

This plan focuses on four initiatives that address specific challenge points:

The proposed initiatives could all be housed in a new office at NIST called the Bio for America Program Office (BAPO), which would collaborate closely with the Office of the Secretary of Commerce and the Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology, as well as additional government and nongovernmental stakeholders as appropriate. NIST would be an effective home for the BAPO given that it harbors cross-disciplinary expertise in engineering and the physical, information, chemical, and biological sciences; is a nonregulatory agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce, whose mission it is “to drive U.S. economic competitiveness, strengthen domestic industry, and spur the growth of quality jobs in all communities across the country”; and serves as a neutral convener for industry consortia, standards development organizations, federal labs, universities, public workshops, and interlaboratory comparability testing.

Bioindustrial Production Precompetitive Consortium

NIST should establish a Consortium, coordinated out of BAPO, to address the measurements, tools, and standards needed to advance both research and commercial bioindustrial products. The Consortium would convene industry, academia, and government to identify and address measurement, tool, and standards needs; enable members to work with NIST to develop those solutions and standards; leverage NIST expertise; and collaborate with related programs at other federal agencies. The Consortium could rapidly develop relationships with organizations such as the Bioindustrial Manufacturing and Design Ecosystem (BioMADE, a Manufacturing Innovation Institute that is part of the Manufacturing USA network), the Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC), SynBioBeta, the Alternative Fuels & Chemicals Coalition (AFCC), the Synthetic Biology Coalition, the Joint BioEnergy Institute, and the Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s pilot-scale Integrated Biorefinery Research Facility. It would also be useful to communicate with efforts in the biopharmaceutical space such as the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and the National Institute for Innovation in Manufacturing Biopharmaceuticals.

The benefits to members would include access to a neutral forum for addressing precompetitive needs; participation in the development of experimental benchmarks, guidelines, and terminology; access to tools developed by the consortium ahead of public release; and institutional representation on the consortium steering committee. Members would contribute an annual fee of, for example, $20,000 or in-kind support of equivalent value, as well as sign a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement.

Congress should initially appropriate $20 million over five years to support the Consortium’s activities, and the Consortium could launch by putting forward a Notice of Consortium establishment and letter of interest form.

U.S. Bioindustrial Production Investment Portfolio

Early-stage companies are the engine for U.S. job creation, regional economic development, and technological innovation. A more consistent, yet scrupulous, source of funding for nascent companies in the bioindustrial production space would be catalytic. Using the BARDA Ventures-Global Health Investment Corporation (GHIC) Global Health Security Portfolio public-private partnership as a model, the U.S. government, coordinating both existing and new appropriations via BAPO Ventures, should seed a nonprofit partnership manager to launch a U.S. Bioindustrial Production Investment Portfolio. The portfolio would crowd-in additional capital and invest in early-stage, domestic bioindustrial production companies that share sound metrics and credible techno-economic analyses that they are on the path to product commercialization and profitability.

The portfolio’s nonprofit partnership manager should be empowered to crowd-in capital using return augmentation and risk mitigation incentives as they see fit. Measures that a venture fund could take to incentivize coinvestment could include but are not limited to:

Launching a U.S. Bioindustrial Production Investment Portfolio requires the following four steps.

1. Both existing and newly appropriated federal funds should be used to seed investments in the U.S. Bioindustrial Production Investment Portfolio.

Existing appropriations: Appropriations have already been made to some federal agencies through the IRA and other vehicles that could be used to seed the portfolio. BAPO Ventures should coordinate with the interagency, and agencies with available funds could contribute to directly seeding the portfolio. Some examples of existing funds to coordinate include:

New appropriations: Congress should appropriate $500 million in new funding for BAPO Ventures over five years to support BAPO Ventures personnel and operations and augment the portfolio. These funds would be critical since they could be applied for all-purpose venture capital investments in early-stage bioindustrial production companies. Congress should also grant BAPO Ventures, as well as other agencies or programs, any authority needed to transfer funds to the portfolio for these purposes.

2. Identify the nonprofit partnership manager.

BAPO Ventures should solicit proposals for an existing nonprofit partner to manage the U.S. Bioindustrial Production Investment Portfolio. Selection should be based on demonstrated track record of experience with and successful venture investments in bioindustrial manufacturing or a closely related space. Potential nonprofit partners include Breakthrough Energy Catalyst or America’s Frontier Fund. GHIC should also be consulted. 

3. Transfer funds from the appropriate U.S. government programs to funds within the portfolio and support the nonprofit partnership manager in crowding-in additional capital.

The nonprofit partnership manager will recruit capital from nonfederal government sources into the portfolio’s different funds with the aim of matching and/or exceeding the dedicated public funds to generate a multiplier effect and access even more capital. Capital from investors willing to take on risk equatable to venture capital would be the most viable targets.

4. The nonprofit partnership manager will use the portfolio’s funds to invest in U.S. early-stage bioindustrial production companies on the basis of sound techno-economic analyses and robust metrics.

The nonprofit partnership manager would invest in bioindustrial production companies that commit to hiring and manufacturing domestically and making products useful to Americans and the country, on the basis of robust techno-economic analyses of the companies’ commercial potential, and generate returns on investments. BAPO Ventures, as well as NIST writ large, would be accessible for technical assistance, if necessary. The nonprofit partnership manager would structure investments with co-funding from additional nonfederal government investors. As this public-private partnership generates investment returns, proceeds from the BAPO Ventures funding will be returned to the portfolio and its funds for reinvestment and sustainment of BAPO Ventures. If this evergreen fund begins to compete with, rather than incentivize, private market funding, or otherwise begins to be unproductive, the fund should be tapered off and/or sunset.

Bioindustrial Production Scale-up Infrastructure Group

It is critical for early-stage bioindustrial production companies to gather evidence that their production processes have the potential to be commercially viable at scale—or not. To learn this, companies need access to pilot- and intermediate-scale bioindustrial production infrastructure like fermenters and bioreactors, as well as modern downstream bioprocessing equipment. The BAPO should house a Bioindustrial Production Scale-up Infrastructure Group (BPSIG). which, as an initial step, would work with both the interagency and nonfederal government partners to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the U.S. bioindustrial production pilot- and intermediate-scale infrastructure landscape with the aim of informing a precision strategy for most effectively leveraging federal resources.

The BPSIG would aim to complete the landscape analysis in three months, seeking to understand deficiencies in capacities such as the different volumes of fermenters and bioreactors that are accessible (and the costs associated with their use) and modular downstream bioprocessing equipment accessibility. They should also identify existing facilities that have accessible capacity, such as corporations’ sites where capacity might be rented, toll facilities, or facilities that could be retooled or rehabilitated to provide the necessary pilot-scale capacity. BPSIG should engage with organizations such as Capacitor, the Bioprocess to Product Network, Royal DSM, DuPont, Cargill, BioMADE, Battelle, MITRE, and the Advanced Biofuels and Bioproducts Process Development Unit at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory when performing this evaluation.

If the assessment concludes that retooling existing sites or building new pilot- or intermediate-scale infrastructure is necessary, and that government support would be catalytic, some funds would already be available via existing appropriations, and new appropriations might also be necessary. Appropriations have already been made to some federal agencies through the IRA and other vehicles that could be coordinated by the BPSIG. BPSIG should coordinate with the interagency, and agencies with available funds could contribute directly to building the network. Existing funds to leverage include:

Additionally, Congress may need to make appropriations directly to BPSIG, which BPSIG could then allocate to other federal financing programs for retooling or building any additional pilot- or intermediate-scale bioindustrial production infrastructure projects outside the scope of existing pools of already-appropriated funds.

Bioindustrial Production Loan Program Office

To ensure techno-economically sound bioindustrial production companies can secure financing for demonstration- or commercial-scale infrastructure and equipment needs, Congress should enable an initiative within BAPO called the Bioindustrial Production Loan Programs Office (BPLPO) that replicates and improves the DOE LPO model. The BPLPO would be tailored to the bioindustrial production segment, without agencies’ science or technology mission area constraints (for instance, energy), offering flexible debt instruments and supporting large-scale projects. For example, assistance in the form of loan guarantees would help underwrite debt associated with launching bioproduction plants.

Coordination with DOE LPO, DOE Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the U.S. Small Business Association, the relevant U.S. Department of Agriculture loan programs, and other government agencies and offices would be key to avoid duplicating efforts and to incorporate lessons learned and best practices from existing efforts. Congress should appropriate an initial $5 billion for the BPLPO, authorizing the program for an initial 10 years.

Conclusion

Launching a suite of public-private partnerships to advance domestic bioproduction would create more well-paying biomanufacturing jobs in the U.S., expand economic opportunity across the country by spreading the biotech and biomanufacturing footprint into nontraditional areas, produce more high-quality chemicals and goods in the U.S., and help meet national and economic security needs, such as strengthened supply chains and more sustainable production methods.

Frequently Asked Questions
Is there precedent for a federal agency–nonprofit venture capital organization public-private partnership in biotech or biomanufacturing?

BARDA, situated within the Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, launched BARDA Ventures in June 2021 to “accelerate development and commercialization of technologies and medical products needed to respond to or prevent public health emergencies, such as pandemics, and other health security threats.” BARDA has provided the nonprofit organization GHIC tens of millions of dollars. GHIC launched and manages a global health security fund with matching capital from other investors. This partnership allows direct linkage with the investment community and establishes sustained and long-term efforts to identify, nurture, and commercialize technologies that aid the U.S. in responding effectively to future health security threats.

Could the BARDA-GHIC model be applied to other sectors in addition to bioindustrial manufacturing?

Yes. The BARDA-GHIC model can be considered when there is underinvestment from the capital markets in a particular early-stage commercial area.

Why the focus on coordinating existing funds from DoD and DOE?

Some funds have already been appropriated to DoD and DOE that could be used to advance U.S. bioindustrial production. DoD and DOE are both stakeholders in bioindustrial manufacturing whose missions would benefit from virtually any domestic bioindustrial manufacturing efforts.

What are some other opportunities for capital for bioindustrial production?

Capital from strategic investors, venture investors with long-term outlooks, and private equity, with growth equity of particular interest, could be targeted. Examples of strategic investors that could be pursued include IndianOil Corp, Petronas, Brookfield, or BASF. Venture investors with longer-term outlook funds like Breakthrough Energy Catalyst would also be candidates to pursue to recruit capital.


The scale-up and commercialization of some bioindustrial production capabilities can be capital intensive; however, standing-up bioproduction facilities can cost two to 2,000 times less than chemical facilities, and operating expenses for a bioproduction facility are relatively low, making return on capital more attractive to capital markets. It’s likely that investments’ returns should be expected to be long-term in nature. Investments now could help some bioindustrial production operations reach profitability by the mid- to late 2020s, with positive returns on investments likely. In addition to acquiring equity in bioindustrial production companies, some investors may contribute to commercializing the bioindustrial production of those operations’ chemicals or other goods in their regions of influence, etc.

What’s a potential starting point for the equitable and strategic placement of pilot- and intermediate-scale bioindustrial production facilities?

Potential regional targets include Suffolk, Massachusetts, and Albany, New York, in the Northeast; Warren, Ohio, Johnson, Kansas, and Porter, Indiana, in the Midwest; Denton, Texas, Wake, North Carolina, and Canadian, Oklahoma, in the South; and Yavapai, Arizona, and Honolulu, Hawaii, in the West.

Accelerating Bioindustry Through Research, Innovation, and Translation

Summary

America’s bioeconomy is entering a once-in-a-generation moment. Research and development (R&D) breakthroughs have brought us to a scientific tipping point; at the same time, health and security threats are inspiring a new level of strategic coordination. Although we now have a strong base of fundamental science, we lack the equally powerful industrial foundation needed to put the “economy” in bioeconomy. Bioindustry, encompassing less flashy products (chemicals, plastics, fuels) and bio-enabling tools and capabilities, often fails to capture the attention and investment needed to connect research with use cases, commercialize, and scale. But without solutions and capabilities that span multiple applications and sectoral silos, our bioeconomy will stall at the lab door.

Rapid progress in strengthening American bioindustry is possible, but it demands a coordinated and concerted effort that taps the federal government’s unique combination of scale and highly effective lab-to-market incentive mechanisms. Streamlined funding of open and cross-disciplinary research, prize and challenge mechanisms, and market shaping through innovative procurement have all proven highly effective in the face of market failures and applied technology gaps like those seen in our bioindustry.

To refine, tailor, and manage its unique lab-to-market toolkit in this space, the federal government should establish a single coordinating entity to accelerate bioindustry in close partnership with stakeholder agencies. The Bioindustrial Research, Innovation, and Translation Engine (BRITE), housed within National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), would do this by:

Challenge and Opportunity

After steadily gaining mindshare and momentum among policymakers, our bioeconomy has reached a once-in-a-generation moment. This has been amplified by the urgency of biothreats revealed during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the role that biotechnology and biopharmaceutical innovation played in the global response. While efforts to realize a comprehensive U.S. bioeconomy vision date back to 2012, the Biden Administration’s September 2022 Executive Order provides a clear and compelling new articulation of that vision and can serve as a platform for realizing it. Moreover, recent legislative actions, including the CHIPS and Science Law, Inflation Reduction Law, and various appropriations (see FAQ), have enabled a range of federal bioeconomy initiatives and investments.

The greatest barrier to meeting our bioeconomic moment is not one of fundamental science; it is the underdevelopment of America’s bioindustry. Bioindustry encompasses both the manufacturing of biochemicals, bioplastics, and biofuels as well as the tools, kits, and services that drive and enable the wider bioeconomy. There are very real technical, capability, and incentive barriers to bioindustrial progress, including:

Given these barriers, bioindustry is particularly susceptible to two “valleys of death”—one between a scientific breakthrough and a usable product and another between a market-ready product and deployment. In these valleys, typical innovation funders are disincentivized from high-risk / high-reward investment and struggle to achieve any sort of investment coherence or cohesion. A Congressional Research Service report notes that the very definition of bioeconomy varies widely across sectors and countries. Capital tends to isolate around one thematic area (e.g., climate, advanced materials, agriculture, health) rather than fueling systems-based, cross-cutting investments that grow the overall pie. This creates a high risk of duplicated effort and repetition of missteps. A Schmidt Futures task force report estimates that without a vibrant bioindustry, the U.S. risks losing out on at least $260 billion of annual economic opportunity that will otherwise go overseas. We will also face new economic and national security threats if we fail to establish resilient domestic bioeconomic supply chains and a robust competitive landscape.

The federal government stands alone in its ability to rapidly close the gaps that hold bioindustry back. Federal agencies are uniquely incentivized to bridge the valleys of death by tapping agencies’ unique portfolios of lab-to-market, demand-pull mechanisms. These include:

The barriers to bioindustrial progress—complex technical gaps, incentive and market failures, and misalignment of innovation culture—are daunting. Encouragingly, they are just the sort of barriers that these federal lab-to-market and demand-pull mechanisms were designed to overcome.

What are the broader benefits of accelerating our bioindustry?

Building a more robust industrial foundation for our bioeconomy benefits the entire nation but has particular potential to close economic gaps in regions historically left behind. A range of different production infrastructure, from dormant plants to breweries, can be retrofit more efficiently, especially in places outside traditional biotechnology hubs. Broadening the range of bioindustrial tools and processes, and moving to scale manufacturing, will create new job opportunities beyond advanced researchers in labs. There are also many advantages to locating biomanufacturing infrastructure in proximity to rural areas rich in feedstocks. The intersection of place-based innovation and bioindustry has already been brought to life through efforts like the U.S. Department of Agriculture Bioproduct Pilot Program and will no doubt accelerate through the NSF Regional Innovation Engines opportunity, which will align use-inspired research, translation, and workforce development in new self-sustaining innovation hubs across the country.

Plan of Action

Business as usual will not realize the full potential of—or avoid the many pitfalls awaiting—our national bioeconomy strategy. The pace and scale of bioindustrial progress require us to tap into all of the capabilities and resources noted above. In general, we need more coordinated action across the public and private sectors, including streamlined R&D partnerships to close gaps in health vs. industrial applications; competitions and challenges that translate breakthroughs to real-world use; market-shaping activities to achieve scale; and strategic coordination of sustainable funding to maximize investment leverage.

A new, whole-of-government entity should be established to marshal federal tools, best practices, and investments toward shared priorities that are critical to American bioindustrial leadership. The Bioindustrial Research, Innovation, and Translation Engine (BRITE) will encompass open innovation programs, market-shaping activities, and stakeholder engagement. BRITE can be housed within a new NIST Bio for America Program Office and convene relevant program owners from core agencies with bioeconomy mandates: National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy (DOE), Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Agriculture (USDA), and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

Streamlined R&D partnerships

BRITE can take advantage of the growing body of ideas and insights coming from academic and commercial communities through open and accessible calls for projects. This could be achieved through an EZ-BAA vehicle, modeled after BARDA DRIVe’s open call for projects that address a broad set of health security problems. The BRITE EZ-BAA would offer up to $500,000 for research and commercialization projects addressing a set of announced areas of interest (AOIs). Early engagement with BRITE through this program would improve the efficiency and win rate of technology development—and incentivize success-enabling design principles, such as designing for future biomanufacturing scale versus pure scientific outcomes. Initial AOIs could focus on scientific and technical rate limiters for growth in nonhealth bio, including development of novel high-performance biomaterials with features optimized for specific industrial use cases, or tailored to replace carbon-based inputs, as well as foundry-style projects that scale known, high-potential platforms—like spider silk protein or mycelium—with a wide array of potential use cases.

Innovation competitions and challenges

Engaging the broader scientific community through a research BAA will deliver novel and surprising ideas but will not itself advance actionable ideas to solve concrete problems. To complement a research BAA, BRITE can launch, cosponsor, or administer prize competitions and grand challenges. Open innovation programs accelerate solution development for even the most complex and stubborn bioindustrial development challenges. They are most successful when a clear ‘Goldilocks’ problem can be defined—narrow enough to be addressable by the market, but broad enough that solutions are not presupposed or prescribed. BRITE team members would work with sponsoring agencies to identify “prizeable” issues and optimize problem statements for the prize mechanism. Initial prizes or challenge series could address such diverse problems as:

Once refined, problem statements can then be designed into single- or multistage competitions. Prize design parameters can be fine-tuned to the nature of the problem and the communities that have the potential to solve them. Using strategic design to balance the fidelity of solutions sought, scale and type of incentives on offer, and timeline for development or refinement maximizes the impact of prizes. One-off or series of single phase competitions can be used to quickly prime the pump and identify potential solutions and solvers. Multistage competitions that down-select to a high-potential cohort provide the added benefit of offering targeted technical assistance over and above prize funds. This form of support is often more valuable to solvers than money—and for bioindustrial challenges could include unique resources such as support for producing demonstration projects, access to third-party validation, and engagement with federal and external experts in science, standards, or regulations.

Market shaping

The quick and meaningful wins achieved through an EZ-BAA and open innovation programs need to be sustained by a robust bioindustrial marketplace. BRITE and partner agencies could draw upon nontraditional procurement mechanisms to amplify the ideas and products that emerge from research and innovation. Other Transaction Authorities could be developed to rapidly engage production capacity from a consortium of biomaterial demonstration and scale-up providers. Advance market commitments to fund procurement of biomaterials or production capacity can position agencies as tentpole customers for applied bioindustrial solutions. These could be executed through strategic national stockpiles, chemical reserves, or other critical product procurements.

Beyond procurement, BRITE can be a driving force across agencies to lower barriers to market entry development. Housed within NIST, BRITE would have a unique ability to directly translate research and innovation outcomes to inform new or revised biomanufacturing and bioindustrial standards. BRITE could also serve as a neutral party that supports alignment of incentives and development of interoperable platforms and standards, facilitating longer-term innovation while preserving private companies’ ability to succeed. Through relationships with various bioindustry regulators (Food and Drug Administration, Environmental Protection Agency, USDA), BRITE could facilitate clearer delineation and harmonization of regulatory responsibilities. This engagement could also better incorporate the current voice of science and technology in defining and refining bioindustry rules, experimental sandboxes, and optimization for different subsectors.

Finally, BRITE can shape the market from the grassroots, engaging a wider set of scientific and general communities in the growing bioindustry. As research and innovation activities ramp up, BRITE can convene prize winners to share insights and spur serendipitous collaborations. BRITE can also steer effective scientific communication on bioindustry, engage stakeholders more directly in the innovation process, and feed community insights back into future programs and priorities. BRITE can follow the example of accelerators like HHS’s LymeX, which actively engages clinical and scientific roundtables to inform prizes and strategy.

Case example: How BRITE activities coordinate for greater impact

The federal lab-to-market tools BRITE would foster are powerful in their own right. Applied in a coordinated fashion, they can rapidly bring transformative bioindustrial solutions to bear against intractable problems.

Consider how all facets of BRITE might contribute to a pressing, multifaceted problem like lead exposure:

Sustainable funding

Based on analogous programs, including DOE American Made Challenges, an initial appropriation or discretionary allocation of $100–200 million is needed to catalyze BRITE’s standup and early wins. This could be assembled by pooling agency funds authorized for bioeconomy activities and/or unspent from recent appropriations (see Table A in FAQ). Private-sector partners or existing public-private partnerships (PPPs) could also support initial funding, though a new PPP likely could not be executed in the required timeframe. In the longer term, BRITE funding can be supported by one or more fit-to-purpose PPPs and should be enshrined in annual appropriations, following the example of KidneyX. Consistent funding is important to show commitment to bioindustrial innovation, enable more multiyear programs or recurring prize series, and provide resilience in the event of budget conflict. A minimum $15 million annual appropriation to sustain BRITE innovation activities could easily be input into one or a combination of bills (Agriculture, Commerce/Justice/State, and Energy and Water).

Conclusion

We are fortunate as a country to have a strong bench of talent working hard to push what is possible in our bioeconomy. They deserve tools and capabilities2 that enable them to work smart, delivering a far greater return on the dollars we invest in our bio-driven future. It is not sustainable for the federal government to be the only customer driving bioindustrial progress. But as a catalytic force that bridges valleys of death and solves chicken-and-egg dilemmas, strategic government action to nurture bioindustry out of the lab and into markets will take us farther, faster. By fully utilizing the world-class mechanisms smart policymakers of the past have provided us, we can de-risk bioeconomic investments while yielding maximum benefit for our economy, security, and society.

Frequently Asked Questions
What authorities and funding sources would agencies use to work with or through BRITE?

Multiple departments and agencies have been charged with advancing U.S. bioindustry. While the latest and most fit-to-purpose authorities were established under Title IV of the CHIPS and Science Law (42 U.S.C. §19135), agencies can draw upon multiple authorities to support and incentivize bioindustrial research, innovation, and translation. The following table is far from exhaustive, but it highlights several such authorities, as well as existing funding agencies could leverage to act on them.


Table A. Example authorities and appropriations to support bioindustry



































Agency Bioindustry-relevant authorities Select bioindustry-related funding
(active or FY23 appropriations)
Department of Commerce

  • Title IV: NIST standards, facilities, and capabilities to advance engineering biology and biomanufacturing

  • Manufacturing USA (15 U.S.C. §278s)

  • NIST Working Capital Fund (15 U.S.C. §278b)

  • NIST: $33M for bioeconomy enablement and emerging technology standards 

  • EDA: $200M through ongoing Build Back Better Regional Challenge activities
Department of Energy

  • Title IV: Engineering biology research, development, demonstration, and commercial application and translation

  • Multiple research and Manufacturing USA programs (e.g., Agile BioFoundry, ABPDU)

  • Incentives, including loans, for innovative technology development
    (42 U.S.C. §16513)

  • $470M for Advanced Research Projects Agency—Energy (ARPA-E) 

  • $66M for Title XVII Innovative Technology Loan Guarantee Program
Department of Agriculture

  • Title IV: Engineering biology R&D through Agricultural Research Service, National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and Office of the Chief Scientist

  • BioPreferred Program (7 U.S.C. §8102)

  • Bioproduct Pilot Program (P.L. 117-58, Title V, Section 70501)

  • Regional Bioeconomy Development Grants (42 U.S.C. §16254; expired 2015, but could be renewed)

  • National Forest System: $20M to incentivize increased use of biomass from NFS lands
National Science Foundation

  • Title IV: Engineering biology and biomanufacturing research, plus support for research infrastructure

  • Regional innovation initiatives, likely including bioeconomy and bioindustry, run through new Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP)

  • TIP likely to be funded from a portion of $7.8B Research & Related Activities appropriation
Department of Defense

  • Title IV: R&D in engineering biology and associated data and information sciences

  • BioMADE (Manufacturing USA institute)

  • $270 million from the Department of Defense (DOD) over five years for the TriService Biotechnology for a Resilient Supply Chain program;

  • $1 billion from DOD over five years to catalyze the establishment of a domestic biomanufacturing industrial base
Who would staff BRITE? What are the ideal characteristics of a program manager?

While initial stand-up of BRITE may require detail assignments from partner agencies, BRITE should have its own dedicated, permanent staff. Beyond strategic and operational leadership, program managers (PMs) would be needed to own particular topics or problem areas. The ideal PM profile would differ by function; for example, research PMs would have an applied research background and experience leading high-risk, high-reward activities in a government or industry capacity. Prize PMs would have experience with large-scale grant and prize authorities—as well as experience educating different agencies and functions (legal, political, communications) on the ins and outs of prize authorities. This expertise could also be accessed through support contracts or working with cross-agency centers of excellence in open innovation, such as NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation.

Why should BRITE be housed within NIST? Why couldn’t these activities be carried out under an entity like ARPA-E, ARPA-H, or BARDA?

BRITE draws on analogous entities and initiatives from different agencies. Indeed, by leaning on various precedents, BRITE will be easier for agency stakeholders (particularly general counsels) to understand and will be able to enact faster than relying on a brand-new legislative mandate. That said, BRITE’s mission to accelerate bioindustry in underaddressed spaces is inherently cross-disciplinary. The outcomes spearheaded by BRITE will benefit multiple agencies’ bioeconomy-related objectives; but outside of Commerce, any other agency would naturally prioritize its particular sector and set of use cases, even if it failed to lift all bioindustrial boats. Furthermore, housing BRITE within a NIST bioeconomy program office or entity could inform more rapid and effective development of bioeconomy standards, frameworks, and systems interoperability. An inspiring analog is NIST’s Public Safety Communications Research Division.

How is it possible for agencies to sponsor prize competitions through BRITE without new legislation or authorization?

Any federal agency is authorized to run a prize competition under the America COMPETES Act, (see footnote 2) and federal prize activity has increased dramatically over the last decade. In addition to COMPETES, there are various agency-specific prize authorities (e.g., NSF, DOE, DOD, NASA, HHS). While agency-specific authorities sometimes have a narrow topic focus, they can add flexibility beyond COMPETES provisions (for example, DOD and NASA competitions can award monetary prizes to non-U.S. entrants, which is not possible under COMPETES). Multiagency collaboration on prizes is common—over a quarter of agency prizes were conducted with at least one other federal partner. In addition, many agencies receive expert support in prize administration from partner entities like GSA’s Challenge.gov and NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation.

How will BRITE advance the field if only winners benefit from prize competitions? Are there ways to reward or support non-winners with good ideas?

Prizes confer many benefits beyond the direct cash payment and in-kind support awarded to top teams. The experience of entering a competition alone is often a helpful forcing function for teams to crystallize ideas and present them in a more compelling way. But prizes can also include design elements that advance the wider field beyond the winners. In multistage prizes, non-winning teams can partner with or even provide technical assistance and expertise to the teams that advance. Honorable mention or other award categories can also provide a lift. For example, the VA’s recent Mission Daybreak challenge issued small “Promise Awards” to teams that were not named finalists but showed potential, which provides them a boost in securing future funding and support. Finally, some or all of the technical assistance provided to winners (in the form of webinars, documents, templates, etc.) can be disseminated to the general public as an open resource.

Tilling the Federal SOIL for Transformative R&D: The Solution Oriented Innovation Liaison

Summary 

The federal government is increasingly embracing Advanced Research Projects Agencies (ARPAs) and other transformative research and engagement enterprises (TREEs) to connect innovators and create the breakthroughs needed to solve complex problems. Our innovation ecosystem needs more of these TREEs, especially for societal challenges that have not historically benefited from solution-oriented research and development. And because the challenges we face are so interwoven, we want them to work and grow together in a solution-oriented mode. 

The National Science Foundation (NSF)’s new Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships should establish a new Office of the Solution-Oriented Innovation Liaison (SOIL) to help TREEs share knowledge about complementary initiatives, establish a community of practice among breakthrough innovators, and seed a culture for exploring new models of research and development within the federal government. The SOIL would have two primary goals: (1) provide data, information, and knowledge-sharing services across existing TREEs; and (2) explore opportunities to pilot R&D models of the future and embed breakthrough innovation models in underleveraged agencies.

Challenge and Opportunity

Climate change. Food security. Social justice. There is no shortage of complex challenges before us—all intersecting, all demanding civil action, and all waiting for us to share knowledge. Such challenges remain intractable because they are broader than the particular mental models that any one individual or organization holds. To develop solutions, we need science that is more connected to social needs and to other ways of knowing. Our problem is not a deficit of scientific capital. It is a deficit of connection.

Connectivity is what defines a growing number of approaches to the public administration of science and technology, alternatively labeled as transformative innovation, mission-oriented innovation, or solutions R&D. Connectivity is what makes DARPA, IARPA, and ARPA-E work, and it is why new ARPAs are being created for health and proposed for infrastructure, labor, and education. Connectivity is also a common element among an explosion of emerging R&D models, including Focused Research Organizations (FROs) and Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). And connectivity is the purpose of NSF’s new Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships (TIP), which includes “fostering innovation ecosystems” in its mission. New transformative research and engagement enterprises (TREEs) could be especially valuable in research domains at the margins, where “the benefits of innovation do not simply trickle down.

The history of ARPAs and other TREEs shows that solutions R&D is successfully conducted by entities that combine both research and engagement. If grown carefully, such organisms bear fruit. So why just plant one here or there when we could grow an entire forest? The metaphor is apt. To grow an innovation ecosystem, we must intentionally sow the seeds of TREEs, nurture their growth, and cultivate symbiotic relationships—all while giving each the space to thrive.

Plan of Action

NSF’s TIP directorate should create a new Office of Solution-Oriented Innovation (SOIL) to foster a thriving community of TREEs. SOIL would have two primary goals: (1) nurture more TREEs of more varieties in more mission spaces; and (2) facilitate more symbiosis among TREEs of increasing number and variety. 

Goal 1: More TREEs of more varieties in more mission spaces

SOIL would shepherd the creation of TREEs wherever they are needed, whether in a federal department, a state or local agency, or in the private, nonprofit, or academic sectors. Key to this is codifying the lessons of successful TREEs and translating them to new contexts. Not all such knowledge is codifiable; much is tacit. As such, SOIL would draw upon a cadre of research-management specialists who have a deep familiarity with different organizational forms (e.g., ARPAs, FROs, DAOs) and could work with the leaders of departments, businesses, universities, consortia, etc. to determine which form best suits the need of the entity in question and provide technical assistance in establishment.

An essential part of this work would be helping institutions create mission-appropriate governance models and cultures. Administering TREEs is neither easy nor typical. Indeed, the very fact that they are managed differently from normal R&D programs makes them special. Former DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar has emphasized the importance of such tailored structures to the success of TREEs. To this end, SOIL would also create a Community of Cultivators comprising former TREE leaders, principal investigators (PIs), and staff. Members of this community would provide those seeking to establish new TREEs with guidance during the scoping, launch, and management phases.

SOIL would also provide opportunities for staff at different TREEs to connect with each other and with collective resources. It could, for example, host dedicated liaison officers at agencies (as DARPA has with its service lines) to coordinate access to SOIL resources and other TREEs and support the documentation of lessons learned for broader use. SOIL could also organize periodic TREE conventions for affiliates to discuss strategic directions and possibly set cross-cutting goals. Similar to the SBIR office at the Small Business Administration, SOIL would also report annually to Congress on the state of the TREE system, as well as make policy recommendations.

Goal 2: More symbiosis among TREEs of increasing number and variety

Success for SOIL would be a community of TREEs that is more than the sum of its parts. It is already clear how the defense and intelligence missions of DARPA and IARPA intersect. There are also energy programs at DARPA that might benefit from deeper engagement with programs at ARPA-E. In the future, transportation-infrastructure programs at ARPA-E could work alongside similar programs at an ARPA for infrastructure. Fostering stronger connections between entities with overlapping missions would minimize redundant efforts and yield shared platform technologies that enable sector-specific advances.

Indeed, symbiotic relationships could spawn untold possibilities. What if researchers across different TREEs could build knowledge together? Exchange findings, data, algorithms, and ideas? Co-create shared models of complex phenomena and put competing models to the test against evidence? Collaborate across projects, and with stakeholders, to develop and apply digital technologies as well as practices to govern their use? A common digital infrastructure and virtual research commons would enable faster, more reliable production (and reproduction) of research across domains. This is the logic underlying the Center for Open Science and the National Secure Data Service.

To this end, SOIL should build a digital Mycelial Network (MyNet), a common virtual space that would harness the cognitive diversity across TREEs for more robust knowledge and tools. MyNet would offer a set of digital services and resources that could be accessed by TREE managers, staff, and PIs. Its most basic function could be to depict the ecosystem of challenges and solutions, search for partners, and deconflict programs. Once partnerships are made, higher-level functions would include secure data sharing, co-creation of solutions, and semantic interconnection. MyNet could replace the current multitude of ad hoc, sector-specific systems for sharing research resources, giving more researchers access to more knowledge about complex systems and fewer obstacles from paywalls. And the larger the network, the bigger the network effects. If the MyNet infrastructure proves successful for TREEs, it could ultimately be expanded more broadly to all research institutions—just as ARPAnet expanded into the public internet. 

For users, MyNet would have three layers:

These functions would collectively require:

How might MyNet be applied? Consider three hypothetical programs, all focused on microplastics: a medical program that maps how microplastics are metabolized and impact health; a food-security program that maps how microplastics flow through food webs and supply chains; and a social justice program that maps which communities produce and consume microplastics. In the data layer, researchers at the three programs could combine data on health records, supply logistics, food inspections, municipal records, and demographics. In the information layer, they might collaborate on coding and evaluating quantitative models. Finally, in the knowledge layer, they could work together to validate claims regarding who is impacted, how much, and by what means.

Initial Steps

First, Congress should authorize and appropriate the NSF TIP Directorate with $500 million over four years for a new Office of the Solution-Oriented Innovation Liaison. Congress should view SOIL as an opportunity to create a shared service among emergent, transformative federal R&D efforts that will empower—rather than bureaucratically stifle—the science and technological advances we need most. This mission fits squarely under the NSF TIP Directorate’s mandate to “mobilize the collective power of the nation” by serving as “a crosscutting platform that collaboratively integrates with NSF’s existing directorates and fosters partnerships—with government, industry, nonprofits, civil society and communities of practice—to leverage, energize and rapidly bring to society use-inspired research and innovation.” 

Once appropriated and authorized to begin intentionally growing a network of TREEs, NSF’s TIP Directorate should focus on a four-year plan for SOIL. TIP should begin by choosing an appropriate leader for SOIL, such as a former director or directorate manager of an ARPA (or other TREE). SOIL would be tasked with first engaging the management of existing ARPAs in the federal government, such as those at the Departments of Defense and Energy, to form an advisory board. The advisory board would in turn guide the creation of experience-informed operating procedures for SOIL to use to establish and aid new TREEs. These might include discussions geared toward arriving at best practices and mechanisms to operate rapid solutions-focused R&D programs for the following functions:

Beyond these structural aspects, the board must also incorporate important cultural aspects of TREES into best practices. In my own research into the managerial heuristics that guide TREEs, I found that managers must be encouraged to “drive change” (critique the status quo, dream big, take action), “be better” (embrace difference, attract excellence, stand out from the crowd), “herd nerds” (focus the creative talent of scientists and engineers), “gather support” (forge relationships with research conductors and potential adversaries), “try and err” (take diverse approaches, expect to fail, learn from failure), and “make it matter” (direct activities to realize outcomes for society, not for science).

The board would also recommend a governance structure and implementation strategy for MyNet. In its first year, SOIL could also start to grow the Community of Cultivators, potentially starting with members of the advisory board. The board chair, in partnership with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, would also convene an initial series of interagency working groups (IWGs) focused on establishing a community of practice around TREEs, including but not limited to representatives from the following R&D agencies, offices, and programs: 

In years two and three, SOIL would focus on growing three to five new TREEs at organizations that have not had solutions-oriented innovation programs before but need them. 

SOIL would also start to build a pilot version of MyNet as a resource for these new TREEs, with a goal of including existing ARPAs and other TREEs as quickly as possible. In establishing MyNet, SOIL should focus on implementing the most appropriate system of data governance by first understanding the nature of the collaborative activities intended. Digital research collaborations can apply and mix a range of different governance patterns, with different amounts of availability and freedoms with respect to digital resources. MyNet should be flexible enough to meet a range of needs for openness and security. To this end, SOIL should coordinate with the recently created National Secure Data Service and apply lessons forward in creating an accessible, secure, and ethical information-sharing environment. 

Year four and beyond would be characterized by scaling up. Building on the lessons learned in the prior two years of pilot programs, SOIL would coordinate with new and legacy TREEs to refresh operating procedures and governance structures. It would then work with an even broader set of organizations to increase the number of TREEs beyond the three to five pilots and continue to build out MyNet as well as the Community of Cultivators. Periodic evaluations of SOIL’s programmatic success would shape its evolution after this point. These should be framed in terms of its capacity to create and support programs that yield meaningful technological and socioeconomic outcomes, not just produce traditional research metrics. As such, in its creation of new TREEs, SOIL should apply a major lesson of the National Academies’ evaluation of ARPA-E: explicitly align the (necessarily) robust performance management systems at the project level with strategy and evaluation systems at the program, portfolio, and agency levels. The long-term viability of SOIL and TREEs will depend on their ability to demonstrate value to the public.

Frequently Asked Questions
What is the transformative research model? What makes it different from a typical R&D model?

The transformative research model typically works like this:



  • Engage with stakeholders to understand their needs and set audacious goals for addressing them.

  • Establish lean projects run by teams of diverse experts assembled just long enough to succeed or fail in one approach.

  • Continuously evaluate projects, build on what works, kill what doesn’t, and repeat as necessary.


In a nutshell, transformative research enterprises exist solely to solve a particular problem, rather than to grow a program or amass a stock of scientific capital.


To get more specific, Bonvillian and Van Atta (2011) identify the unique factors that contribute to the innovative nature of ARPAs. On the personnel front, ARPA program managers are talented managers, experienced in business, and appointed for limited terms. They are “translators,” as opposed to subject-matter experts, who actively engage with allies, rivals, and others. They have great power to choose projects, hire, fire, and contract. On the structure front, projects are driven by specific challenges or visions—co-developed with stakeholders—designed around plausible implementation pathways. Projects are executed extramurally, and managed as portfolios, with clear metrics to asses risk and reward. Success for ARPAs means developing products and services that achieve broad uptake and cost-efficacy, so finding first adopters and creating markets is part of the work.

What kinds of TREEs could SOIL help to create?

Some examples come from other Day One proposals. SOIL could work with the Department of Labor to establish a Labor ARPA. It could work with the Department of Education on an Education ARPA. We could imagine a Justice Department ARPA with a program for criminal justice reform, one at Housing and Urban Development aimed at solving homelessness, or one at the State Department for innovations in diplomacy. And there are myriad opportunities beyond the federal government.

What kind of authority over TREEs should SOIL have? Since TREEs are designed to be nimble and independent, wouldn’t SOIL oversight inhibit their operations with an extra layer of bureaucracy?

TREEs thrive on their independence and flexibility, so SOIL’s functions must be designed to impose minimal interference. Other than ensuring that the TREEs it supports are effectively administered as transformative, mission-oriented organizations, SOIL would be very hands-off. SOIL would help establish TREEs and set them up so they do not operate as typical R&D units. SOIL would give TREE projects and staff the means to connect cross-organizationally with other projects and staff in areas of mutual interest (e.g., via MyNet, the Community of Cultivators, and periodic convenings). And, like the SBIR office at the Small Business Administration, SOIL would report annually to Congress on its operations and progress toward goals.

What is the estimated cost of SOIL and its component initiatives? How would it be funded?

An excellent model for SOIL is the Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) system. SBIR is funded by redirecting a small percentage of the budgets of agencies that spend $100 million or more on extramural R&D. Given that SOIL is intended to be relevant to all federal mission spaces, we recommend that SOIL be funded by a small fraction (between 0.1 and 1.0%) of the budgets of all agencies with $1 billion or more in total discretionary spending. This would yield about $15 billion to support SOIL in growing and connecting new TREEs in a vastly widened set of mission spaces. 


The risk is the opportunity cost of this budget reallocation to each funding agency. It is worth noting, though, that changes of 0.1–1.0% are less than the amount that the average agency sees as annual perturbations in its budget. Moreover, redirecting these funds may well be worth the opportunity cost, especially as an investment in solving the compounding problems that federal agencies face. By redirecting this small fraction of funds, we can keep agency operations 99–99.9% as effective while simultaneously creating a robust, interconnected, solutions-oriented R&D system.

Empower the Geothermal Earthshot: Solve the Climate Crisis with Earth’s Energy

Summary

As a result of human activity, greenhouse gas emissions are increasing so rapidly that climate disaster is imminent. To avoid catastrophe, all economic sectors––industry, agriculture, transport, buildings, and electricity––require immediate energy and climate policy solutions. Only with a resilient and renewable, bipartisan, clean, and reliable partner can America fully decarbonize its economy and avert the devastating effects of climate change. As America’s clean energy transformation proceeds, there is one energy technology up for the task across all these sectors––geothermal. 

Geothermal is the energy source naturally produced by the Earth. It is a proven technology with decades of utilization across the United States, including New York, Idaho, North Dakota, California, Arkansas, New Mexico, and everywhere in between.

Government agencies and academic institutions have already identified more than enough untapped Earth-powered energy in the United States alone to meet the nation’s energy needs while also achieving its emissions goals. In fact, the total amount of heat energy in the Earth’s crust is many times greater than the energy available globally from all fossil fuels. 

Despite these benefits, geothermal represented just 0.4% of total U.S. utility-scale electricity generation in 2021 and only 1% of the residential and commercial building heating and cooling market. What is holding geothermal back is a lack of policy attention at both the federal and state levels. Geothermal has been drastically underfunded and continues to be left out of energy, climate, and appropriations legislation. By acting as the primary facilitator and coordinator for geothermal technology policy and deployment, the U.S. government can significantly accelerate the clean energy transformation. 

Our Empowering the Geothermal Earthshot proposal is a multibillion dollar interagency effort to facilitate the energy revolution America needs to finally solve the climate crisis and complete its clean energy transformation. This top-down support would allow the geothermal industry to fully utilize the power of the free market, commercialize innovation into mass production, and scale technologies.

Challenge and Opportunity

Geothermal energy––clean renewable energy derived from the unlimited heat in the Earth––is a proven technology that can contribute to achieving aggressive climate goals but only if it gets much-needed policy support. Geothermal urgently requires the same legislative and executive attention, policy momentum, and funding that all other energy technologies receive. The Biden Administration as well as Republicans and Democrats in Congress need to lift up the profile of geothermal on par with other energy technologies if we are to reach net-zero by 2050 and eventually 24/7 carbon-free energy.

On day one of his administration, President Biden charged his National Climate Task Force to utilize all available government resources to develop a new target for reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As a result, in April 2021 the Biden Administration announced an aggressive new GHG target: a 50% reduction from 2005 levels by 2030. To meet this challenge, the administration outlined four high-priority goals:

Pie chart showing Total Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Economic Sector in the U.S. in 2020. Transportation is responsible for 27%; Electricity, 25%; Industry, 24%; Commercial; Residential, 13%; Agriculture, 11%.
Figure 1.

Pie chart showing Total Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Economic Sector in the U.S. in 2020. Transportation is responsible for 27%; Electricity, 25%; Industry, 24%; Commercial; Residential, 13%; Agriculture, 11%.

  1. Invest in clean technology infrastructure.
  2. Fuel an economic recovery that creates jobs.
  3. Protect our air and water and advance environmental justice.
  4. Do this all in America.

Geothermal energy’s primary benefits make it an ideal energy candidate in America’s fight against climate change. First, geothermal electricity offers clean firm, reliable, and stable baseload power. As such, it easily complements wind and solar energy, which can fluctuate and produce only intermittent power. Not only does geothermal energy offer more resilient and renewable energy, but––unlike nuclear and biomass energy and battery storage––it does so with no harmful waste by-products. Geothermal energy does not depend on extractive activities (i.e., mining) that have a history of adversely impacting the environment and Indigenous communities. The underlying energy source––the literal heat beneath our feet––is local, is 100% American, and has demonstrated gigawatt-scale operation since the 1980s, unlike every other prospective clean energy technology. Geothermal energy offers a technology that we can export as a service provider and manufacturer to the rest of the world to reduce global GHG emissions, increase U.S. energy independence, and improve the country’s economy and national defense. 

Additionally, climate change continues to change outside air temperatures and weather patterns impacting building energy consumptions (e.g., heating and cooling), which are expected to increase. Geothermal heating and cooling meets these demands by providing reliable and distributed electricity generation, winter heating, and summer cooling. Geothermal heating and cooling offer solutions to other economic sectors that produce harmful carbon and methane emissions. 

Getting to net-zero by 2050––and eventually to 24/7 carbon-free energy––is a community problem, a public sector problem that affects America’s public health, economic survival, and national security. We can get here if geothermal is provided the same opportunities that the government has afforded all other energy technologies.

Geothermal Energy: The Forgotten Energy Technology

Today, geothermal power production is at the same developmental stage that oil production was 100 years ago. Geothermal power production has been proven at gigawatt scale, but in a limited range of locations where conventional hydrothermal systems are easily accessible. Petroleum drilling in the United States began in 1859 and expanded first in places where oil was visible, easily identifiable, and quickly accessible. In the 150 years since, continuous market support from governments and societies has allowed the fossil fuel economy not just to continue but to expand through technology innovation. Fossil fuel technologies have matured to the point where engineers regularly drill seven to eight miles underground, drill in deep ocean water, and utilize efficient recovery technologies such as steam-assisted gravity drainage.

Geothermal carries the same potential to drive new technologies of energy production and enable huge increases in energy recovery and output. However, unlike the petroleum industry, geothermal energy has never received comparable and effective policy support from the federal and state governments to drive this needed technology development, innovation, and deployment. As a result, the geothermal industry has been left behind in the United States. 

Pie chart of Federal Energy Subsidies between 1950 and 2010, showing a plurality of subsidies going to oil, while only a small sliver to geothermal.
Figure 2.

Pie chart of Federal Energy Subsidies between 1950 and 2010, showing a plurality of subsidies going to oil, while only a small sliver to geothermal.

Ironically, the fact that geothermal technologies have a long and successful track record has kept them out of the “new technology” focus that has been central to clean energy transition policy discussions.

Other technologies (e.g., hydro, solar, hydrocarbons, nuclear, biofuels, and wind) receive tens of billions of dollars each year to develop a path to continued, preferred, and widespread use, which generates commercialization, scalability, and profit. However, similar investment strategies have not been dedicated to geothermal energy infrastructure development. 

The United States needs critical capital investments to reach the vast amount of untapped Earth energy scientists have identified, expand the range of places where geothermal resources are possible, and lower the cost of geothermal drilling and production. Public investment will promote technologies such as heating and cooling systems that use individualized geothermal heat pumps (GHP) or district thermal systems. Significant public investment is needed in electricity generation technologies such as closed-loop, deep super hot rock, and enhanced systems (EGS). And of course, public and private investments are needed to help manufacturing and agricultural processes switch from fossil fuels to geothermal.

Investing in Our Future: Empowering the Geothermal Earthshot

Thankfully, investing in America’s energy infrastructure is a priority of our current presidential administration. As indicated in the April 2021 White House Fact Sheet and supported by Executive Order 14057 and the Department of Energy (DOE) Enhanced Geothermal Earthshot announced in September 2022, the Biden Administration realizes the need to marshal federal resources in a coordinated effort.

However, to fully realize and build upon the administration’s clean energy objectives, this proposal urges a holistic approach to empower geothermal deployment. The Enhanced Geothermal Earthshot falls short of the effort required to empower geothermal and scale a solution to draw down the climate crisis because it focuses on a single geothermal technology and involves just one federal agency. Instead, a whole-of-geothermal approach that harnesses the power of the entire federal government is necessary to create ambitious, positive, and widespread changes in America’s energy landscape and subvert the current fossil fuel status quo. The following action plan will usher in the geothermal era and ensure the United States meets its climate objectives and completes the clean energy transformation.

Plan of Action

The Biden Administration must set the targets and the agenda, propose policy and tax support, negotiate for appropriations, and issue regulatory support that allows commercialization and deployment of every possible Earth-powered technology solution. These steps will set up the market conditions for the private sector to commercialize and scale these proven technologies and new innovations. 

Creating policies and programs to support geothermal applications and technologies will accelerate the clean energy transformation and end our dependence on hydrocarbons. The U.S. government can usher in a new age of clean, renewable, and local energy through a combination of innovation, programs, and institutionalization. These are outlined in the recommendations detailed below.

Recommendation 1. Empower a Holistic Geothermal Earthshot

The Biden Administration should build upon and broaden the Enhanced Geothermal Earthshot to reduce the cost of EGS by 90% to $45 per megawatt hour by 2035. The administration should set a target for geothermal heat pumps and district thermal systems to reach 35% of U.S. energy consumption by 2035 and electricity generation to reach 10% of energy consumption by 2035. These objectives are in response to the administration’s carbon reduction goals for 2030 and 2050. To begin this initiative, President Biden––joined by the Secretaries of Energy, the Interior, Commerce, Defense, and Agriculture, as well as special climate and environment envoys and advisors and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, among others—should formally usher in a reimagined and holistic Geothermal Earthshot that leverages a whole-of-government approach.

Recommendation 2. Institutionalize and Coordinate Earth Energy Support

Create the Office of Earth Energy (OEE) at DOE through the president’s annual budget proposal. The OEE’s mission will be to coalesce federal and state governments, familiarize the public, and support all types of Earth-powered energy technologies. 

Existing DOE offices such as ONE and OFECM offer a proven template from which to model OEE. Geothermal’s potential to address the climate crisis and become a significant part of the cooling/heating and electricity mix in the United States requires significant growth of support within the federal government. The organizational structure of the federal government is imperative to spearhead geothermal development. Raising the awareness and profile of geothermal within the government requires higher-level offices and more senior-level personnel supporting, evaluating, and studying the industry. The three DAS subject-matter designations represent the three overarching applications of geothermal technologies.

Interagency coordination should be led by a Senior Director for Earth-Powered Energy within the National Security Council (NSC). Programs and initiatives involve executive agencies and offices, including DOE, Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Agriculture, Department of Commerce, Department of the Interior (DOI), Office of Science and Technology Policy, Office of Management and Budget, NSC, Domestic Policy Council, Department of State, and EPA, among others.

Recommendation 3. Accelerate Geothermal Innovation

The following innovation accelerator concepts can help unlock technical hurdles and unleash private sector thinking to expand the reach of geothermal energy applications. The needed primary research fits into three broad categories: streamlining existing geothermal energy development and reducing risk, technology innovations to support massively scaling the potential range and total energy available from the Earth, and technical refinements to optimize every Earth energy application.

For example, work is needed to reduce technical risk and predictability in siting geothermal wells to make drilling a geothermal well as predictable and repeatable as it is for oil and gas wells today. Reduced risk and greater predictability is critical to private sector investment support. 

Commercial and residential heat pumps and district heating systems need R&D support to improve deployability in urban settings and to maximize both heating and cooling efficiency.

Enhanced geothermal systems—those that expand traditional hydrothermal power generation to less permeable locations—have received modest public sector support for several decades but need greater and more focused application of technologies that were developed for oil and gas during the fracing expansion.

Achieving massive scalability for geothermal power means developing technologies that can operate well beyond traditional hydrothermal system locations. Closed-loop and other advanced geothermal technologies promise access to energy anywhere there is heat, but all are currently at the earliest stages of their technology lifecycles and operating without major public sector research support 

All of these use cases would benefit from a concerted, government-funded research effort, shared access to innovation and best practices, and a clear path to commercialization.

(A) Propose in the president’s annual budget a geothermal bureau, program, or focus area within the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) dedicated to promoting all types of geothermal innovations, from low- to high-temperature cooling/heating and electricity applications. ARPA-E “advances high-potential, high-impact energy technologies that are too early for private-sector investment.” Use this program to support research into new or expanded ways to use Earth energy that are too early or speculative for private sector investment and bring them to the point of commercialization.

(B) Create a new venture capital entity to accelerate commercialization of geothermal innovations by aggressively investing in geothermal-related technologies. Model it on the existing In-Q-Tel organization that has been very successful in driving national security technology development. This would be a new venture capital funding entity focused on commercializing Earth power technology innovation from U.S. government-funded research and development initiatives (e.g., the ARPA-E projects described above) and on exploring technology solutions to problems that remain unsolved across government, industry, and society yet are critically important for dealing with climate change. 

(C) Create a public-private Geothermal Center of Excellence (GeoExcel) at a DOE national lab. A sustained and robust public-private research program is essential for innovation, and many agencies leverage private sector investment through publicly funded centers of excellence. Currently, geothermal research is conducted haphazardly and incoherently across U.S. government agencies and DOE national labs such as Idaho National Lab, Sandia National Labs, Lawrence Berkeley Lab, U.S. Geological Survey, National Renewable Energy Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, Argonne National Lab, National Energy Technology Lab, and many more. To augment research within its national lab apparatus, DOE should establish GeoExcel to develop the technology necessary to produce low-cost geothermal power, cooling/heating, and mineral recovery such as lithium, manganese, gold, and silica. GeoExcel would also conduct education outreach and workforce development. GeoExcel would be a multibillion-dollar public-private partnership competitively awarded with multiyear funding. It would interact closely with one or two DOE national labs as well as federal, state, regional, and municipal government agencies, research universities, community college, nonprofits, and the private sector.

Recommendation 4. Create Earth Energy-Specific Programs and Policies

The following programs, funding, and regulatory suggestions should be proposed in the president’s budget and funded or authorized through congressional appropriations or moving authorization legislation. Some recommendations can be achieved through updating rules and regulations.

Programmatic: DOE Demonstration Projects

The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) appropriated $20 billion for demonstration projects, including those for hydrogen, direct air capture, and large-scale carbon capture. This funding provides vital capital to incentivize, commercialize, and scale public-private partnerships using the benefits of the free market to build major infrastructure projects that will expand clean energy and advance the energy transformation. The IIJA did not direct any funding specifically for geothermal technologies; yet geothermal provides the critical clean firm and renewable baseload energy that complements intermittent technologies, can be coupled to produce green hydrogen, and empowers direct air capture infrastructure. As part of its criteria for selecting applications for demonstration project funding, Congress should clarify and/or DOE should expressly include and announce that geothermal technology will receive significant demonstration appropriations funded through the IIJA.

Funding: Risk Mitigation and Management

Commercial investment in new technology hinges on risk assessment. Removing risk from new geothermal ventures will facilitate faster commercial-scale deployment and, in turn, lower risk as more projects are completed. Propose a $2 billion risk mitigation fund within the DOE’s OEE specific for district cooling/heating and electricity drilling and exploration projects. This geothermal risk mitigation fund would provide loans to cover a portion (i.e., 60%) of the drilling cost that can be converted into grants if development of the geothermal field is unsuccessful. To minimize losses, a premium can be charged to ensure a positive return based on risk and set limits on total wells covered and monetary claims to limit losses. 

This risk mitigation and management structure has been successfully implemented for geothermal projects in Kenya, Iceland, and Costa Rica, countries in the top five of geothermal energy production per capita. To further reduce risk, the OEE should only consider projects that have already completed some exploratory drilling. Before administering commercial debt financing, the OEE should also require these projects to receive concessional risk mitigation support prior to advancing with additional drilling, district cooling/heating system construction, or power plant construction.

Funding: Rural Development

Propose a $450 million Department of Agriculture Rural Development grant program to transition agricultural and industrial cool/heat applications from burning fossil fuels to Earth energy generation. This funding can be used to decarbonize over two million cooling and heating systems used in the agricultural sector in rural America. Agricultural activities such as food processing, pulp and paper manufacturing, vegetable dehydration, dairy processing, aquaculture, greenhouses, processing sugar, and much more can transition to the clean energy economy.

Funding: Community Development

Propose a $750 million grant program to be implemented by the Department of Commerce Economic Development Administration. Grants will be made for high- and low-temperature geothermal developers to partner with municipalities, electric or energy cooperatives, community choice aggregators, and public utilities servicing America’s communities to develop geothermal resources. This funding level could generate between 375 and 500 megawatts of electricity to power between 280,000 and 375,000 households or over 3,500 megawatts of cooling/heating energy and decarbonize two to three million households and commercial businesses around the country. It is important that the clean energy transition equitably and justly empower rural American communities along with urban and suburban communities.

Funding: Tribal Development

Fund a $275 million grant program through the proposed OEE at DOE or the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) at DOI to support tribal nations to develop geothermal resources on their lands, such as electricity generation, industrial and agricultural decarbonization, residential and commercial GHPs or district cooling/heating installations, and recreation. This funding could be used to generate up to 183 megawatts of electricity or 1,375 megawatts of thermal energy for use on tribal lands. Native Americans used geothermal resources for thousands of years before European settlement. Today, tribal lands are the backbone of mineral exploitation, agriculture, industry, and power production in America. These OEE or BIA funds will facilitate the clean energy transition on tribal lands using geothermal resources.

Funding: Military Construction

Propose a $2.6 billion program for distributed geothermal power and cooling/heating projects on military installations across the United States and abroad. The Air Force recently selected two military installations to deploy geothermal energy. In an increasingly contested clean energy economy, we should build secure and resilient military infrastructure using local Earth energy technologies directly on military installations. DOD can use the funding to generate a combination of up to 1,733 megawatts of electricity or 13,000 megawatts of thermal energy to offset its massive carbon footprint from 500 fixed installations, which includes 300,000 buildings. This investment will help all service branches and DOD reach the Biden Administration’s renewable energy generation goals. This funding begins the vital transformation to secure the energy infrastructure of military installations through energy independence and protect our national security interests at home and abroad. Energy and mineral security are paramount for our national security. 

Funding: Smithsonian Institution

Geothermal energy is a story of the forgotten energy technology. Propose $25 million for the Smithsonian Institution to memorialize and narrate the history and future of geothermal energy in the United States. Museums familiarize and educate policymakers and the public about the past, present, and future of America. Permanent exhibitions in museums along the National Mall in Washington, DC, will help promote the potential of geothermal resources to policymakers as is already done with other energy technologies featured by the Smithsonian Institution.

Funding: Workforce Development and Community Colleges

The future of the clean energy transformation rests in the education of Americans and a smooth workforce transition of oil and gas professionals into the clean energy economy. Community colleges play a vital role in this transition. Allocate $300 million for the Department of Education to award grants to technical and vocational programs to develop and build geothermal-specific skill sets and needs into curriculums. These geothermal programs will build upon and expand existing programs such as drill rig crew member training programs like that at Houston Community College in Texas or cooling/heating apprenticeship programs like those at Mercer Community College in New Jersey or Foothills College in California. The objective of these grants is to amplify the capabilities of geothermal technologies and deepen the knowledge of professionals who install, sell, market, or manufacture products that could transition to geothermal technologies and away from burning fossil fuels.

Funding: Convert Abandoned Oil and Gas Wells

Expand the authorities of the Leaking Underground Storage Tank (LUST) Trust Fund within the EPA to include the conversion of existing and abandoned oil and gas fields into geothermal wells. The LUST Trust Fund is financed by a 0.1 cent tax on each gallon of motor fuel sold nationwide. Oil and gas wells can be retrofitted or reworked to provide geothermal cooling/heating for low-to-no-carbon direct use opportunities or generate power. Due to the years of development at these sites, the reservoir is well understood, thereby lowering risks and cost of exploration. Alternatively, this program could be a direct grant program funded through the proposed OEE within DOE or through EPA.

Regulatory: Geothermal Permitting Application Processing

Applications to conduct geophysical exploration are currently reviewed by the district office within the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) at DOI that has geographic jurisdiction over the specific geothermal project. Yet many district offices are unfamiliar with the technical aspects of geothermal development, causing significant delays in the review process. Fund $15 million for a national office with a dedicated geothermal team to develop training materials and standard operating procedures and to provide technical support to district offices to ensure timely review of geothermal power and cooling/heating projects on federal lands. Programs that cross-train staff will also improve the ability to coordinate between different agencies and offices.

Regulatory: Categorical Exclusions for Geothermal Projects

Several activities involved in geothermal resource development have no significant environmental effects yet lack an existing categorical exclusion under the National Environmental Policy Act. BLM’s regulations include only one categorical exclusion for geophysical exploration when no temporary or new road construction is required (43 CFR 4 3250); however, it does not cover resource confirmation activities. As a consequence, federal agencies take several months to approve what could be done in a matter of days via a categorical exclusion. Congress has recognized the need to improve the permitting process for geothermal production and introduced several bills to authorize categorical exclusions (i.e., S. 2949, S. 2824, and H.R. 5350).

Tax Support: Cooling and Heating

Propose a 40% tax incentive for residential and commercial building installation of geothermal heat pumps and extend the lifespan of these incentives through 2050, the date set to reach net zero emissions economy-wide. Additionally, the Biden Administration should publicly clarify or amend Presidential Determination No. 2022-18 of Section 303 of the Defense Production Act to include geothermal heat pumps.

Tax Support: Power

Geothermal electricity generation has traditionally been capital-intensive, and investment decisions depend in part on the predictability of tax incentives. This trend is best illustrated by the 1978 passage of the Public Utility Regulatory Policies Act (PURPA). This legislation’s tax consequences created more favorable conditions and a more robust market for renewable-energy suppliers. As a result, PURPA allowed the United States to rapidly increase its geothermal capacity throughout the 1980s.

Rapid deployment and growth after the passage of PURPA illustrates the impact of public policy on geothermal innovation and investment. However, renewable energy tax incentives provided in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 had intermittent energy and battery storage in mind when drafted. These tax incentives do not adequately support geothermal power development due to sunset clauses. The president’s budget as well as congressional appropriators and authorizers should extend the availability of the 30% Investment Tax Credit (ITC) and 2.6 cents per kWh for the Production Tax Credit (PTC) using a market approach akin to that proposed in the bipartisan Energy Sector Innovation Credit (ESIC) Act authored by Senators Whitehouse (D-RI), Crapo (R-ID), Barrasso (R-WY), Bennet (D-CO), and Hickenlooper (D-CO) as well as Representatives Reed (R-NY) and Panetta (D-CA). 

Chart showing eletricity generation capacity from geothermal development in the U.S. from 1970 to 2020. In that time, geothermal generation capacity has grown from 0 megawatts to nearly 4,000 megawatts.
Figure 3.

Chart showing eletricity generation capacity from geothermal development in the U.S. from 1970 to 2020. In that time, geothermal generation capacity has grown from 0 megawatts to nearly 4,000 megawatts.

The ITC and PTC are written with intermittent energy technologies in mind. Geothermal requires a tax incentive structure that does not sunset after two or 10 years but rather automatically scales down credits as geothermal technologies’ market penetration ramps up. The ESIC scale down should begin when geothermal reaches 10% market penetration instead of 2%. This empowers the free market to play a major role in commercialization and scaling geothermal technologies and provides much-needed predictability and planning for the geothermal industry. It also ensures taxpayer dollars do not subsidize market-mature technologies as they currently do for all other energy technologies such as hydrocarbon, solar, wind, and nuclear projects.

Conclusion 

We can find geothermal energy just below our feet, literally everywhere. It provides 24/7 carbon-free power, cooling, and heating that is safe, resilient, local, and American. A public-private partnership that leverages public-sector investment with private-sector know-how can make geothermal technology a viable replacement for hydrocarbons and a powerful solution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We must empower and broaden the Enhanced Geothermal Earthshot through the programs and recommendations listed in this plan of action. In doing so, a reimagined and holistic Geothermal Earthshot can leverage the position and influence of the federal government through a whole-of-government approach, allowing the free market to seize on this momentum to scale and commercialize geothermal energy solutions. This will expand the rapidly emerging technologies that make widespread Earth-energy harnessing possible. As the need for firm, scalable, renewable, stable baseload energy only becomes more urgent, these geothermal innovations make the possibility of continuous, reliable, global clean energy a reality.

Frequently Asked Questions
Many clean energy options require critical minerals that are difficult to obtain or come with security concerns. Does geothermal energy carry this same drawback?

No. Unlike some other clean energy technologies that require vital minerals extracted or refined in authoritarian countries including Russia and China, Earth energy technologies and innovations reduce the clean energy economy’s reliance on these foreign-extracted minerals. Resilience from domestic geothermal energy secures our supply chains, conserves from destruction vital forests and habitats from Brazil to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and generates high-paid and sought-after union jobs here in the United States.

In the switch to geothermal energy, how do we ensure that the American workforce isn’t left behind?

The clean energy transformation brings with it a workforce transition. Geothermal technologies offer displaced fossil fuel workers employment opportunities that respect their professional experiences, maintain their community heritage, and preserve their place-based sense of self. Mechanical engineers, drill rig apprentices, drill supervisors, geophysicists, and project managers from the oil, gas, and coal industries all possess skills and training transferable to geothermal jobs—typically, six-figure salaried jobs. 


Workers are tired of hearing “trust us” refrains from politicians, the private sector, and government agencies that claim a new job will be found for them. These jobs need to be ready before an individual’s job disappears and not rely on potential tourism or the prospect of relocation to another community.

Do rural communities stand to benefit from geothermal energy production?

Geothermal provides solutions to the oil and gas workforce as it transitions to a clean energy economy and protects the integrity and honor of rural American communities once prominent in the fossil fuel economy such as Eddington in Maine, Page in Arizona, Colstrip in Montana, River Rouge in Michigan, St. James in Louisiana, and Winfield in West Virginia. All of these communities have had environmental and public health issues due to hydrocarbons or are experiencing major loss of employment due to closing hydrocarbon-burning power plants.


Rural America is poised to win big in the ongoing clean energy transformation once policymakers harness the vast geothermal potential everywhere under our feet.

Why is addressing residential and commercial cooling needs such a concern, and how can geothermal energy help?

Recent heat waves around the world, with record temperatures that threaten food production and even human survival, highlight an important fact: with global warming comes an increasing need for sustainable cooling strategies. 


 


Traditional air-conditioning removes dangerous heat from buildings and provides life-saving shelter and comfort. Unfortunately, air-conditioning systems worsen two other problems.


 


First, heat is not so much removed or eliminated as it is moved from one location to another. When a building interior is cooled, that thermal energy is transferred to the exterior surroundings. In dense urban areas, this effect increases local temperatures, exacerbating the heat wave in places that are already heat islands as a result of urbanization. 


 


Second, air-conditioning requires significant electricity, placing additional stress on electric grids and generation systems that are already struggling to decrease fossil fuel dependence and cope with the electrification needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 


 


Thankfully, this increased demand can be partially offset by daytime solar generation. But nighttime cooling has become a necessity in many places. Geothermal technology has a major role to play here too. Geothermal (i.e., ground source) heat pumps are far more efficient than their air-source counterparts, especially at high and low temperatures. 



A ground-source cooling system can reduce building interior temperatures without heating the surrounding air space. But the capital costs for these systems are high. Public-sector support is needed via tax credits and the Defense Production Act to incentivize adoption now plus simultaneous investments in technology to streamline implementation and decrease cost over time.

What can geothermal energy provide that solar and wind energy cannot?

Intermittent energy technologies have proven they can scale and compete with fossil fuels. But wind and solar, along with battery storage, only get us part of the way through the clean energy transformation. These technologies have made enormous strides in cost-effectively replacing fossil fuels for power generation, but their intermittent nature means they cannot get us “the last mile” to total electrification. They also cannot provide scalable and distributed cooling/heating benefits to decarbonize the built environment or agriculture processes that produce harmful emissions by burning fossil fuels.

How much power and heat can geothermal produce?

A report published by a consortium of scientists and led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimate conventional geothermal could provide 100,000 megawatts of electricity in the United States––enough energy to power 16 million U.S. households––while the Department of Energy estimates geothermal heating and cooling could reach 28 million U.S. households through the use of geothermal heat pumps. These are conservative estimates using proven technologies. Innovative technologies will exponentially grow these estimates with the right and much needed policy support.

What are the agriculture, industry, and manufacturing applications of geothermal?

Because geothermal energy is a reliable, carbon-free, and renewable source of power, it has wide-ranging applications that meet America’s key agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial needs, including aquaculture farming; dairy production; processing pulp and paper; mineral recovery for use in battery, wind turbine, and solar panel manufacturing; vegetable processing and drying; and zero-carbon electricity generation, to name a few. Find out more uses of geothermal on page 22 in the DOE’s GeoVision report.

Strengthening and Diversifying the Biomedical Research Workforce Through a National Institutes of Health and Department of Education Collaboration

Summary

Our nation’s health and the future of scientific research depend on greater inclusion of underrepresented individuals in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields—and in the biomedical sciences in particular. Our nation’s scientists are a homogeneous group: majority white, despite the U.S. population rapidly increasing in diversity. A biomedical science workforce that reflects our nation’s demographics is required to address growing equity gaps and distinct health needs that accompany our diversifying country. This cannot be accomplished without inclusive and practical biomedical educational programs that begin at the PreK–12 level and continue through all levels of higher education, emphasizing Minority Serving Institution (MSI) research programs. 

The lack of diversity in biomedical science is unacceptable, especially for an administration deeply committed to equity across its policy agenda. The Biden-Harris Administration must act to address this issue in the biomedical sciences at all levels: from PreK-12 education to research careers. Using the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s program Minority Serving Institution Partnership Program (MSIPP) as a model, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) should establish a Biomedical Research Minority Serving Institution Partnership Program (BioMSIPP) to build a sustainable pipeline between NIH’s institutes and centers and biomedical science students at MSIs. 

Educational interventions are also crucial at earlier stages of education than higher education. BioMSIPP would also include a grant program that funds participating MSIs to produce PreK-12 educational resources (i.e. SEPA tools) and to create a high school to undergraduate bridge program to further link educational interventions with biomedical research careers. We also propose that the Department of Education’s White House Initiative for Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), and other MSIs, create community-based engagement plans to assess the needs of individual communities and generate data to aid in future programming. Simultaneously, the Department of Education (ED) should launch a Bright Spots campaign to highlight efforts taking place across the country, building examples for policymakers as roadmaps to bolster biomedical science education and excellence.

Challenge and Opportunity

On June 25, 2021, President Biden signed an executive order establishing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) as national priorities. This order authorized the reestablishing of a coordinated government-wide DEIA Initiative and Strategic Plan. From there, over 50 federal agencies, including ED, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and NIH, released equity action plans, which can be strengthened by supporting meaningful partnerships with MSIs.

MSIs offer broad access to higher education for students who would otherwise not have the opportunity, such as underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities, low-income students, first-generation-to-college students, adult learners, and other post-traditional or nontraditional students. Furthermore, these institutions set an example of DEIA through diverse leadership, administration, and faculty, which is not seen at predominately white institutions (PWIs). The federal government should support institutions that foster diverse talent and the pipelines that feed these institutions through MSI-guided programming for PreK–12 students.

Despite a marginal increase in racially diverse doctorate graduates, there is still a substantial gap in the number of historically marginalized groups that enter and stay in the biomedical enterprise. While there are training programs (see Table 1) to diversify the biomedical sciences at federal agencies such as NIH and NSF, these programs have failed to substantially change the national percentage of racially diverse biomedical scientists. This is in part because the structure of these programs often does not support MSIs in building research capacity, an essential aspect in raising the research classification of an institution determined partly by research spending. In addition, current federal programs do not effectively capture the full spectrum of diverse students since they leave out engagement at the PreK–12 years. 

Early exposure to STEM careers is essential to increased STEM participation and success. In fact, getting children involved in STEM-related activities at a young age has been demonstrated to bolster enrollment in STEM degrees and participation in STEM-related careers. Programs focused on STEM education at the PreK–12 level encourage learning in engineering, technology, and computer-based skills. We propose a focused approach in the field of biomedical science. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, STEM-related occupations are estimated to grow by 10.8 percent in the next 10 years, and biomedical science is estimated to see exponential growth at 17 percent. A sustainable and diverse STEM ecosystem requires education interventions focused on biomedical sciences at an early age. Currently, interventions primarily focus on undergraduate and graduate students, leaving out formative PreK–12 years (Table 1). ED has programs to immerse PreK–12 students into STEM and to support STEM capacity at MSIs through the Title III Higher Education Act, but none focused specifically on biomedical science. 

Department or AgencyProgramPreK-12 programs in the biomedical sciences? 

National Institutes of Health		Maximizing Access to Research CareersNo
National Institutes of HealthMinority Biomedical Research Support ProgramYes (supplement)
National Institutes of HealthResearch Infrastructure in Minority Institutions No
National Institutes of HealthHigh School Scientific Training and Enrichment Program 2.0Yes (high school seniors in DC, VA, or MD only)
National Science FoundationCenters of Research Excellence in Science and Technology Yes (supplement)
National Science FoundationHBCU Research Infrastructure for Science and EngineeringNo
National Science FoundationHispanic Serving Institutions ProgramNo
National Science FoundationDiscovery Research Pre-KYes
Department of DefenseResearch and Education Program for Historically Black Colleges and Universities / Minority-Serving InstitutionsNo
Department of DefenseHistorically Black Colleges and Universities / Minority Serving Institution Science ProgramNo
Department of DefenseHispanic Serving Institutions ProgramNo
Table 1. Federal Programs that Support STEM at MSIs and the Availability of PreK–12 Biomedical Science Programs

Plan of Action

The U.S. Department of Education and the National Institutes of Health should collaborate to create a program that strengthens the biomedical science pipeline. NIH and ED are committed to diversity and inclusion in their respective strategic plans. Leveraging their combined resources to strengthen and diversify the biomedical sciences would work toward the DEIA goals set in their strategic plans and prioritized by the Biden-Harris Administration at large. More importantly, it would take an essential step toward creating a biomedical workforce that represents and serves the diverse makeup of the U.S. population. 

We propose a new program to address the disparities in the biomedical science education pipeline through NIH and ED collaboration by:

Recommendation 1. Establish a Biomedical Research Minority Serving Institution Partnership Program (BioMSIPP) to serve as a direct pipeline from MSIs to the research capacity resources at the Department of Education and the research laboratories at the National Institutes of Health.

The Department of Energy established the Minority Serving Institution Partnership Program to build a “sustainable pipeline between the Department of Energy’s (DOE) sites/labs and minority-serving institutions in STEM disciplines.” This program is an example of direct measures to invest in university research capacity and workforce development through relationships between the federal government and institutions that serve historically marginalized populations. The program consists of a network of DOE/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) national laboratories, nonprofit organizations, and MSIs through enrichment activities that span from PreK–12 to the postdoctoral level. We recommend that ED and NIH collaboratively fund and implement a similar program that includes a network of highly-funded NIH laboratories, nonprofit organizations, MSIs, and PreK–12 schools that serve historically marginalized communities.

The program should be implemented under ED, with support from NIH’s research resources and laboratories. The Higher Education Act of 2022 requires ED to provide grants for activities such as research capacity building and institutional support. Further, research capacity grants funded through ED allow for hiring administrative staff to support project management. Opening the capability of funding to include staff to support project management circumvents the eligibility requirement where the sponsoring institution must assure support for the proposed program, a possible barrier to entry. 

Recommendation 2. The Department of Education’s White House initiatives for HBCUs, HSIs, and other MSIs should create community-based engagement plans to assess individual community needs and generate data to aid in future programming. 

Diversity in the biomedical sciences is an ever-evolving conversation. Currently, the White House Initiatives for HBCUs and HSIs have working groups that collaborate with other federal agencies to develop best practices to diversify the STEM workforce. First, we charge the White House to expand these working groups to include the entire spectrum of MSIs, as well as to include representation from NIH, providing a crucial biomedical science perspective. Next, the working groups should write a report on best practices to engage with historically marginalized PreK–12 school districts in the biomedical sciences, and in particular, approaches to train teachers in teaching biomedical sciences to historically underrepresented students. 

Recommendation 3. The Department of Education, along with the National Institutes of Health, should launch a Bright Spots campaign to highlight efforts that are taking place across the country to bolster biomedical science education and excellence.

Bright Spots campaigns highlight transformative work done by school districts, nonprofits, and federal agencies in education. NIH and ED both have repositories for science education resources. The NIH funds the Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) program, which awards grants to create resources that target state and national PreK–12 standards for STEM teaching and learning and are rigorously evaluated for effectiveness. Likewise, ED funds the Minority Science and Engineering Improvement program to aid MSIs in enhancing their STEM education programs.

We propose that ED and NIH launch a campaign similar to the Bright Spots in Hispanic Education Fulfilling America’s Future spearheaded by the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. Moreover, we charge both agencies with disseminating the campaign via webinars, conference exhibitions, and outreach to educational societies.

Conclusion

ED and NIH are at the forefront of our nation’s biomedical science enterprise and have access to funding, cutting-edge research, and technology that could greatly enhance research and education at every level of the educational spectrum, specifically by increasing diversity. To ensure that the biomedical workforce reflects our nation, we must increase the research capacity and resources available to MSIs, promote collaborative research and technology transfer between investigators from MSIs and NIH, and provide key educational resources for student enrichment and career development. Through these recommendations, we hope to close the achievement gap and propel PreK–12 students into achieving careers in the biomedical sciences.

Frequently Asked Questions
Why Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs)?

Addressing national priorities in innovation demands a larger-scale effort to support incoming students’ education and workforce training. MSIs are an underutilized and underfunded resource for training and strengthening the biomedical research workforce.

How does this proposal differ from existing programs to increase diversity in STEM?

Existing programs at the DoD, NIH, and NSF are limited either to the undergraduate level or to a specific geographic location. Our recommended program is designed for Pre–K to the postdoctoral level, like MSIPP.

How much will this program cost?

We estimate that BioMSIPP will cost about the same as the MSIPP program, which currently costs the Department of Energy $38.8 million.

How does this ensure that students from across the country have access to NIH-funded institutions?

Saving 3.1 Million Lives a Year with a President’s Emergency Plan to Combat Acute Childhood Malnutrition

Summary

Like HIV/AIDS, acute childhood malnutrition is deadly but easily treatable when the right approach is taken. Building on the success of PEPFAR, the Biden-Harris Administration should launch a global cross-agency effort to better fund, coordinate, research, and implement malnutrition prevention and treatment programs to save millions of children’s lives annually and eventually eliminate severe acute malnutrition.

Children with untreated severe acute malnutrition are 9 to 11 times more likely to die than their peers and suffer from permanent setbacks to their neurodevelopment, immune system, and future earnings potential if they survive. Effective programs can treat children for around $60 per child with greater than 90 percent recovery rates. However, globally, only about 25–30 percent of children with moderate and severe acute malnutrition have access to treatment. Every year, 3.1 million children die due to malnutrition-related causes, and 45% of all deaths of children under five are related to malnutrition, making it the leading cause of under-five deaths. 

In 2003, a similar predicament existed: the HIV/AIDS epidemic was causing millions of deaths in sub-Saharan Africa and around the world, despite the existence of highly effective treatment and prevention methods. In response, the Bush Administration created the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). PEPFAR has proven a major global health success, saving an estimated 30 million lives since 2003 through over $100 billion in funding. 

The Biden-Harris Administration should establish a President’s Emergency Plan for Acute Childhood Malnutrition (PEPFAM) in the Office of Global Food Security at the State Department to clearly elevate the problem of acute childhood malnutrition, leverage new and existing food security and health programs to serve U.S. national security and humanitarian interests, and save the lives of up to 3.1 million children around the world, every year. PEPFAM could serve as a catalytic initiative to harmonize the fight against malnutrition and direct currently fragmented resources toward greater impact.

Challenge and Opportunity

United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 2.2 outlines goals for reducing acute malnutrition, ambitiously targeting global rates of 5 percent by 2025 and 3 percent (a “virtual elimination”) by 2030. Due to climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, and conflicts like the war in Ukraine, global rates of malnutrition remain at 8 percent and are forecast to become worse, not better. Globally, 45.4 million children suffer from acute malnutrition, 13.6 million of whom are severely acutely malnourished (SAM). If current trends persist until 2030, an estimated 109 million children will suffer from permanent cognitive or physiological stunting, despite the existence of highly effective and relatively cheap treatment. 

Providing life-saving treatment around the world serves a core American value of humanitarianism and helps meet commitments to the SDGs. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) recently announced a commitment to purchase ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF), a life-saving food, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, demonstrating a prioritization of global food security. Food security is also a priority for the Biden Administration’s approach to national security. The newly released National Security Strategy dedicates an entire section to food insecurity, highlighting the urgency of the problem and calling on the United States and its global partners to work to address acute needs and tackle the extraordinary humanitarian burden posed by malnutrition. The Office of Global Food Security at the U.S. Department of State also prioritizes food security as an issue of national security, leading and coordinating diplomatic engagement in bilateral, multilateral, and regional contexts. At a time when the United States is competing for its vision of a free, open, and prosperous world, addressing childhood malnutrition could serve as a catalyst to achieve the vision articulated in the National Security Strategy and at the State Department.

“People all over the world are struggling to cope with the effects of shared challenges that cross borders—whether it is climate change, food insecurity, communicable diseases, terrorism, energy shortages, or inflation. These shared challenges are not marginal issues that are secondary to geopolitics. They are at the very core of national and international security and must be treated as such.” 

U.S. 2022 National Security Strategy 

Tested, scalable, and low-cost solutions exist to treat children with acute malnutrition, yet the platform and urgency to deliver interventions at scale does not. Solutions such as community management of acute malnutrition (CMAM), the gold standard approach to malnutrition treatment, and other intentional strategies like biofortification could dramatically lower the burden of global childhood malnutrition. Despite the 3.1 million preventable deaths that occur annually related to childhood malnutrition and the clear threat that food insecurity poses to U.S. national security, we lack an urgent platform to bring these low-cost solutions to bear. 

While U.S. government assistance to combat food insecurity and malnutrition is a priority, funding and coordination are not centralized. The U.S. has committed over $10 billion to address global food insecurity, allocating dollars to USAID, Feed the Future, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and others. Through the recently signed Global Malnutrition Prevention and Treatment Act of 2021, Congress took a step forward by authorizing USAID to have greater authority in targeting nutrition aid to areas of greatest need and greater flexibility to coordinate activities across the agency and its partners. In accordance with the agency’s Global Nutrition Coordination Plan, Congress also established the Nutrition Leadership Council, chaired by the Bureau for Resilience and Food Security to coordinate and integrate activities solely within USAID. Multilateral and private sector partners also dedicate resources to food security: the Gates Foundation committed $922 million toward global nutrition and food systems, and UNICEF created a Nutrition Match Fund to incentivize funding to combat severe acute malnutrition. These lines of effort are each individually important, but could be more impactful if aligned. A President’s Emergency Plan for malnutrition could harmonize these separate funding streams and authorities and mobilize multilateral and private sector partners to prevent and treat malnutrition and food insecurity.

Drawing on the strengths of the PEPFAR model to combat HIV/AIDS at scale while driving down costs for treatment, PEPFAM could revolutionize how resources are spent while scaling sustainable and cost-effective solutions to childhood malnutrition, saving millions of lives every year. Under this model, significantly more—and, optimally, all—children suffering from acute malnutrition would have access to treatment. This would make dramatic progress toward global food security and U.S. national security priorities.

Plan of Action

President Biden should declare a global childhood malnutrition emergency and announce the creation of the President’s Emergency Plan for Acute Childhood Malnutrition. Using PEPFAR as a model, PEPFAM could catalyze cost-effective solutions to save millions of lives every year. When President Bush mobilized support for PEPFAR in his 2003 State of the Union, he declared, “We must remember our calling, as a blessed country, is to make the world better,” and called for interagency support for an “Emergency Plan” for HIV/AIDS relief and Congressional support to commit $15 billion over the next five years to launch PEPFAR.

President Biden should follow a similar path and announce PEPFAM in a similarly high-profile speech—the 2023 State of the Union address, for example—to elevate the problem of acute childhood malnutrition to the American people and the U.S. government and offer a clear call to action through an executive order directing an interagency task force to develop a 24-month strategic plan within 180 days. The initial stages of PEPFAM and corresponding executive branch activities can be guided by the following recommendations.

Recommendation 1. Name a White House PEPFAM czar and task the Office of Global Food Security at the State Department to coordinate cross-agency support, intended personnel, agencies, and roles involved.

A Senior Advisor on the White House’s National Security Team at the Office of Science and Technology Policy would serve as the White House czar for PEPFAM and would (1) steer and lead the initiative, (2) organize an interagency task force, and (3) coordinate PEPFAM’s strategic focus by engaging multiple federal agencies, including: 

The Office of the Global AIDS Coordinator and Health Diplomacy at the State Department (OGAC) manages the high-level execution of PEPFAR by dictating strategic direction and coordinating agencies. The PEPFAM executive order will set up a similar infrastructure at the Office of Global Food Security at the State Department to: 

USAID is also well positioned to play a leading role given its current support of global food and nutrition programming. Several of USAID’s portfolios are central to PEPFAM’s aims, including Agriculture and Food Security, Nutrition, Global Health, Water and Sanitation, and Humanitarian Assistance. The offices that support these portfolios should provide technical expertise in the realm of food and nutrition, existing connections to good program implementers in various country contexts, monitoring and evaluation capacity to track implementer’s progress toward goals, and strategic direction. 

The Office of Global Food Security and the PEPFAM czar should delegate authority for the program across government agencies, private partners (e.g., Gates Foundation), and multilateral organizations (e.g., World Food Programme). The Office would coordinate interagency action to support PEPFAM’s implementation and evaluation as well as identify agencies that are best placed to lead each component of the effort. 

Recommendation 2. Present initial, strategic action plan to build and sustain PEPFAM.

The PEPFAM interagency task force, described above, should develop a strategic plan targeting an initial set of actions to align with existing global food security and childhood malnutrition priorities and identify opportunities to redirect existing resources toward scalable, high-impact solutions like CMAM. USAID already invests millions of dollars each year in initiatives like Feed the Future that support global food security while overseeing cross-agency implementation and harmonization of the Global Food Security Strategy. These efforts and funding should be rolled under the umbrella of PEPFAM to better align treatment and prevention interventions, strategically coordinate resources across the government, and improve a focus on impact.  

Recommendation 3. Announce discrete, evidence-driven goals for PEPFAM.

These goals include:

Recommendation 4. Establish a coordination framework between PEPFAM, multilateral agencies, and private sector partners to mobilize and harmonize resources.

The Office of Global Food Security and USAID should build on current momentum to bring multilateral and private partners behind PEPFAM. USAID has recently announced a series of partnerships with large philanthropic organizations like the Gates Foundation, Aliko Dangote Foundation, and Eleanor Crook Foundation (to name a few), as well as other countries and multilateral organizations at UNGA. Much like with PEPFAR, PEPFAM could rely on the support of external partners as well as federal funds to maximize the impact of the program. 

Recommendation 5. Create an international council to set technical standards so that money goes to the most effective programs possible. 

The Office of Global Food Security, USAID, and PEPFAM should spearhead the development of an international technical council (that could be housed under the UN, the World Health Organization, or independently) to set standards for malnutrition prevention and treatment programming. Malnutrition treatment is already cost-effective, but it could be made even cheaper and more effective through innovation. Even when promising new interventions are identified, the process of disseminating and scaling of existing, proven best practices innovations doesn’t function optimally. 

Treatment guidelines issued by the WHO and national governments are slow to be updated, meaning that highly effective interventions can take years to be adopted and, even then, are adopted in a piecemeal fashion. Other implementers may be too wedded to their operational practices to consider making a change unless standards are updated or innovations from other implementers are actively socialized. 

An international technical council would disseminate and scale best practices discovered in the processes of implementation and research. If funders like the U.S. government commit to only funding organizations that promptly adopt these standards, they can maximize the impact of existing funding by ensuring that every dollar goes toward the most cost-effective ways of saving lives. This body could ideally speed the sharing and implementation of practices that could allow more children to be treated effectively, at lower costs.

Recommendation 6. Direct existing child malnutrition assistance through PEPFAM to ensure coordinated impact and seek permanent funding from Congress for PEPFAM.

The executive order will create the momentum to establish PEPFAM, but legislative authorization is required to make it sustainable. The strategic plan should lay out efforts to build Congressional support for funding legislation.

Congress will play a key role in PEPFAM implementation by appropriating funds. Under PEPFAR, Congress appropriates money directly to OGAC at the Department of State, which disburses it to other agencies. In 2003, Congress supported President Bush’s request for $15 billion in PEPFAR funding by passing the Leadership Act that authorized yearly contributions to the Global Fund from 2004 to 2008. Congress has subsequently reauthorized the program through FY2023. Each year, the OGAC presents a request of funding needed for recipient countries and programs to the President, who then forwards the request to Congress for reauthorization. The PEPFAM process should mirror this structure.

At the UNGA in 2022, President Biden announced over $2.9 billion in new assistance to address global food insecurity, building on the $6.9 billion in U.S. government assistance already committed in 2021. Last year, President Biden also announced a $10 billion, multiyear investment to promote food systems transformation, including a $5 billion commitment to Feed the Future specifically. Instead of fractured funding to different initiatives, these funds should be harmonized under PEPFAM, with dollars allocated to the PEPFAM task force to create a centralized two-year strategy to combat malnutrition. 

Conclusion 

This program would have a series of positive effects. First, and most obviously, PEPFAM would save up to 3.1 million lives every year and bring together resources and goals around food security that are currently fractured across the federal government, increasing the effectiveness of U.S. aid dollars globally. Second, PEPFAM, like PEPFAR, would make existing interventions more effective by unlocking cost savings and innovation at scale. Third, at a time when the United States is competing for its vision of a free, open, and prosperous world, PEPFAM could play a key role in achieving the mission of the National Security Strategy.
Over time, more comprehensive treatment coverage and prevention efforts could also lead to the elimination of severe acute malnutrition by preventing cases and catching those that approach moderate acute malnutrition or have already fallen into it. PEPFAM would save an estimated 27.9 million lives over the same time scale as PEPFAR. Millions of children die every year while a cheap and effective solution exists. PEPFAM could change that.

Frequently Asked Questions
How does PEPFAM compare to PEPFAR in terms of funding and effectiveness at scale?

From 2003 to present day, PEPFAR has spent billions of dollars and saved millions of lives. This table compares the estimated costs and outcomes of PEPFAR with PEPFAM. Because malnutrition treatment is cheaper than HIV/AIDS treatment and there is a higher caseload, there is a high-leverage opportunity to save lives.






























  PEPFAR (HIV/AIDS) PEPFAM (Childhood Malnutrition)
Average Cost of Treatment per Person $367,134 $60
Number of Cases 38.4 million 45.4 million
Program Cost (estimated yearly) $5.7 billion (USD) $4 billion (USD)
Lives Saved (estimated yearly) 1.6 million  1.5 million 

 


Costs for PEPFAM are difficult to project precisely, because the program is likely to become more cost-effective over time as efforts to prevent cases start to work and research and development result in cheaper and more effective treatment. The projections above operate under the most pessimistic assumptions that no improvements to cost or effectiveness are made over time. This graph illustrates a similar the expansion of PEPFAR services, even under flat budgets thanks to this same self-improvement over time. 


PEPFAR funding graph


Source: Department of State


PEPFAM is similar: more comprehensive treatment coverage and prevention efforts could lead to the elimination of severe acute malnutrition by preventing cases and catching those that approach moderate acute malnutrition or have already fallen into it. That means that the program should become cheaper over time, as more cases are identified earlier when they are cheaper to treat, and more cases are prevented, both by prevention programs and general economic development. Research and innovation can similarly cut down on the costs and improve the effectiveness of malnutrition treatment and prevention over time.

Why should the U.S. declare food security and childhood malnutrition a global emergency?

The lack of attention to childhood malnutrition in non-emergency/non-crisis zones results in millions of preventable deaths each year. Declaring an emergency would put pressure on other organizations, media outlets, and NGOs to devote more resources to food security. The international community is keen to respond to food crises in emergency contexts, especially among children. USAID and the UN recently committed millions of dollars for the procurement of ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) to combat emergency risks like the war in Ukraine and conflicts in places like Ethiopia. But the unfortunate truth is that even outside of newsworthy emergencies, acute malnutrition remains a daily emergency in many places around the world. Malnutrition rates are just as high in states and countries that neighbor emergency zones as in the crisis-hit places themselves, partially as a result of movement of internally displaced people. While funding acute malnutrition in relatively mundane circumstances (e.g., poverty-stricken states in Nigeria) may make less headlines than emergency food aid, it’s equally needed.

How much U.S. global health funding is currently put toward nutrition?

Currently, only 1 percent of U.S. global health spending is put toward nutrition. Only 25–30 percent of children globally have access to treatment as a result of underfunded programs and a subsequent lack of resources and geographic coverage.

What is the current state of investment in quality treatment implementation?

Treatment is only effective if implemented well. Right now, funding goes to a range of programs that fail to meet Sphere Standards of 75 percent recovery rates. Large-scale funders like UNICEF have internal commitments to spend a certain amount of their budgets on ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) a year, which means that their hands are tied when working in contexts with poor implementing partners (e.g., corrupt governments). At the same time, NGOs like Alliance for International Medical Action and Médecins Sans Frontières achieve recovery rates of more than 95 percent. More investment in quality implementation capacity is needed; otherwise, scarce existing resources will continue to be wasted.

Is there a robust evidence base for malnutrition prevention?

There’s a growing movement to implement interventions that catch children on the border of malnutrition or improve conditions that lead to malnutrition in the first place (e.g., infant and young child feeding circles, exclusive breastfeeding counseling). These programs are exciting, but the evidence base for impact at this point is minimal. It’s much cheaper to catch a child before they fall into malnutrition than it is to treat them, not to mention the health benefits to the child from averting the disease. More work needs to be done to test and validate the most cost-effective prevention methods to ensure that only those that actually generate impact are scaled.

What agencies play a role in PEPFAR?

See: Institute of Medicine, Evaluation of PEPFAR

Where are current efforts to combat malnutrition focused?

Childhood malnutrition sits at the intersection of public health and nutrition/agricultural programming. Current efforts are spread across the U.S. government and multilateral partners with little coordination toward desired outcomes. Funding that hypothetically targets childhood malnutrition can come from a variety of players in the U.S. government, ranging from Department of Defense to USAID to the Department of Agriculture. While some coordination through programs like Feed the Future exist at USAID, these programs are not yet results- or outcome-based. Coordination should involve measuring the impact of collective aid across agencies on an outcome like recovery rates or the number of children suffering from malnutrition in a given geographic area.

What outcomes does PEPFAM target?

Digital Ethics for All: Implementing a National Digital Framework for K–12 Education

Summary 

With the growing prominence of technology and social media in our lives, children of all ages should be made aware of and trained on the ethics of responsible technology usage. Creating a National Digital Ethics Framework for PreK–12 students will enable them to think critically, behave responsibly, and maintain mental health wellness in a digitally transforming world.

Technology is at the forefront of spreading information: news is read on mobile devices, teachers use applications and open-source software in classrooms, and social media defines the lives and status of youth. The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly increased technology use among tweens (8–12 years) and teens, with millions of students using digital entertainment such as TikTok, Instagram, and streaming services. But social media is not the only way students are introduced early to technology; online meetings through applications such as Zoom and Webex became the face of communication, and internet access is required for homework, assignments, and learning in all levels of schooling.

We are not adequately preparing our youth to create a positive digital footprint or have basic internet safety awareness. Implementing internet safety and digital ethics curriculum is imperative, and there is no better time to start than now.

A National Digital Ethics Framework would allow students not just to follow protocols and procedures but also to think critically, behave responsibly, and maintain mental health wellness in a digitally transforming world. This can go further to include concepts like leaving a digital footprint, wherein students engage with technology and media to create content, seek information, communicate ideas, and use open-source platforms in a meaningful and safe manner.

Challenge and Opportunity

Children start interfacing with technology as early as 3–4 years old, and they become increasingly dependent on it through their formative years as digital and social media platforms become ever more indispensable tools for navigating the world. Kids aged 8 to 12 spend an average of six hours per day using entertainment media. By the time they’re teenagers, 95 percent of youth in the United States will have their own mobile device and will, on average, spend almost nine hours a day texting, playing games, posting to social media, watching videos, and more. As tweens and teens move into the middle and high school years, they have ongoing, 24/7 access to friends

and peers via apps and mobile devices, with 45 percent of teens saying they’re online “almost constantly.”

On average, parents allow independent internet usage at 8 years old, and the average age that children sign up for social media is 12.6 years old. In 2021, 59 percent of U.S. tween/teenage students had been cyberbullied or threatened online; we cannot expect a 12-year-old to know how to deal with these dangers on their own.

Despite our increasing reliance on technology, it is not reflected in the learning experiences of PreK–12 students. Digital ethics and internet safety need to be heavily emphasized and implemented in the classroom. This can include simple practices like how to distinguish useful information from spam, using reputable and legitimate sites for references, and understanding copyright issues while quoting information and images from the internet. Digital ethics is a critical 21st-century skill that can be taught alongside computer science courses in schools or in conjunction with coursework that requires students to engage with the internet while seeking information.

Students need increased fluency in information literacy, cyberbullying prevention, online safety, digital responsibility, and emotional well-being. There is currently an internet safety requirement for schools under the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) to “educate minors about appropriate online behavior, including interacting with other individuals on social networking websites, in chat rooms, and cyberbullying awareness.” The requirements state that this education can be held through school assemblies or via presentations provided by Netsmartz. The presentations highlight important topics, but they are not particularly specific or relevant to today’s environment. Simple internet safety such as avoiding clicking on links sent through spam emails, how and when to use the “block” button on social media platforms, and how to create smart passwords are not covered in the current curriculum.

Developing a federal framework will give teachers a clear path to implementation. The vagueness of current internet safety education requirements means that this education is easily overlooked or not presented thoroughly. Integrating this curriculum into CIPA would allow for easier implementation while leveraging existing resources. In order to implement this at the PreK–12 level, teachers will have to be trained on how to deliver this curriculum. Instead of trying to restrict social media usage and heavily monitor or block internet activity, schools should consider this as an opportunity to help students navigate a digitally transforming world in an informed way.

Plan of Action

Recommendation 1. In order to achieve the goal of digital ethics for all learners, the federal government can take a number of steps to keep kids safer in online settings.

At a federal level, CIPA is a great avenue to authorize these standards. The act currently applies its internet safety education requirements to “schools and libraries that receive discounts for Internet access through the E-rate program,” which makes certain communications tools affordable for these institutions. Although this does not cover all schools in the United States, schools with less ability to finance technology have the greatest need for digital literacy and internet safety education. By implementing this curriculum under CIPA’s current education suggestions (which are guidelines, not a specific way to conduct internet safety education), then it is likely to be implemented in schools that qualify for CIPA discounts.

Recommendation 2. As the digital ethics framework rolls out, agencies should work with critical stakeholders.

Efforts should directly engage elementary and middle school students and their teachers in designing frameworks, professional learning, and so on. Other stakeholders include state-level legislators that will be responsible for operationalizing and implementing the framework and school district boards that approve learning in each school district/school. Teachers are also key stakeholders, as they will have to receive and implement the information given to them as listed in the standards and may be subject to training.

Recommendation 3. Allocate federal funding to NIST to develop the Digital Ethics Framework and provide temporary staff through fellows with subject matter expertise on how to develop a digital ethics framework.

It will require approximately $1 million to develop the framework. The other actions as part of Digital Ethics for All utilize existing funds but could be bolstered and more quickly executed with the addition of subject matter experts through fellow placements or other staffing mechanisms. It is estimated that one fellow at NSF and one fellow at the U.S. Department of Education would cost approximately $500,000 annually in addition to the above costs. 

Conclusion

Having access to a curriculum rooted in digital ethics, internet safety, and technology career paths is essential for students growing up in a society where access to technology is introduced earlier than the concept of computer science. Although computer science curriculum is being widely pushed for at the high school level, we must make sure to educate elementary and middle school youth as well. A National Digital Ethics Framework is not just an advantage—it is imperative in order to protect our students and their future.

Frequently Asked Questions
Who are the key members needed to develop this curriculum?

Organizations that are developing curriculums centered around digital tools and computer science, such as Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) and CSforAll, could be tapped in order to pull topics or ideas from the standards they have already created. Their standards have been implemented in various states, so leveraging their existing resources will make it easier to develop a national curriculum that is suited for approval and implementation.

Which experts should be tapped to develop appropriate standards that are likely to be approved?

Subject matter experts are crucial for this initiative. Their perspective will be important to determine which standards have the best chance of being approved at the state and local level and how CIPA’s current curriculum can be modified. Subject matter experts will be fellows from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Education. The National Institute of Standards and Technology will also be consulted.

Would it be easier to implement this at a federal level or a state level?

Due to the incorporation of this curriculum into CIPA’s current standards, it would be quicker to implement at a federal level. However, if digital ethics cannot be incorporated into CIPA, it could also be addressed at a state level, similar to the initiatives run by CSTA and CSforAll, where their independent curriculum and standards are adopted by states that want to implement technology standards.

What qualifies you to develop a guideline to implement this curriculum?

In my own experience as a student and as the CEO and founder of Likeable STEM (an educational technology training company), I have observed that students lack resources to teach them about simple topics such as phishing scams, how to write appropriate emails, cybersecurity/password creation, social media profiles, etc. For the past six years, through Likeable STEM, I have taught these crucial topics to elementary, middle, and high school students and created independent curriculum on digital ethics.

Does this curriculum have bipartisan legislative appeal?

Computer science education has been a bipartisan concern, with both the Democratic and Republican Parties introducing educational principles to support STEM growth and computer science career opportunities. However, one problem area would be the current crackdown on educational topics in states such as Florida. Digital ethics does not have roots in either political party, so it should be likely to be supported by both parties.

Investing in Digital Agriculture Innovation to Secure Food, Yields, and Livelihoods

Summary 

Smallholder farmers and their households account for more than 2 billion people—almost one-third of humanity and more than two-thirds of the world’s poor. Smallholder farmers are the economic engine of local livelihoods and critical local sources of nutrition and food security. Their persistently low agricultural productivity is a major driver of global poverty and food insecurity. Many known agricultural practices and technologies could improve farmers’ yields and incomes, but systemic barriers and information gaps hamper their adoption. Today, with the rapid growth of mobile phone penetration throughout the developing world, we are in a unique moment to deploy new digital technologies and innovations to improve food security, yields, and livelihoods for 100 million smallholder farmers by 2030.

To spearhead USAID’s leadership in digital agriculture and create a global pipeline from tested innovation to scaled impact, USAID should launch a Digital Agriculture for Food Security Challenge, establish a Digital Agriculture Innovation Fund, and convene a Digital Agriculture Summit to jump-start the process. 

Challenge and Opportunity

Two-thirds of the world’s ultra-poor depend on agriculture for their livelihood. Low productivity growth in this sector is the biggest obstacle to poverty reduction and sustainable food security. The Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2022 report on The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World estimates that around 2.3 billion people—nearly 30% of the global population—were moderately or food insecure in 2021 and as many as 828 million were affected by hunger. Improving smallholder farmer incomes and local food security is critical to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, particularly ending poverty (SDG 1) and eliminating hunger (SDG 2). Yet smallholder farmers typically harvest only 30%–50% of what they could produce. Smallholder farmers are particularly at risk from climate-driven shocks, and fundamental changes to growing conditions make climate adaptation a key challenge to improving and securing their yields.

More than $540 billion is spent in the agricultural sector each year through public budgets, mostly subsidies on farm inputs and outputs. Of USAID’s over $1 billion annual budget for agricultural aid, much attention is given to direct nutrition and economic assistance as well as institution and market-shaping programs. By contrast, efforts in climate adaptation and food security innovation like the Feed the Future Innovation Labs and Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate (AIM for Climate) rely on traditional, centralized models of R&D funding that limit the entry and growth of new stakeholders and innovators. Not enough investment or attention is paid to productivity-enhancing, climate-adaptation-focused innovations and to translating R&D investment into sustainable interventions and scaled products to better serve smallholder farmers. 

USAID recognizes both the challenge for global food security and the opportunity to advance economic security through evidence-driven, food-system level investments that are climate-driven and COVID-conscious. As directed by the Global Food Security Act of 2016, the U.S. Government Global Food Security Strategy (GFSS) 2022–2026 and its counterpart Global Food Security Research Strategy (GFSRS) highlight the potential for digital technologies to play a pivotal role in the U.S. government’s food system investments around the world. The GFSS describes “an ecosystem approach” that prioritizes the “financial viability of digital products and services, rather than one that is driven predominantly by individualized project needs without longer-term planning.” A core part of achieving this strategy is Feed the Future (FTF), the U.S. government’s multi-agency initiative focused on global hunger and food security. Administrator Samantha Powers has committed $5 billion over five years to expand FTF, creating an opportunity to catalyze and crowd in capital to build a thriving, sustainable global agriculture economy—including innovation in digital agriculture—that creates more resilient and efficient food systems.

However, USAID stakeholders are siloed and do not coordinate to deliver results and invest in proven solutions that can have scaled sustainable impact. The lack of coordination means potential digital-powered, impactful, and sustainable solutions are not fostered or grown to better serve USAID’s beneficiaries globally. USAID’s Bureau for Resilience and Food Security (RFS) works with partners to advance inclusive agriculture-led growth, resilience, nutrition, water security, sanitation, and hygiene in priority countries to help them accelerate and protect development progress. USAID’s FY 2023 budget request also highlights RFS’s continued focus on supporting “partner countries to scale up their adaptation capacity and enhance the overall climate resilience of development programming.” The FTF Innovation Labs focus on advanced agricultural R&D at U.S. universities but do not engage directly in scaling promising innovations or investing in non-academic innovators and entrepreneurs to test and refine user-centered solutions that fall within FTF’s mandate. USAID’s emerging Digital Strategy and Digital Development Team includes specific implementation initiatives, such as a Digital Ecosystem Fund and an upcoming Digital Vision for each sector, including agriculture. USAID is also planning to hire Digital Development Advisors, whose scope aligns closely with this initiative but will require intentional integration with existing efforts. Furthermore, USAID country missions, where many of these programs are funded, often do not have enough input in designing agriculture RFPs to incorporate the latest proven solutions and digital technologies, making it harder to implement and innovate within contract obligations.

This renewed strategic focus on food security through improved local agricultural yields and climate-resilient smallholder farmer livelihoods, along with an integration of digital best practices, presents an opportunity for USAID and Feed the Future. By using innovative approaches to digital agriculture, FTF can expand its impact and meet efficiency and resilience standards, currently proposed in the 2022 reauthorization of the Global Food Security Act. While many known agricultural practices, inputs, and technologies could improve smallholder farmers’ yields and incomes, adoption remains low due to structural barriers, farmers’ lack of information, and limitations from existing agriculture development aid practices that prioritize programs over sustainable agricultural productivity growth. Today, with the rapid pace of mobile phone penetration (ranging between 50% and 95% throughout the developing world), we are in a unique moment to deploy novel, emerging digital technologies, and innovations to improve food security, yields, and livelihoods for 100 million smallholder farmers by 2030.

There are many digital agriculture innovations – for example digital agricultural advisory services (DAAS, detailed below) – in various stages of development that require additional investment in R&D. These innovations could be implemented either together with DAAS or as stand-alone interventions. For example, smallholder farmers need access to accurate, reliable weather forecasts. Weather forecasts are available in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), but additional work is needed to customize and localize them to farmers’ needs and to communicate probabilistic forecasts so farmers can easily understand, interpret, and incorporate them in their decision-making. 

Similarly, digital innovations are in development to improve farmers’ linkages to input markets, output markets, and financial services—for example, by facilitating e-subsidies and mobile ordering and payment for agricultural inputs, helping farmers aggregate into farmer producer organizations and negotiate prices from crop offtakers, and linking farmers with providers of loans and other financial services to increase their investment in productive assets.

Digital technologies can also be leveraged to mobilize smallholder farmers to contribute to climate mitigation by using remote sensing technology to monitor climate-related outcomes such as soil organic carbon sequestration and digitally enrolling farmers in carbon credit payment schemes to help them earn compensation for the climate impact of their sustainable farming practices.

Digital agricultural advisory services (DAAS) leverage the rapid proliferation of mobile phones, behavioral science, and human-centered design to build public extension system capacity to empower smallholder farmers with cutting-edge, productivity-enhancing agricultural knowledge that improves their food security and climate resilience through behavior change. It is a proven, cost-effective, and shovel-ready innovation that can improve the resilience of food systems and increase farmer yields and incomes by modernizing the agricultural extension system, at a fraction of the cost and an order of magnitude higher reach than traditional extension approaches.

DAAS gives smallholder farmers access to on-demand, customized, and evidence-based agricultural information via mobile phones, cheaply at $1–$2 per farmer per year. It can be rapidly scaled up to reach more than a hundred million users by 2030, leading to an estimated $1 billion increase in additional farmer income per year.

USAID currently spends over $1 billion on agricultural aid annually, and only a small fraction of this is directed to agricultural extension and training. Funding is often program-specific without a consistent strategy that can be replicated or scaled beyond the original geography and timeframe. Reallocating a share of this funding to DAAS would help the agency achieve strategic climate and equity global food security goals. 

Scaling up DAAS could improve productivity and transform the role of LMIC government agricultural extension agents by freeing up resources and providing rapid feedback and data collection. Agents could refocus on enrolling farmers, providing specialized advice, and improving the relevance of advice farmers receive. DAAS could also be integrated into broader agricultural development programs, such as FAO’s input e-subsidy programs in Zambia and Kenya.
DAAS: A highly scalable tool to achieve global food security and climate resilience

Plan of Action

To spearhead USAID’s leadership in digital agriculture and create a global pipeline from tested innovation to scaled impact, USAID, Feed the Future, and its U.S. government partners should launch a Digital Agriculture for Food Security Challenge. With an international call to action, USAID can galvanize R&D and investment for the next generation of digitally enabled technologies and solutions to secure yields and livelihoods for one hundred million smallholder farmers by 2030. This digital agriculture moonshot would consist of the following short- and long-term actions:

Recommendation 1: Allocate $150 million over five years to kickstart the Digital Agriculture Innovations Fund (DAI Fund) to fund, support, and scale novel solutions that use technology to equitably secure yields, food security, and livelihoods for smallholder farmers. 

The fund’s activities should target the following:

The fund’s investment priorities should align with stated GFSS and GFSRS objectives, including solutions focused on climate-smart agricultural innovation, enhanced nutrition, and food systems, genetic innovation, and poverty reduction. Program activities and funding should coordinate with FTF implementation in strategic priority countries with large agricultural sectors and mature, low-cost mobile networks such as Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Nigeria, and Pakistan. It should also collaborate with the FTF Innovation Lab and the AIM for Climate Initiative networks.

Recommendation 2: Convene the Digital Agriculture Summit to create an all-hands-on-deck approach to facilitate and accelerate integrated digital agriculture products and services that increase yields and resilience. 

USAID will announce the dedicated DAI Fund, convening its interagency partners—like the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), Development Finance Corporation (DFC), Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), US Africa Development Foundation (USADF) as well as philanthropy, private sector capital, and partner country officials and leaders to chart these pathways and create opportunities for collaboration between sectors. The Summit can foster a community of expertise and solidify commitments for funding, in-kind resources, and FTF country partnerships that will enable DAI Fund solutions to demonstrate impact and scale. The Summit could occur on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly to allow for greater participation and collaboration with FTF country representatives and innovators. Follow-up activities should include:

Conclusion

With the exponential adoption of mobile phones among smallholder farmers in the past decade, digital agriculture innovations are emerging as catalytic tools for impact at an unprecedented scale and social return on investment. Devoting a small percentage (~2%–5%) of USAID’s agricultural aid budget to DAAS and other digital agriculture innovations could catalyze $1 billion worth of increased yields among 100 million smallholder farmers every year, at a fraction of the cost and an order of magnitude higher reach than traditional extension approaches.

Achieving this progress requires a shift in strategy and an openness to experimentation. We recommend establishing a Digital Agriculture Innovation Fund to catalyze investment from USAID and other stakeholders and convening a global Digital Agriculture Summit to bring together subject matter experts, USAID, funders, and LMIC governments to secure commitments. From our experience at PxD, one of the world’s leading innovators in the digital agriculture sector, we see this as a prime opportunity for USAID to invest in sustainable agricultural production systems to feed the world and power local economic development for marginalized, food-insecure smallholder farmers around the world.

More from Jonathan Lehe, Gautam Bastian, and Nick Milne can be found at Precision Development.

Frequently Asked Questions
What might a commitment from the Digital Agriculture Summit look like?

Using the reach and power of the US government and its leaders as a platform to convene, multi-sector stakeholders can be brought together to outline a common agenda, align on specific targets, and seek commitments from the private sector and other anchor institutions to spur collective, transformational change on a wide range of issues aligned to the goals and interests of the federal agency and Administration’s priorities. External organizations respond to these calls-to-action, often leading to the development of partnerships (formal and informal), grand challenges, and the building of new coalitions to make financial and in-kind commitments that are aligned with achieving the federal government’s goals. A commitment could be modeled after how the State Department’s convened the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves:



  • a financial contribution (e.g.) the U.S. pledged nearly $51 million to ensure that the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves reaches its ‘100 by 20,’ which calls for 100 million homes to adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020.

  • shared expertise: the organization mobilizes experts in a variety of issues: gender, health, security, economics, and climate change to address significant risk factors. The U.S. will also offer assistance to implement cookstoves.

  • research and development: the U.S. is committed to an applied research and development effort that will serve as the backbone of future efforts in the field that includes analyzing health and environmental benefits of using clean stoves, developing sustainable technologies, and conducting monitoring to ensure success of the Alliance’s goals. 

How should the Challenge be designed? What existing models could it mimic?

USAID is a leader in the US government in running open innovation challenges and prizes. Other U.S. government agencies, foreign government aid agencies, and philanthropies have also validated the potential of open innovation models, particularly for technology-enabled solutions. USAID’s Grand Challenges for Development (GCDs) are effective programmatic frameworks that focus global attention and resources on specific, well-defined international development problems and promote the innovative approaches, processes, and solutions to solving them.


Conceived, launched, and implemented in coordination with public and private sector partners, Grand Challenges for Development (see list below) emphasize the engagement of non-traditional solvers around critical development problems. The Grand Challenges for Development approach is a complement to USAID’s current programming methods, with each GCD is led by experts at the bureau level. These experts work directly with partners to implement the day-to-day activities of the program. The Grand Challenges for Development programs show how the power of the framework can be leveraged through a variety of modalities, including partnerships, prizes, challenge grant funding, crowdsourcing, hack-a-thons, ideation, and commitments. The Digital Agriculture for Food Security Challenge could mimic a GCD program like Saving Lives at Birth by providing consistent funding, resources, and energy toward new meaningful, cost-effective breakthroughs to improve lives where solutions are most needed.

Why should USAID and the U.S. Government lead on digital agriculture rather than national/local governments, the private sector, or other stakeholders?

Information provision, including DAAS, is a difficult product for private sector entities to deliver with a sustainable business model, particularly for smallholder farmers. The ability and willingness to pay for such services is often low among resource-poor smallholder farmers, and information is easily shareable, so it is hard to monetize. National or local governments, on the other hand, have an interest in implementing digital solutions to complement in-person agricultural extension programs and subsidies but tend to lack the technical capacity and experience to develop and deliver digital tools at scale. 


USAID has the technical and institutional capacity to provide digital agriculture services across its programs. It has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in agricultural extension services over the past 60 years and has gained a strong working knowledge of what works (and what doesn’t). Digital tools can also achieve economies of scale for cost relative to traditional in-person agriculture solutions. For instance, in-person extension requires many expenses that do not decrease with scale, including fuel, transportation, training, and most importantly the paid time of extension agents. 


One estimate is that extension agents cost $4,000 to $6,000 per year in low-income countries and can reach between 1,000 to 2,000 farmers each—well above the World Bank recommended threshold of 500 farmers per agent—bringing annual costs to $2–$6 per farmer per year. This estimate assumes a farmer-to-agent ratio well above the World Bank’s recommended threshold of 500:1. In other contexts, it has been estimated as high as $115. We estimate a cost-effectiveness of $10 in increased farmer income for every $1 invested in programs like DAAS, which is an effective return on American foreign development assistance.

What is the long-term sustainability and scaling model for digital agriculture solutions?

Digital solutions require not only the up-front cost of development and testing but also maintenance and upkeep to maintain effectiveness. Scaling these solutions and sustaining impact requires engaged public-private partnerships to reduce costs for smallholder famers while still providing positive impact. Scaling also requires private capital – particularly for new technologies to support diffusion and adaptation –  but is only unlocked by de-risking investments by leveraging development aid.


As an example, PxD engages directly with national governments to encourage adoption of DAAS, focusing on building capacity, training government staff, and turning over systems to governments to finance the operation and maintenance of systems into perpetuity (or with continued donor support if necessary). For instance, the State Government of Odisha in India built a DAAS platform with co-financing from the government and a private foundation, scaled the platform to 3 million farmers, and transitioned it to the government in early 2022. A similar approach could support scale across other geographies—especially given USAID’s long-standing relationships with governments and ministries of agriculture.

How does a digital-enabled technology like DAAS help smallholder farmers?

A growing body of evidence shows that DAAS can have a significant impact on farmers’ yields and incomes. Precision Development (PxD) currently reaches more than 7 million smallholder farming households with DAAS in nine countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and there is a well-established market with many other service providers also providing similar services. This research, including several randomized control trials conducted by PxD researchers in multiple contexts as well as additional research conducted by other organizations, shows that DAAS can improve farmer yields by 4% on average in a single year, with benefit-cost ratios of 10:1, and the potential for these impacts to increase over time to create larger gains. 


There is also evidence of a larger impact in certain geographies and for certain crops and livestock value chains, as well as a larger impact for the subset of farmers who use DAAS the most and adopt its recommendations.

Unlocking the U.S. Bioeconomy with the Plant Genome Project

Summary

Plants are an important yet often overlooked national asset. We propose creating a Plant Genome Project (PGP), a robust Human Genome Project-style initiative to build a comprehensive dataset of genetic information on all plant species, starting with the 7,000 plant species that have historically been cultivated for food and prioritizing plants that are endangered by climate change and habitat loss. In parallel, we recommend expanding the National Plant Germplasm System (NPGS) to include genomic-standard repositories that connect plant genetic information to physical seed/plant material. The PGP will mobilize a whole-of-government approach to advance genomic science, lower costs, and increase access to plant genomic information. By creating a fully sequenced national germplasm repository and leveraging modern software and data science tools, we will unlock the U.S. bioeconomy, promote crop innovation, and help enable a diversified, localized, and climate-resilient food system.

Challenge and Opportunity

Plants provide our food, animal feed, medicinal compounds, and the fiber and fuel required for economic development. Plants contribute to biodiversity and are critical for the existence of all other living creatures. Plants also sequester atmospheric carbon, thereby combating climate change and sustaining the health of our planet. 

However, as a result of climate change and human practices, we have been losing plants at an alarming rate. Nearly 40% of the world’s 435,000 unique land plant species are extremely rare and at risk of extinction due to climate change. More than 90% of crop varieties have disappeared from fields worldwide as farmers have abandoned diverse local crop varieties in favor of genetically uniform, commercial varieties. 

We currently depend on just 15 plants to provide almost all of the world’s food, making our global food supply extremely vulnerable to climate change, new diseases, and geopolitical upheaval—problems that will be exacerbated as the world’s population rises to 10 billion by 2050. 

We are in a race against time to stop the loss of plant biodiversity—and at the same time, we desperately need to increase the diversity in our cultivated crops. To do this, we must catalog, decode, and preserve valuable data on all existing plants. Yet more than two decades since we sequenced the first plant genome, genome sequence information exists for only 798 plant species—a small fraction of all plant diversity.

Although large agriculture companies have made substantial investments in plant genome sequencing, this genetic information is focused on a small number of crops and is not publicly available. What little information we have is siloed, known only to large corporations and not openly available to researchers, farmers, or policymakers. This is especially true for nations in the Global South, who are not usually included in most genome sequencing projects. Furthermore, current data in existing germplasm repositories, State Agricultural Experiment Stations, and land-grant universities is not easily accessible online, making it nearly impossible for researchers in both public and private settings to explore. These U.S. government collections and resources of germplasm and herbaria, documented by the Interagency Working Group on Scientific Collections, have untapped potential to catalyze the bioeconomy and mobilize investment in the next generation of plant genetic advancements and, as a result, food security and new economic opportunities.

Twenty years ago, the United States launched the Human Genome Project (HGP), a shared knowledge-mapping initiative funded by the federal government. We continue to benefit from this initiative, which has identified the cause of many human diseases and enabled the development of new medicines and diagnostics. The HGP had a $5.4 billion price tag ($2.7 billion from U.S. contributions) but resulted in more than $14.5 billion in follow-on genomics investments that enabled the field to rapidly develop and deploy cutting-edge sequencing and other technologies, leading to a drop in genomic sequencing cost from $300 million per genome to less than $1,000.

Today, we need a Human Genome Project for plants—a unified Plant Genome Project that will create a global database of genetic information on all plants to increase food security and unlock plant innovation for generations to come. Collecting, sequencing, decoding, and cataloging the nation’s plant species will fill a key gap in our national natural capital accounting strategy. The PGP will complement existing conservation initiatives led by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and other agencies, by deepening our understanding of America’s unique biodiversity and its potential benefits to society. Such research and innovation investment would also benefit government initiatives like USAID’s Feed the Future (FTF) Initiative, particularly the Global Food Security Research Strategy, around climate-smart agriculture and genetic diversity of crops. 

PGP-driven advancements in genomic technology and information about U.S. plant genetic diversity will create opportunities to grow the U.S. bioeconomy, create new jobs, and incentivize industry investment. The PGP will also create opportunities to make our food system more climate-resilient and improve national health and well-being. By extending this effort internationally, and ensuring that the Global South is empowered to contribute to and take advantage of these genetic advancements, we can help mitigate climate change, enhance global food security, and promote equitable plant science innovation.

Plan of Action

The Biden Administration should launch a Plant Genome Project to support and enable a whole-of-government approach to advancing plant genomics and the bioeconomy. The PGP will build a comprehensive, open-access dataset of genetic and biological information on all plant species, starting with the 7,000 plant species that have historically been cultivated for food and prioritizing plants that are endangered by climate change and habitat loss. The PGP will convene key stakeholders and technical talent in a novel coalition of partnerships across public and private sectors. We anticipate that the PGP, like the Human Genome Project, will jump-start new technologies that will further drive down the cost of sequencing and advance a new era for plant science innovation and the U.S. bioeconomy. Our plan envisions two Phases and seven Key Actions. 

Phase 1: PGP Planning and Formation

Action 1: Create the Plant Genomics and U.S. Bioeconomy Interagency Working Group

The White House OSTP should convene a Plant Genomics and U.S. Bioeconomy Interagency Working Group to coordinate the creation of a Plant Genome Project and initiate efforts to consult with industry, academic, philanthropy, and social sector partners. The Working Group should include representatives from OSTP, U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and its Agricultural Research Service (ARS), National Plant Germplasm System, Department of Commerce, Department of Interior, National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Smithsonian Institution, Environmental Protection Agency, State Department’s Office of Science and Technology Adviser, and USAID’s Feed the Future Initiative. The Working Group should:

Action 2: Launch a White House Summit on Plant Genomics Innovation and Food Security

The Biden Administration should bring together multi-sector (agriculture industry, farmers, academics, and philanthropy) and agency partners with the expertise, resource access, and interest in increasing domestic food security and climate resilience. The Summit will secure commitments for the PGP’s initial activities and identify ways to harmonize existing data and advances in plant genomics. The Summit and follow-up activities should outline the steps that the Working Group will take to identify, combine, and encourage the distribution and access of existing plant genome data. Since public-private partnerships play a core enabling role in the strategy, the Summit should also determine opportunities for potential partners, novel financing through philanthropy, and international cooperation. 

Action 3: Convene Potential International Collaborators and Partners

International cooperation should be explored from the start (beginning with the Working Group and the White House Summit) to ensure that sequencing is conducted not just at a handful of institutions in the Global North but that countries in the Global South are included and all information is made publicly available. 

We envision at least one comprehensive germplasm seed bank in each country or geographical region similar to the Svalbard seed vault or The Royal Botanic Garden at Kew and sequencing contributions from multiple international organizations such as Beijing Genomics Institute and the Sanger Institute. 

Phase 2: PGP Formalization and Launch

Action 4: Launch the Plant Genome Research Institute to centralize and coordinate plant genome sequencing

Congress should create a Plant Genome Research Institute (PGRI) that will drive plant genomics research and be the central owner of U.S. government activities. The PGRI would centralize funding and U.S. government ownership over the PGP. We anticipate the PGP would require $2.5 billion over 10 years, with investment frontloaded and funding raised through matched commitments from philanthropy, public, and private sources. The PGRI could be a virtual institute structured as a distributed collaboration between multiple universities and research centers with centralized project management. PGRI funding could also incorporate novel funding mechanisms akin to the BRAIN Initiative through U.S. philanthropy and private sector collaboration (e.g., Science Philanthropy Alliance). The PGRI would:

Action 5: Expand and Strengthen NPGS-Managed Seed Repositories

We recommend strengthening the distributed seed repository managed by the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System and building a comprehensive and open-source catalog of plant genetic information tied to physical samples. The NPGS already stores seed collections at state land-grant universities in a collaborative effort to safeguard the genetic diversity of agriculturally important plants and may need additional funding to expand its work and increase visibility and access. 

Action 6: Create a Plant Innovation Fund within AgARDA

The Agriculture Advanced Research and Development Authority (AgARDA) is a USDA-based advanced research projects agency like DARPA but for agriculture research. The 2018 Farm Bill authorized AgARDA’s creation to tackle highly ambitious projects that are likely to have an outsize impact on agricultural and environmental challenges—such as the PGP. The existing AgARDA Roadmap could guide program setup. 

Phase 3: Long-Term, Tandem Bioeconomy Investments

Action 7: Bioeconomy Workforce Development and Plant Science Education

Invest in plant science and technical workforce development to build a sustainable foundation for global plant innovation and enable long-term growth in the U.S. bioeconomy. 

Conclusion

We are in a race against time to identify, decode, catalog, preserve, and cultivate the critical biodiversity of the world’s plant species before they are lost forever. By creating the world’s first comprehensive, open-access catalog of plant genetic information tied to physical samples, the Plant Genome Project will unlock plant innovation for food security, help preserve plant biodiversity in a changing climate, and advance the bioeconomy. The PGP’s whole-of-government approach will accelerate a global effort to secure our food systems and the health of the planet while catalyzing a new era of plant science, agricultural innovation and co-operation.

Frequently Asked Questions
How much will this proposal cost?

We estimate that it would cost ~$2.5 billion to sequence the genomes of all plant species. (For reference, the Human Genome Project cost $5.4 billion in 2017 to sequence just one species).

Will the PGP access existing private sequence information?

Yes, we recommend active solicitation of existing sequence information from all entities. This data should be validated and checked from a quality control perspective before being integrated into the PGP.

Who will undertake the sequencing effort?

The newly created Plant Genome Research Institute (PGRI) will coordinate the PGP. The structure and operations of the PGRI will follow recommendations from the OSTP-commissioned Stakeholder Working Group. All work will be conducted in partnership with agencies like the U.S. Department of Agriculture, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, private companies, and public academic institutions.

What about existing sequencing efforts and seed banks?

Existing sequencing efforts and seed banks will be included within the framework of the PGP.

Is the PGP a national or international effort?

The PGP will start as a national initiative, but to have the greatest impact it must be an international effort like the Human Genome Project. The White House Summit and Stakeholder Working Group will help influence scope and staging. The extinction crisis is a global problem, so the PGP should be a global effort in which the United States plays a strong leadership role. 

How will plant collection be prioritized?

In Phase 1, emphasis might be placed on native “lost crops” that can be grown in areas that are suffering from drought or are affected by climate change. Collection and selection would complement and incorporate active Biden Administration initiatives that center Indigenous science and environmental justice and equity. 


In Phase 2, efforts could focus on sequencing all plants in regions or ecosystems within the U.S. that are vulnerable to adverse climate events in collaboration with existing state-level and university programs. An example is the California Conservation Genomics Project, which aims to sequence all the threatened, endangered and commercially exploited flora and fauna of California. Edible and endangered plants will be prioritized, followed by other plants in these ecosystems.


In Phase 3, all remaining plant species will be sequenced. 

Where will the collected plants/germplasm be stored?

All collected seeds will be added to secure, distributed physical repositories, with priority given to collecting physical samples and genetic data from endangered species. 

How will the legal, ethical, and social issues around sample collection and benefit sharing be addressed?

The PGP will work to address and even correct some long-standing inequalities, ensuring that the rights and interests of all nations and Indigenous people are respected in multiple areas from specimen collection to benefit sharing while ensuring open access to genomic information. The foundational work being done by the Earth BioGenome Project’s Ethical, Legal and Social Committee will be critically important. 

Who will be invited to the White House Summit?

Invitees could include but would not be limited to the following entities with corresponding initial commitments to support the PGP’s launch:



  • Genome sequencing companies, such as Illumina, PacBio, Oxford Nanopore Technologies, and others, who would draft a white paper on the current landscape for sequencing technologies and innovation that would be needed to enable a PGP. 

  • Academic institutions with active sequencing core facilities such as the University of California, Davis and Washington University in St. Louis, among others, who would communicate existing capacity for PGP efforts and forecast additional capacity-building needs, summarize strengths of each entity and past contributions, and identify key thought leaders in the space.

  • Large ag companies, such as Bayer Crop Science, Syngenta, Corteva, and others, who are willing to share proprietary sequence information, communicate industry perspectives, identify obstacles to data sharing and potential solutions, and actively participate in the PGP and potentially provide resources. 

  • Government agencies and public institutions such as NIH/NCBI, NSF, USDA, Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research, CGIAR, Missouri Botanical Garden, would draft white papers communicating existing efforts and funding, identify funding gaps, and assess current and future collaborations.

  • Current sequencing groups/consortiums, such as the Wheat Genome Sequencing Consortium, Earth BioGenome Project, Open Green Genomes Project, HudsonAlpha, and others, would draft white papers communicating existing efforts and funding needs, identify gaps, and plan for data connectivity.

  • Tech companies, such as Google and Microsoft, could communicate existing efforts and technologies, assess the potential for new technologies and tools to accelerate PGP, curate data, and provide support such as talent in the fields of data science and software engineering.

The STEMpathy Task Force: Creating a Generation of Culturally Competent STEM Professionals

Summary

Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are powerful levers for improving the quality of life for everyone in the United States. The connection between STEM’s transformative potential and its current impact on structural societal problems starts in the high school classroom. 

Teachers play a critical role in fostering student cultural awareness and competency. Research demonstrates that teachers and students alike are eager to affect progress on issues related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA). Educational research also demonstrates that DEIA and empathy enhance student sense of belonging and persistence in professional STEM pathways. However, formal STEM learning experiences lack opportunities for students to practice cultural competency and explore applications of STEM to social justice issues.

Cultural Competency is the ability to understand, empathize, and communicate with others as part of a diverse community.

The Biden-Harris Administration should establish the STEMpathy Task Force to aid high school STEM teachers in establishing cultural competency as an overarching learning goal. Through this action, the Administration would signal the prioritization of STEM equity—reflected in both the classroom and the broader community—across the United States. The program would address two pertinent issues in the STEM pipeline: the lack of momentum in STEM workforce diversification and STEM’s unfulfilled promise to relieve our society of systems of oppression and bias. Students need to be taught not only the scientific method and scientific discourse, but also how to approach their science in a manner that best uplifts all people.

Challenge & Opportunity

In a 2017 survey, over 1,900 U.S. companies listed the ability to work effectively with customers, clients, and businesses from a range of different countries and cultures as a critical skill. Since then, the importance of cultural competency in the U.S. workforce has become increasingly apparent. 

Culturally competent workers are more creative and better equipped to solve tricky problems. For example, foresters have managed wildfires by following the instruction and guidance of tribal nations and traditional ecological knowledges. Engineers have designed infrastructure that lowers the water bills of farmers in drought-stricken areas. Public health representatives have assuaged concerns about COVID-19 vaccines in under-served communities. STEM professionals who improve Americans’ quality of life do so by collaborating and communicating with people from diverse backgrounds. When students can see these intersections between STEM and social change, they understand that STEM is not limited to a classroom, lab, or field activity but is also a tool for community building and societal progress. 

Today’s middle and high school students are increasingly concerned about issues around race/ethnicity, gender, and equity. Recent college graduates also share these interests, and many demonstrate a growing desire to participate in meaningful work and to pursue social careers. When students realize that STEM fields are compatible with their passion for topics related to identity and social inequities, they are more likely to pursue STEM careers—and stick with them. This is the way to create a generation of professionals who act with STEMpathy.

To unite STEM subjects with themes of social progress, cultural competency must become a critical component of STEM education. Under this framework, teachers would use curricula to address systemic social inequities and augment learning by drawing from students’ personal experiences (Box 1). This focus would align with ongoing efforts to promote project-based learning, social-emotional learning, and career and technical education in classrooms across the United States.

American high school STEM students will demonstrate an understanding of and empathy for how people from varied backgrounds are affected by environmental and social issues. An environmental sciences student in California understands the risks posed by solar farms to agricultural production in the Midwest. They seek to design solar panels that do not disrupt soil drainage systems and financially benefit farmers.An astronomy student in Florida empathizes with Indigenous Hawaiians who are fighting against the construction of a massive telescope on their land. The student signs petitions to prevent the telescope from being built.A chemistry student in Texas learns that many immigrants struggle to understand healthcare professionals. They volunteer as a translator in their local clinic.A computer science student in Georgia discovers that many fellow residents do not know when or where to vote. They develop a chatbot that reminds their neighbors of polling place information.
Box 1. Examples of Cultural Competency Outcomes.

With such changes to the STEM lessons, the average U.S. high school graduate would have both a stronger sense of community within STEM classrooms and the capacity to operate at a professional level in intercultural contexts. STEM classroom culture would shift accordingly to empower and amplify diverse perspectives and redefine STEM as a common good in the service of advancing society. 

Plan of Action

Through an executive order, the Biden-Harris Administration should create a STEMpathy Task Force committed to building values of inclusion and public service into the United States’ STEM workforce. The task force would assist U.S. high schools in producing college- and career-ready, culturally competent STEM students. The intended outcome is to observe a 20 percent increase in the likelihood of students of color and female- and nonbinary-identifying students to pursue a college degree in a STEM field and for at least 40 percent of surveyed U.S. high school students to demonstrate awareness and understanding of cultural competence skills. Both outcomes should be measured by National Center for Education Research data 5–10 years after the task force is established. 

The STEMpathy Task Force would be coordinated by the Subcommittee on Federal Coordination in STEM Education (FC-STEM) from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). The interagency working group would partner with education-focused organizations, research institutions, and philanthropy foundations to achieve their goals (FAQ #6). These partnerships would allow the White House to draw upon expertise within the STEM education sphere to address the following priorities:

Working toward these priorities will equip the next generation of STEM professionals with cultural competence skills. The task force will form effective STEM teaching methods that result in measurable improvement in STEM major diversity and career readiness.

Diagram Description automatically generated
Figure 1. Roadmap of STEMpathy Task Force priorities, including reinforcing elements.

This approach meets the objectives of existing federal STEM education efforts without imposing classroom standards on U.S. educators. In the Federal STEM Education Strategic Plan, the Committee on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education (Co-STEM) aims to (1) increase work-based learning and training, (2) lend successful practices from across the learning landscape, and (3) encourage transdisciplinary learning. The Department of Education also prioritizes the professional development of educators to strengthen student learning, as well as meet students’ social, emotional, and academic needs. In these ways, the STEMpathy Task Force furthers the Administration’s education goals.

Conclusion

Current national frameworks for high school STEM learning do not provide students with a strong sense of belonging or an awareness of how STEM can be leveraged to alleviate social inequities. The STEMpathy Task Force would establish a rigorous, adaptable framework to address these challenges head-on and ensure that the United States provides high school students with inclusive, hands-on science classrooms that prepare them to serve the diverse communities of their country. Following the implementation of the STEMpathy Task Force, the Biden-Harris Administration can expect to see (1) an increase in the number and diversity of students pursuing STEM degrees, (2) a reduction in race/ethnicity- and gender-based gaps in the STEM workforce, and (3) an increase in STEM innovations that solve critical challenges for communities across the United States.

Frequently Asked Questions
What cultural competence skills would students learn and apply?

In any team setting, students will function effectively and with empathy. They will interact respectfully with people from varied cultural backgrounds. To achieve these behavioral goals, students will learn three key skills, as outlined by the Nebraska Extension NebGuide:



  1. Increasing cultural and global knowledge. Students understand the historical background of current events, including relevant cultural practices, values, and beliefs. They know how to ask open-minded, open-ended questions to learn more information.

  2. Self-assessment. Students reflect critically on their biases to engage with others. They understand how their life experience may differ from others based on their identity.

  3. Active Listening. Students listen for the total meaning of a person’s message. They avoid mental chatter about how they will respond to a person or question, and they do not jump directly to giving advice or offering solutions. 

Would this task force incentivize, influence, or coerce states into adopting standards or curricula?

No. Although the task force will conduct research on STEM- and cultural-competency-related learning standards and lesson plans, the OSTP will not create incentives or regulations to force states to adopt the standards or curricula. The task force is careful to work within the existing, approved educational systems to advance the goals of the Department of Education and Committee on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math Education (Co-STEM).

What are the associated risks with teaching cultural competency?

As observed during recent efforts to teach American students about structural racism and systemic inequality, some parents may find topics pertaining to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility sensitive. The STEMpathy Task Force’s cultural competency-focused efforts, however, are primarily related to empathy and public service. These values are upheld by constituents and their representatives regardless of political leaning. As such, the STEMpathy Task Force may be understood as a bipartisan effort to advance innovation and the economic competitiveness of U.S. graduates.


Another associated risk is the burden created for teachers to incorporate new material into their already-packed schedules and lesson plans. Many teachers are leaving their jobs due to the stressful post-pandemic classroom environment, as well as the imbalance between their paychecks and the strain and value of their work. These concerns may be addressed through the STEMpathy Task Force’s objectives of paid training and rewards systems for educators who model effective teaching methods for others. In these ways, teachers may receive just compensation for their efforts in supporting both their students and the country’s STEM workforce.

What would be the outputs and milestones of the STEMpathy Task Force over its first four years?

In its first two years, the STEMpathy Task Force would complete the following:



  • Revise FC-STEM’s “Best Practices For Diversity and Inclusion in Stem Education and Research” guide to include information on evidence-based or emerging practices that promote cultural competence skills in the STEM classroom.

  • Train 500+ teachers across the nation to employ teaching strategies and curricula that improve the cultural competence skills of STEM students.


In the next two years, further progress would be made on the following:



  • Measure the efficacy of the teacher training program by assessing ~10,000 students’ cultural competence skill development, STEM interest retention and performance, and classroom sense of belonging.

  • Reward/recognize 100 schools for high achievement in cultural competency development.

Why approach cultural competency goals through STEM classes?

STEM subjects and professionals have the greatest potential to mitigate inequities in American society. Consider the following examples wherein marginalized communities would benefit from STEM professionals who act with cultural competency while working alongside or separate from decision-makers: 



Furthermore, although the number of STEM jobs in the United States has grown by 7.6 million since 1990, the STEM workforce has been very slow to diversify. Over the past 30 years, the proportion of Black STEM workers increased by only 2 percent and that of Latinx STEM workers by only 3 percent. Women hold only 15 percent of direct science and engineering jobs. LGBTQ male students are 17 percent more likely to leave STEM fields than their heterosexual counterparts.


Hundreds of professional networks, after-school programs, and nonprofit organizations have attempted to tackle these issues by targeting students of color and female-identifying students within STEM. While these commendable efforts have had a profound impact on many individuals’ lives, they are not providing the sweeping, transformative change that could promote not only diversity in the STEM workforce but a generation of STEM professionals who actively participate in helping diverse communities across the United States.

How much funding would the STEMpathy Task Force and its programming require?

Based on the president’s budget for ongoing STEM-related programming, we estimate that the agency task force would require approximately $100 million. This amount will be divided across involved agencies for STEMpathy Task Force programming.

Who are potential experts to include in the STEMpathy Task Force?

The STEMpathy Task Force must combine interagency expertise with nongovernmental organizations such as educational nonprofits, research institutions, and philanthropy foundations. 





















Government actors • National Center for Education Research

 


• National Research Council of the National Academies


• Department of Education, Blue Ribbon Schools Program
Industry professionals • National Science Teachers Association

 


• Learning for Justice


• Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning 


• International Society for Technology in Education 
Research institutions • Harvard Graduate School of Education

 


• Berkeley Centers for Educational Equity and Excellence


• Peabody College at Vanderbilt University


• National Association for Research in Science Teaching
Philanthropy • Richard Lounsbery Foundation

 


• Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative


• Burroughs Wellcome Fund 


• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation 

Pandemic Readiness Requires Bold Federal Financing for Vaccines

Summary

Most people will experience a severe pandemic within their lifetime, and the world remains dangerously unprepared. In fact, scientists predict a nearly 50% chance––the same probability as flipping heads or tails on a coin––that we will endure another COVID-19-level pandemic within the next 25 years. Shifting America’s pandemic response capability from reactive to proactive is, therefore, urgent. Failure to do so risks the country’s welfare. 

Getting ahead of the next pandemic is impossible without government financing. Vaccine production is costly, and these expenses will hinder industries from preemptively developing the tools needed to halt disease transmission. For example, the total expected revenues over a 20-year vaccine patent lifecycle would cover just half of the upfront research and development (R&D) costs. 

However, research suggests that a portfolio-based approach to vaccine development —  especially now with new, broadly applicable mRNA technology — dramatically increases the returns on investment while also guarding against an estimated 31 of the next 45 epidemic outbreaks. With lessons learned from Operation Warp Speed, Congress can deploy this approach by (i) authorizing and appropriating $10 billion to the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) (ii) developing a vaccine portfolio for 10 emerging infectious diseases (EIDs), and (iii) a White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP)-led interagency effort focused on scaling up production of priority vaccines. 

Challenge & Opportunity 

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to wreak havoc across the world, with an ongoing total cost of $16 trillion and more than 6 million dead. Three conditions increase the likelihood that we will experience another pandemic that is just as disastrous: 

  1. New outbreaks of infectious diseases––like ––are emerging due to population growth, increased zoonotic transmission from animals, habitat loss, climate change, and more. Over 1.6 million yet-to-be-discovered, human-infecting viral species are thought to exist in mammals and birds.
  2. More laboratories are handling dangerous pathogens around the world, which increases the likelihood of an accidental contagion release.
  3. It is easier than ever to purchase biotechnologies once reserved only for scientists. Consequently, malign actors now have more resources to develop a human-engineered bioweapon. 

The United States and the rest of the world are still woefully unprepared for future pandemic or epidemic threats. The lack of progress is largely due to little to no vaccine development for these six EIDs, all of which have pandemic potential: 

Failure to produce and supply vaccines doses to Americans could undermine the U.S. government’s response to a vaccine crisis. This is illustrated in the recent monkeypox response. The federal government invested in a new monkeypox vaccine with a significantly longer shelf life. While focused on this effort, it failed to replace its existing vaccine stockpile as it expired, leaving the American population woefully unprepared during the recent monkeypox outbreak. 

An immediate national strategy is needed to course correct, the beginnings of which are articulated in the recent plan for American Pandemic Preparedness: Transforming our Capabilities. These overarching concerns were also echoed in a bipartisan letter from the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions and Armed Services Committees, urging the Biden Administration to re-establish a “2.0” version of Operation Warp Speed (OWS)––the government’s prior effort to accelerate COVID-19 vaccine production. 

The President’s recent FY23 Budget advocates for a historic pandemic preparedness investment. The plan allocates nearly $40 billion to the Department of Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response to “invest in advanced development and manufacturing of countermeasures for high priority threats and viral families, including vaccines, therapeutics, diagnostics, and personal protective equipment.” BARDA also declared the need to prepare prototype vaccines for virus families with pandemic potential and has included such investments in its most recent strategic plan. And, the recent  calls for increased “piloting and prototyping efforts in biotechnology and biomanufacturing to accelerate the translation of basic research results into practice.”

Robust federal investment in America’s vaccine industry is especially needed since––as demonstrated by COVID-19––industries garner minimal profit from vaccine development before or during a widespread outbreak. A recent study predicted that in the unlikely scenario where 10 million vaccines are manufactured during a crisis response, pharmaceutical companies can expect to recoup only half of the upfront R&D costs. The same research states that “new drug development has become slower, more expensive, and less likely to succeed” because:

With clinical costs accounting for 96% of total investment, companies have a weak financial justification for investing in risky vaccine research. 

To minimize these uncertainties and improve investment returns for vaccine and therapeutic production, the federal government should embrace two key lessons from OWS: 

  1. Guaranteed government demand enables the pursuit of innovative, speedy, and effective vaccine R&D. OWS selected companies pursuing different scientific methods to develop a vaccine, each of which possessed breakthrough potential. Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech utilized mRNA, AstraZeneca and Janssen worked with replication-defective live vectors, and Novavax and Sanofi/GSK utilized a recombinant protein. Merck is working on a live attenuated virus that may be given orally. By frequently evaluating vaccine candidates, scientists ensured that only the most promising contenders continued to subsequent regulatory phases. This workflow dramatically expedited vaccine development. Relatedly, companies were able to invest in large-scale vaccine manufacturing during clinical trials thanks to government financial support. They not only received guaranteed investment installments, but also advanced commitments to purchase vaccines. This significantly decreased the financial risk and saved tremendous amounts of time and resources. 
  2. Public-private partnerships utilize incentives and rewards to foster highly effective and dynamic teams. OWS created a “unique distribution of responsibilities … based upon core competencies rather than on political or financial considerations.” The interests of eight pharmaceutical companies were aligned based on the potential to receive an upfront commitment from the federal government to bulk purchase vaccines. Such approaches are critical to ensuring vaccine R&D not only happens in an efficient, coordinated manner but also that such R&D yields production at scale. Moreover, it enabled a suite of approaches to vaccine development rather than one method, raising the overall probability of developing a successful vaccine. 

Repeating these lessons in subsequent EID vaccine developments would generate both significant returns on investment and benefits to society. 

Plan of Action

By incentivizing vaccine development for priority EIDs, the federal government can preemptively solve market failures without picking winners or losers. 

First, Congress should authorize and appropriate $10 billion to BARDA over 10 years to create a Dynamic Vaccine Development Fund. This fund would build on BARDA’s unique competencies as an engagement platform with the private sector. would allow for new developments to emerge 

It would also enact the following strategies, gleaned from all of which were proven to be effective in OWS: 

As illustrated by its successful history, BARDA is well-positioned to manage a large-scale vaccine initiative. Last year, BARDA announced the first venture capital partnership with the Global Health Investment Corporation to “allow direct linkage with the investment community and establish sustained and long-term efforts to identify, nurture, and commercialize technologies that aid the U.S. in responding effectively to future health security threats.” During the COVID-19 pandemic, BARDA and Janssen shared the R&D costs to help move Janssen’s investigational novel coronavirus vaccine into clinical evaluation—a collaboration supported by their previous successes on the Ebola vaccine. The Government Accountability Office reported that BARDA had also supported scaled production by identifying additional manufacturing partners. This partnership record shows that BARDA not only knows how to manage global health projects to completion but also is particularly adept at interfacing with the private sector. As such, it stands out as an ideal manager for the Dynamic Vaccine Development Fund.

With $10 billion, this Fund could not only support the vaccine economy, but also save millions of lives and trillions of dollars. Although the price tag is admittedly hefty, it is reasonable. After all, OWS had a price tag of $12+ billion––a small investment compared to the $16+ trillion cost of COVID-19. As seen in OWS, the long-term benefits of upfront, robust financing are even more impactful. One back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests immense economic returns for the Fund: 

A $10 billion down payment would allow the Fund to excel in its normal operations (see bulleted list above) and support up to 120 vaccine candidates. OWS also spawned more than just new breakthrough R&D in the use of mRNA vaccine models. It also led to a health and biotechnology innovation windfall: 

“Now that we know that mRNA vaccines work, there is no reason we could not start the process of developing those for the top 20 most likely pandemic pathogen prototypes” 

Dr. Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health

Ten billion dollars would ensure the Fund’s impact could be similarly force-multiplied by private sector partnerships. There would be  more time available and more opportunity for creative partnerships with the private sector. The Fund’s purpose is to lower financial risks and attract large amounts of capital from the bond market, whose size outweighs the venture capital, public equity, or private equity markets. Indeed, there has been growing interest in the application of social bonds to pandemic preparedness as a unique instrument for rapidly frontloading resources from capital markets. Though this Fund will assume a different form, the International Finance Facility for Immunisation represents a proof of concept for coordinating  philanthropic foundations, governments, and supranational organizations for the purpose of “raising money more quickly.” With seed capital, this Fund could provide a strong signal — and perhaps an anchor for coordination — to debt capital markets to make issuances for vaccines. To this end, the targeted critical mass of $10 billion is estimated to generate both tremendous societal value by preventing future epidemic outbreaks as well as producing positive returns for investors. 

Second, in executing Fund activities, BARDA should leverage investment strategies––such as milestone-based payments––to incentivize maximum vaccine innovation. When combatting EIDs, the U.S. will need as many vaccine options as possible. To facilitate this outcome, vaccine manufacturers should be rewarded for producing multiple kinds of vaccines at the same time. For example, BARDA might support the development of vaccines for a given EID by funding progress for four novel methods (e.g., mRNA, recombinant protein, gene-therapy, and live attenuated, orally-administered vaccines).  

Furthermore, these rewards should come regularly during major events––or “milestones”––during development. Initial-stage milestones include vaccine candidates that protect an animal model against disease; later-stage milestones include human clinical trials. This financing model would provide companies with clear, short-term targets, reducing uncertainty and rewarding progress dynamically. Additionally, it would support the recent executive order, which calls for “increasing piloting and prototyping efforts in biotechnology and biomanufacturing to accelerate the translation of basic research results into practice.”

BARDA could expand the milestone-based financing mechanism further by employing early-stage challenges. In this scenario, it would only fund the first two of three candidates that successfully complete small-scale clinical trials. The final milestone stage––which should only be offered to a limited number of candidates––should provide an advanced market commitment to house complete vaccines within U.S. storage facilities, based on the interagency effort (described in the paragraph below). The selections process would retain sufficient competition throughout the development process, while ensuring a sustainable method for scaling up certain vaccines based on mission priorities.

Third, to support Fund activities towards late-stage clinical trials, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) should coordinate a larger-scale interagency effort leveraging advanced market commitments, prize challenges, and other innovative procurement techniques. OSTP should be a coordinator across federal agencies that address pandemic preparedness, which might include: the Department of Defense, BARDA, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Development Finance Corporation. In doing so, the OSTP can (i) consolidate investments for particular vaccine candidates, and (ii) utilize networks and incentive strategies across the U.S. government to secure vaccines. Separately––and based on urgent priorities shared by agencies––OSTP should work closely with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to explore opportunities for pre-approval of vaccines as they develop through the trial phase. 

Conclusion

Vaccines are among the most powerful tools for fighting pandemics. Unfortunately, bringing vaccines to market at scale is challenging. However, Operation Warp Speed (OWS) established a new precedent for tackling vaccine innovation market failures, laying the groundwork for a new era of industrial strategy. Congress should take advantage and supercharge U.S. pandemic preparedness by enabling the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) to build a Dynamic Vaccine Development Fund. Embracing lessons learned from OWS, the Fund would incentivize companies to create vaccines for the six emerging infectious diseases most likely to cause the next pandemic.

Frequently Asked Questions
If it takes so long to approve a new vaccine, why should we invest in developing vaccines ahead of time?

The regulatory process for approving vaccines is even more reason to develop them ahead of time—before they are needed, rather than after an outbreak. Having access to an effective vaccine even days sooner can save thousands of lives due to the exponential rate of growth of all infectious diseases. Moreover, the FDA approval process—especially its Emergency Use Authorization Program—is extremely efficient, and is not the bottleneck for vaccine development. The main delay involved in vaccine development is the time it takes to conduct randomized clinical trials. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to this process if we want to ensure that vaccines are safe and effective. That is why we need to develop vaccines before pandemics occur. The idea here is simply to develop the minimum viable product of vaccines for priority EIDs that positions these vaccines to rapidly scale in the event of a pandemic.

Has this large-scale, multi-use investment program been deployed elsewhere?

Yes, there are several examples of vaccine initiatives using this strategy. To list a few:



  1. The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI) has a “megafund” vaccine portfolio (i.e., they have 32 vaccine candidates as of April 2022). This portfolio spans 13 different therapeutic mechanisms and five different stages of clinical development, from preclinical to “Emergency Use Listing” by the World Health Organization. 

  2. BridgeBio, Roivant Sciences have used portfolio-based approaches for drug development.

  3. The National Brain Tumor Society is also leveraging this approach to finance novel drug candidates that can treat glioblastoma.

Where and how would you safely store a large vaccine stockpile? When we tried this before, didn’t 20 million doses of monkeypox vaccines expire?

Ideally, vaccines in the final milestone stage would be stored in the United States and in line with new CDC guidance in the Vaccine Storage and Handling toolkit. This prevents the scenario where vaccines are held up in transit due to complex international negotiations and, potentially, expire during the lengthy proceedings. This exact scenario occurred when the 300,000 doses of monkeypox vaccine held in a Denmark-based facility were slowly and inconsistently onshored back to the U.S. 


In addition, vaccines that are financed through the Fund would not always be final products. Instead, they would potentially be at varying stages of development thanks to the milestone-based payment strategy and frequent progress reviews. This would make it easier for the federal government to closely coordinate vaccine development with manufacturing professionals and rapidly increase vaccine production if necessary. The strategy offered in this memo lowers the risk of a similar situation occurring again.


We recommend that the executive order on biomanufacturing continue exploring this issue and investigate ways to securely store completed vaccines. The Government Accountability Office, for example, recently suggested several promising and discrete changes to update the requirements and operations of the Strategic National Stockpile.

Why did you select these six emerging infectious diseases?

This list was derived from justifications listed on CEPI’s website, linked here. 

Why not develop a vaccine against all potential viral threats?

There are simply too many infectious diseases in nature, and most of are too rare to pose a significant threat. It would be scientifically and financially impractical––and unnecessary––to develop vaccines against all of them. However, we can greatly increase our readiness by widening our scope and developing a library of prototyped vaccines based on the 25 viral families (as called for by CEPI). Doing so would allow us to respond quickly against even unlikely pandemic scenarios.

Public Value Evidence for Public Value Outcomes: Integrating Public Values into Federal Policymaking

Summary

The federal government––through efforts like the White House Year of Evidence for Action––has made a laudable push to ensure that policy decisions are grounded in empirical evidence. While these efforts acknowledge the importance of social, cultural and Indigenous knowledges, they do not draw adequate attention to the challenges of generating, operationalizing, and integrating such evidence in routine policy and decision making. In particular, these endeavors are generally poor at incorporating the living and lived experiences, knowledge, and values of the public. This evidence—which we call evidence about public values—provides important insights for decision making and contributes to better policy or program designs and outcomes. 

The federal government should broaden institutional capacity to collect and integrate evidence on public values into policy and decision making. Specifically, we propose that the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP): 

  1. Provide a directive on the importance of public value evidence.
  2. Develop an implementation roadmap for integrating public value evidence into federal operations (e.g., describe best practices for integrating it into federal decision making, developing skill-building opportunities for federal employees).

Challenge and Opportunity

Evidence about public values informs and improves policies and programs

Evidence about public values is, to put it most simply, information about what people prioritize, care, or think about with respect to a particular issue, which may differ from ideas prioritized by experts. It includes data collected through focus groups, deliberations, citizen review panels, and community-based research, or public opinion surveys. Some of these methods rely on one-way flows of information (e.g., surveys) while others prioritize mutual exchange of information among policy makers and participating publics (e.g., deliberations). 

Agencies facing complex policymaking challenges can utilize evidence about public values––along with expert- and evaluation-based evidence––to ensure decisions truly serve the broader public good. If collected as part of the policy-making process, evidence about public values can inform policy goals and programs in real time, including when program goals are taking shape or as programs are deployed. 

Evidence about public values within the federal government: three challenges to integration

To fully understand and use public values in policymaking, the U.S. government must first broadly address three challenges.

First, the federal government does not sufficiently value evidence about public values when it researches and designs policy solutions. Federal employees often lack any directive or guidance from leadership that collecting evidence about public values is valuable or important to evidence-based decision making. Efforts like the White House Year of Evidence for Action seek to better integrate evidence into policy making. Yet––for many contexts and topics––scientific or evaluation-based evidence is just one type of evidence. The public’s wisdom, hopes, and perspectives play an important mediating factor in determining and achieving desired public outcomes. The following examples illustrate ways public value evidence can support federal decision making:

  1. An effort to implement climate intervention technologies (e.g., solar geoengineering) might be well-grounded in evidence from the scientific community. However, that same strategy may not consider the diverse values Americans hold about (i) how such research might be governed, (ii) who ought to develop those technologies, and (iii) whether or not they should be used at all. Public values are imperative for such complex, socio-technical decisions if we are to make good on the Year of Evidence’s dual commitment to scientific integrity (including expanded concepts of expertise and evidence) and equity (better understanding of “what works, for whom, and under what circumstances”). 
  2. Evidence about the impacts of rising sea levels on national park infrastructure and protected features has historically been tense. To acknowledge the social-environmental complexity in play, park leadership have strived to include both expert assessments and engagement with publics on their own risk tolerance for various mitigation measures. This has helped officials prioritize limited resources as they consider tough decisions on what and how to continue to preserve various park features and artifacts. 

Second, the federal government lacks effective mechanisms for collecting evidence about public values. Presently, public comment periods favor credentialed participants—advocacy groups, consultants, business groups, etc.—who possess established avenues for sharing their opinions and positions to policy makers. As a result, these credentialed participants shape policy and other experiences, voices, and inputs go unheard. While the general public can contribute to government programs through platforms like Challenge.gov, credentialed participants still tend to dominate these processes. Effective mechanisms for collecting public values into decision making or research are generally confined to university, local government, and community settings. These methods include participatory budgeting, methods from usable or co-produced science, and participatory technology assessment. Some of these methods have been developed and applied to complex science and technology policy issues in particular, including climate change and various emerging technologies. Their use in federal agencies is far more limited. Even when an agency might seek to collect public values, it may be impeded by regulatory hurdles, such as the Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA), which can limit the collection of public values, ideas, or other input due to potentially long timelines for approval and perceived data collection burden on the public. Cumulatively, these factors prevent agencies from accurately gauging––and being adaptive to––public responses. 

Third, federal agencies face challenges integrating evidence about public values into policy making. These challenges can be rooted in the regulatory hurdles described above, difficulties integrating with existing processes, and unfamiliarity with the benefits of collecting evidence about public values. Fortunately, studies have found specific attributes present among policymakers and agencies that allowed for the implementation and use of mechanisms for capturing public values. These attributes included: 

  1. Leadership who prioritized public involvement and helped address administrative uncertainties.
  2. An agency culture responsive to broader public needs, concerns, and wants.
  3. Agency staff familiar with mechanisms to capture public values and integrate them in the policy- and decision-making process. The latter can help address translation issues, deal with regulatory hurdles, and can better communicate the benefits of collecting public values with regard to agency needs. Unfortunately, many agencies do not have such staff, and there are no existing roadmaps or professional development programs to help build this capacity across agencies. 

Aligning public values with current government policies promotes scientific integrity and equity

The White House Year of Evidence for Action presents an opportunity to address the primary challenges––namely a lack of clear direction, collection protocols, and evidence integration strategies––currently impeding public values evidence’s widespread use in the federal government. Our proposal below is well aligned with the Year of Evidence’s central commitments, including: 

Furthermore, this proposal aligns with the goals of the Year of Evidence for Action to “share leading practices to generate and use research-backed knowledge to advance better, more equitable outcomes for all America…” and to “…develop new strategies and structures to promote consistent evidence-based decision-making inside the Federal Government.” 

Plan of Action

To integrate public values into federal policy making, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) should: 

  1. Develop a high-level directive for agencies about the importance of collecting public values as a form of evidence to inform policy making.
  2. Oversee the development of a roadmap for the integration of evidence about public values across government, including pathways for training federal employees. 

Recommendation 1. OMB and OSTP should issue a high-level directive providing clear direction and strong backing for agencies to collect and integrate evidence on public values into their evidence-based decision-making procedures. 

Given the potential utility of integrating public value evidence into science and technology policy as well as OSTP’s involvement in efforts to promote evidence-based policy, OSTP makes a natural partner in crafting this directive alongside OMB. This directive should clearly connect public value evidence to the current policy environment. As described above, efforts like the Foundations for Evidence-Based policy making Act (Evidence Act) and the White House Year of Evidence for Action provide a strong rationale for the collection and integration of evidence about public values. Longer-standing policies––including the Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science Act––provide further context and guidance for the importance of collecting input from broad publics.

Recommendation 2. As part of the directive, or as a follow up to it, OMB and OSTP should oversee the development of a roadmap for integrating evidence about public values across government. 

The roadmap should be developed in consultation with various federal stakeholders, such as members of the Evaluation Officer Council, representatives from the Equitable Data Working Group, customer experience strategists, and relevant conceptual and methods experts from within and outside the government.

A comprehensive roadmap would include the following components:

Conclusion

Collecting evidence about the living and lived experiences, knowledge, and aspirations of the public can help inform policies and programs across government. While methods for collecting evidence about public values have proven effective, they have not been integrated into evidence-based policy efforts within the federal government. The integration of evidence about public values into policy making can promote the provision of broader public goods, elevate the perspectives of historically marginalized communities, and reveal policy or program directions different from those prioritized by experts. The proposed directive and roadmap––while only a first step––would help ensure the federal government considers, respects, and responds to our diverse nation’s values.

Frequently Asked Questions
Which agencies or areas of government could use public value evidence?

Federal agencies can use public value evidence where additional information about what the public thinks, prioritizes, and cares about could improve programs and policies. For example, policy decisions characterized by high uncertainty, potential value disputes, and high stakes could benefit from a broader review of considerations by diverse members of the public to ensure that novel options and unintended consequences are considered in the decision making process. In the context of science and technology related decision making, these situations were called “post-normal science” by Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz. They called for an extension of who counts as a subject matter expert in the face of such challenges, citing the potential for technical analyses to overlook important societal values and considerations.

Why should OSTP be engaged in furthering the use of public value evidence?

Many issues where science and technology meet societal needs and policy considerations warrant broad public value input. These issues include emerging technologies with societal implications and existing S&T challenges that have far reaching impacts on society (e.g., climate change). Further, OSTP is already involved in Evidence for Action initiatives and can assist in bringing in external expertise on methods and approaches.

Why do we need this sort of evidence when public values are represented by elective officials?

While guidance from elected officials is an important mechanism for representing public values, evidence collected about public values through other means can be tailored to specific policy making contexts and can explore issue-specific challenges and opportunities. 

Are there any examples of public value evidence being used in the government?

There are likely more current examples of identifying and integrating public value evidence than we can point out in government. The roadmap building process should involve identifying those and finding common language to describe diverse public value evidence efforts across government. For specific known examples, see footnotes 1 and 2.

Is evidence about public values different from evidence collected about evaluations?

Evidence about public values might include evidence collected through program and policy evaluations but includes broader types of evidence. The evaluation of policies and programs generally focuses on assessing effectiveness or efficiency. Evidence about public values would be used in broader questions about the aims or goals of a program or policy.