Summary

To address the critical challenges of lifelong learning, evolving skills gaps, and continuous labor market transformation and automation, all Americans need to have access to agile and effective jobs training. Artificial intelligence (AI) and virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR) capabilities can deliver training tailored to the unique backgrounds, preferences, and needs of every individual. In this memo, we propose a two-stage approach that the Biden-Harris administration can adopt to help prepare Americans for the jobs of the future through responsible use of AI and VR/AR.

Stage 1 would launch a one to three pilot programs that leverage AI and VR/AR technologies to provide targeted training to specific communities.

Stage 2 would establish a national prize competition soliciting proposals to build and deliver a federal lifelong learning platform for the nation.

Summary

The Congress should dedicate $1 billion, 1 percent of the proposed workforce funding under the American Jobs Plan, for needed upgrades to Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS). Major upgrades are needed to Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems to enable states to effectively monitor and address long-term pandemic learning loss, while ensuring this generation of students stays on track for college and career in the aftermath of the pandemic. With the major influx of planned resources into K12 and postsecondary education from the recent and upcoming relief bills, there is also a critical need to ensure those funds are targeted toward students and workers who are most in need and to measure the impact of those funds on pandemic recovery. Some states, such as Texas and Rhode Island, are already leveraging funds from previous relief bills (e.g., Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES Act), to modernize their data systems, offering a model for other states to connect education, workforce, and social services information. This demonstrates an interest and need among states for SLDS upgrades, though additional investment is necessary to address historically underfunded data infrastructure.

Summary

The future of computing innovation is becoming more uncertain as the 2020s have brought about a pivot point in the global semiconductor industry. We owe this uncertainty to several factors, including the looming end of Moore’s Law, disruptions in semiconductor supply chains, international competition in innovation investment, a growing demand for more specialized computer chips, and the continued development of alternate computing paradigms, such as quantum computing.

In order to address the next generation of computing needs, architectures are beginning to emphasize the integration of multiple, specialized computing components. Within this framework, the U.S. is well poised to emerge as a leader in the future of next-generation computing, and more broadly advanced semiconductor manufacturing. However, there remains a missing link in the United States’ computing innovation strategy: a coordinating organization which will down-select and integrate the wide variety of promising, next-generation computing materials, architectures, and approaches so that they can form the building blocks of advanced, high-performance, heterogeneous systems.

Armed with these facts, and using the existing authorization language in the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the Biden Administration and Congress have a unique opportunity to establish a Manufacturing USA Institute under the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) with the goal of pursuing advanced packaging for scalable heterogeneous computing. This Institute will leverage the enormous body of previous work in post-Moore computing funded by the federal government (Semiconductor Technology Advanced Research Network (STARnet), Nanoelectronics Computing Research (nCORE), Joint University Microelectronics Program (JUMP), Energy-Efficient Computing: From Devices to Architectures (E2CDA), Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI)) and will bridge a key gap in bringing these R&D efforts from the laboratory to real world applications. By doing this, the U.S. will be well positioned to continue its dominance in semiconductor design and potentially regain advanced semiconductor manufacturing activity over the coming decades.

Climate change is an enormous environmental, social, and economic threat to the United States. Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from burning fossil fuels and other industrial processes are a major driver of this threat. Even if the world stopped emitting CO2 today, the huge quantities of CO2 generated by human activity to date would continue to sit in the atmosphere and cause dangerous climate effects for at least another 1,000 years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has reported that keeping average global warming below 1.5°C is not possible without the use of carbon dioxide removal (CDR).2 While funding and legislative support for CDR has greatly increased in recent years, the United States does not yet have a coordinated plan for implementing CDR technologies. The Department of Energy’s CDR task force should recommend a governance strategy for CDR implementation to responsibly, equitably, and effectively combat climate change by achieving net-negative CO2 emissions.

Challenge and Opportunity 

There is overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is a dangerous global threat. Climate change, driven in large part by human-generated CO2 emissions, is already causing severe flooding, drought, melting ice sheets, and extreme heat. These phenomena are in turn compromising human health, food and water security, and economic growth.

Figure 1. Data collected from observation stations show how noticeably atmospheric CO2 concentrations have risen over the past several decades. (Data compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association; figure by Klaus S. Lackner.)

Morton, E.V. (2020). Reframing the Climate Change Problem: Evaluating the Political, Technological, and Ethical Management of Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the United States. Ph.D. thesis, Arizona State University.

CO2 concentrations are higher today than they have been at any point in the last 3 million years. The contribution of human activity is causing CO2 emissions to rise at an unprecedented rate — approximately 2% per year for the past several decades (Figure 1) — a rate that far outpaces the rate at which the natural world can adapt and adjust. A monumental global effort is needed to reduce CO2 emissions from human activity. But even this is not enough. Because CO2 can persist in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years, CO2 already emitted will continue to have climate impacts for at least the next 1,000 years. Keeping the impacts of climate change to tolerable levels requires not only a suite of actions to reduce future CO2 emissions, but also implementation of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) strategies to mitigate the damage we have already done.

The IPCC defines CDR as “anthropogenic activities removing CO2 from the atmosphere and durably storing it in geological, terrestrial, or ocean reservoirs, or in products.” While becoming more energy efficient can reduce emissions and using renewable energy causes zero emissions, only CDR can achieve the “net negative” emissions needed to help restore climate stability.

Five companies around the world — two of which are based in the United States — have already begun commercializing a particular CDR technology called direct air capture. Climeworks is the most advanced company, and can already remove 900 tons of atmospheric CO2 per year at its plant in Switzerland. Though these companies have demonstrated that CDR technologies like direct air capture work, costs need to come down and capacity needs to expand for CDR to remove meaningful levels of past emissions from the atmosphere.

Thankfully, the Energy Act of 2020, a subsection of the 2021 Consolidated Appropriations Act, was passed into law in December 2020. This act creates a carbon removal research, development, and demonstration program within the Department of Energy. It also establishes a prize competition for pre-commercial and commercial applications of direct air capture technologies, provides grants for direct air capture and storage test centers, and creates a CDR task force.

The CDR task force will be led by the Secretary of Energy and include the heads of any other relevant federal agencies chosen by the Secretary. The task force is mandated to write a report that includes an estimate of how much excess CO2 needs to be removed from the atmosphere by 2050 to achieve net zero emissions, an inventory and evaluation of CDR approaches, and recommendations for policy tools that the U.S. government can use to meet the removal estimation and advance CDR deployment. This report will be used to advise the Secretary of Energy on next steps for CDR development and will be submitted to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources and the House of Representatives Committees on Energy and Commerce and Science, Space, and Technology.

The Biden administration has clearly shown its commitment to combating climate change by rejoining the Paris Agreement and signing several Executive Orders that take a whole-of-government approach to the climate crisis. The Energy Act complements these actions by advancing development and demonstration of CDR. However, the Energy Act does not address CDR governance, i.e., the policy tools necessary to efficiently and ethically steward CDR implementation. A proactive governance strategy is needed to ensure that CDR is used to repair past damage and support communities that have been disproportionately harmed by climate change — not as an excuse for the fossil-fuel industry and other major contributors to the climate crisis to continue dumping harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. The CDR task force should therefore leverage the crucial opportunity it has been given to shape future use of CDR by incorporating governance recommendations into its report.

Plan of Action

The Department of Energy’s CDR task force should consider recommending the following options in its final report. Taken together, these recommendations form the basis of a governance framework to ensure that CDR technologies are implemented in a way that most responsibly, equitably, and effectively addresses climate change.

Establish net-zero and net-negative carbon removal targets.

The Energy Act commendably directs the CDR task force to estimate the amount of CO2 that the United States must remove to become net zero by 2050. But the task force should not stop there. The task force should also estimate the amount of CO2 that the United States must remove to limit average global warming to 1.5°C (a target that will require net negative emissions) and estimate what year this goal could feasibly be achieved. Much like the National Ambient Air Quality Standards enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency, there should be a specific amount of CO2 that the United States should work toward removing to enhance environmental quality. This target could be based on how much CO2 the United States has put into the atmosphere to date and how much of that amount the United States should be responsible for removing. Both net-zero and net-negative removal targets should be preserved through legislation to continue progress beyond the Biden administration.

Design a public carbon removal service.

If carbon removal targets become law, the federal government will need to develop an organized way of removing and storing CO2 in order to reach those targets. Therefore, the CDR task force should also consider what it would take to develop a public carbon removal service. Just as waste disposal and sewage infrastructure are public services paid for by those that generate waste, industries would pay for the service of having their past and current CO2 emissions removed and stored securely. Revenue generated from a public carbon removal service could be reinvested into CDR technology, carbon storage facilities, maintenance of CDR infrastructure, environmental justice initiatives, and job creation. As the Biden administration ramps up its American Jobs Plan to modernize the country’s infrastructure, it should consider including carbon removal infrastructure. A public carbon removal service could materially contribute to the goals of expanding clean energy infrastructure and creating jobs in the green economy that the American Jobs Plan aims to achieve. 

Planning the design and implementation of a public carbon removal service should be conducted in parallel with CDR technology development. Knowing what CDR technologies will be used may change how prize competitions and grant programs funded by the Energy Act are evaluated and how the CDR task force will prioritize its policy recommendations. The CDR task force should assess the CDR technology landscape and determine which technologies — including mechanical, agricultural, and ocean-based processes — are best suited for inclusion in a public carbon removal service. The assessment should be based on factors such as affordability, availability, and storage permanence. The assessment could also consider results from the research, development, and demonstration (RD&D) program and the prize competitions mandated by the Energy Act when making its determination. The task force should also recommend concrete steps towards getting a public carbon removal service up and running. Steps could include, for instance, establishing public-private partnerships with prize competition winners and other commercialized CDR companies.

Create a national carbon accounting standard.

The Energy Act directs the RD&D program to collaborate with the Environmental Protection Agency to develop an accounting framework to certify how much carbon different techniques can remove and how long that carbon can be stored. This may involve investigating the storage permanence of various carbon storage and utilization options. This may also involve creating a database of storage lifetimes for CDR products and processes and identification of CDR techniques best suited for attaining carbon removal targets. The task force could recommend to the Secretary of Energy that the framework becomes a standard. A national carbon accounting standard will be integral for achieving carbon removal targets and verifying removal through public service described above.

Ensure equity in CDR.

While much of the technical and economic aspects of carbon removal have been (or are being) investigated, questions related to equity remain largely unaddressed. The CDR task force should investigate and recommend policies and actions to ensure that carbon removal does not impose or exacerbate societal inequities, especially for vulnerable communities of color and low-income communities. Recommendations that the task force could explore include:

• Establishing a tax credit for investing in CDR on private land. This credit would be similar to existing credits for installing solar and selling electricity back to the grid. Some or all of proceeds from the credit should go to help communities previously harmed by environmental injustice (i.e., “environmental justice communities”).
• Launching a CDR technology deployment program that gives environmental justice communities a tax credit or other financial benefit for allowing a CDR technology to be deployed in their communities. This “hosting” compensation would be earmarked for local environmental remediation.
• Incentivizing design of CDR technologies that deliver co-benefits. For instance, planting trees not only helps remove carbon from the atmosphere but also creates shade, provides habitat, and helps mitigate urban heat-island effects. Industrial direct air capture plants can be surrounded by greenspace and art to create public parks.
• Interviewing environmental justice communities to understand their needs and how those needs could be met through strategic implementation of CDR.

Include CDR in international climate discussions.

Because CDR is a necessary part of any realistic strategy to keep average global warming to tolerable levels, CDR is a necessary part of future international discussions on climate change. The United States can take the lead by including CDR in its nationally determined contribution (NDC) to the Paris Agreement. The U.S. NDC most recently submitted in April 2021 does discuss increasing carbon sequestration through agriculture and oceans but could be even more aggressive by including a broader suite of CDR technologies (e.g., engineered direct air capture) and prioritizing pursuit of carbon-negative solutions. The CDR task force could recommend that the Department of Energy work with the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate and the Department of State Office of Global Change on (1) enhancing the NDC through CDR, and (2) developing climate-negotiation strategies intended to increase the use of CDR globally.

Conclusion

Global climate change has worsened to the point where simply reducing emissions is not enough. Even if all global emissions were to cease today, the climate impacts of the carbon we have dumped into the atmosphere would continue to be felt for centuries to come. The only solution to this problem is to achieve net-negative emissions by dramatically accelerating development and deployment of carbon dioxide removal (CDR). As one of the world’s biggest emitters, the United States has a responsibility to do all it can to tackle the climate crisis. And as one of the world’s technological and geopolitical leaders, the United States is well positioned to rise to the occasion, investing in CDR governance alongside the technical and economic aspects of CDR. The CDR task force can lead in this endeavor by advising the Secretary of Energy on an overall governance strategy and specific policy recommendations to ensure that CDR is used in an aggressive, responsible, and equitable manner.

Summary

Congress is actively interested in ensuring that the United States is educating the talent needed to maintain our global economic and national security leadership. A number of proposals being considered by Congress focus on putting the National Science Foundation’s Education division on a doubling path over the next 5-7 years.

This memo recommends that the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) — the R&D agency housed within the Department of Education — be put on the similar doubling path with stepladder increases in authorization levels, and targeted program starts (e.g., an “ARPA” housed at ED) focused on major gaps that have been building for years but made even more evident during the pandemic.

This increased funding for IES should be focused on:

• Establishing New Research Capacity in the form of an [1] “ARPA-like” Transformative Research Program;

• Harnessing Data for Impact through investments in [2] Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS), [3] a Learning Observatory, and [4] modernization of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP);

• Conducting Pathbreaking Data-Driven Research by [5] building a permanent Data Science Unit within IES, [6] increasing funding for special education research; and [7] investing in digital learning platforms as research infrastructure; and

• Building the Education Field for Deployment of What Works by [8] establishing a Center of Learning Excellence for state-level recovery investments in tutoring and more.

Improving university/corporate research partnerships is key to advancing U.S. competitiveness. Reform of the IRS rules surrounding corporate sponsored research taking place in university facilities funded by tax-exempt bonds has long been sought by the higher education community and will stimulate more public-private partnerships. With Congress considering new ways to fund research through a new NSF Technology Directorate and the possibility of a large infrastructure package, an opportunity is now open for Congress to address these long-standing reforms in IRS rules.

Challenge and Opportunity

Research partnerships between private companies and universities are critical to U.S. technology competitiveness. China and other countries are creating massive, government-funded research centers in artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, biotechnology, and other critical sectors, threatening our nation’s international technology advantage. The United States has responded with initiatives such as the corporate research and development (R&D) tax credit, the SBIR and STTR programs, Manufacturing USA institutes, and numerous other programs and policies to assist tech development and encourage public-private collaborations. States and cities have mirrored these efforts, helping to build a network of innovation hubs in communities across the nation

The U.S. Innovation and Competition Act recently passed by the Senate is designed to build on this progress. A key provision of the Act is the establishment of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Directorate for Science and Technology that would “identify and develop opportunities to reduce barriers for technology transfer, including intellectual property frameworks between academia and industry, nonprofit entities, and the venture capital communities.”

One such barrier is the suite of “private use” rules surrounding corporate research taking place in university facilities financed with tax-exempt bonds. Tax-exempt bonds are a preferred financing option for university research facilities as they carry lower interest rates and more favorable terms. But the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) prohibition on “private business use“ of facilities financed using tax-exempt bonds have the unfortunate consequence of hamstringing the U.S. research enterprise. Current IRS rules place universities wishing to avoid concerns about sponsoring research from outside organizations to hold the rights to almost all intellectual property (IP) generated within their research facilities, even when the research is sponsored by private corporations. This can lead U.S. corporations wishing to retain IP rights to partner with universities overseas instead of U.S. universities institutions. Small technology companies whose business plans depend on their claim to IP rights may similarly avoid partnerships with universities.

Though the IRS has issued policies that aim to address these problems (e.g., Revenue Procedure 2007-47), such policies are so narrow in scope that most research partnerships between companies and universities are still considered private uses. As a result, universities engaged in cutting-edge, industry-relevant research face an unenviable choice: they must either (i) forego promising partnerships with the many companies unwilling to completely cede claims to IP rights, (ii) dedicate substantial time and administrative resources to track and report all specific instances of corporate-sponsored research occurring in facilities financed by tax-exempt bonds, or (iii) use funding that would otherwise be available for research to finance facilities through taxable bonds.

Forcing this choice upon universities further exacerbates a system of “haves” and “have-nots”. Large and/or well-endowed universities may have the financial resources to avoid relying on tax-exempt financing for research facilities, or to hire sophisticated and expensive legal expertise for help structuring financing in a way that complies with IRS rules. But for many — perhaps most — universities, the more viable solution is to avoid corporate-sponsored research altogether.

Complex federal rules governing intellectual property and private business use are widely acknowledged as an issue. A memo from the Association of American Universities (AAU), which represents the leading research universities in North America, notes that “[m]any universities believe that the remaining [IRS] private use regulations are overly restrictive” and “[limit] their ability to conduct certain cooperative research.” Similarly, the website of the Carnegie Mellon University Office of Sponsored Programs warns:

“While colleges and universities have lobbied the Internal Revenue Service to reconsider its position with respect to sponsored research in bond financed facilities, they have not, as yet, been successful. Consequently, if the University does not receive fair market royalties from the sponsors of sponsored research, it risks having its tax-exempt bonds become taxable, with all of the concomitant consequences.”

At a 2013 hearing on “Improving Technology Transfer at Universities, Research Institute and National Laboratories” before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology, several university witnesses and members of Congress commented on the complications that federal rules present for cooperative research conducted by universities working in partnership with corporations.

In 2014, Congress introduced H.R. 5829 to amend the Internal Revenue Code to provide an exception from the “business use” test for certain public-private research arrangements, but it did not pass as a stand-alone bill.

In June 2021, the American Council of Education and Association of American Universities released a letter to Congress on behalf of over 20 higher education organizations asking Congress to modernize rules on tax exempt bond financing.

Overly restrictive federal rules may hamstring bipartisan efforts by the new administration and Congress to accelerate tech commercialization and enhance U.S. competitiveness in science and technology (S&T). The recent U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, passed by the Senate, for instance, aims to support public-private partnerships, cross-sectoral innovation hubs, and other multistakeholder initiatives in priority S&T areas. But such initiatives may run afoul of rules on facilities financed by tax-exempt bonds…unless reforms are adopted.

Plan of Action

The administration should implement the following two reforms to clarify and update rules governing use of facilities financed by tax-exempt bonds:

1. Eliminate the requirement that universities must retain ownership to all IP generated in university-owned facilities financed by tax-exempt bonds. Instead, universities and corporations should be allowed to negotiate their own terms of IP ownership before entering a research partnership.
2. Broaden applicability of IRS safe-harbor provisions. IRS revenue procedures include safe-harbor provisions that exempt “basic research agreements” from restrictions on private business use. The IRS defines basic research as “any original investigation for the advancement of scientific knowledge not having a specific commercial objective.” This definition is too narrow. But especially today, the lines between “basic” and applied research are blurry — and virtually nonexistent when it comes to cutting-edge fields such as digitalization, biosciences, and quantum computing. The IRS should broaden the applicability of its safe-harbor provisions to include all research activities, not just ‘basic research’.

Together, these reforms would support new public-private initiatives by the federal government (such the research hubs funded under the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act); help emerging research universities (including minority-serving institutions such as historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and Hispanic-serving institutions (HSIs)) grow their profiles and better compete for talent and resources; and repatriate corporate research to the United States. Moreover — since other countries do not have similarly onerous restrictions on research activities conducted in facilities financed with tax-exempt bonds — these reforms are needed for the U.S. tech economy to remain competitive on an international scale.

These reforms require changes to tax laws, but do not require a direct outlay of federal appropriations. Reforms could be implemented as part of several tech-commercialization legislative packages expected to be considered by this Congress, including the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act or the proposed US Infrastructure bill.

Conclusion

As the Congress and the Administration explore ways to make the U.S. more technologically competitive, ensuring robust university-industry partnerships should be a key factor in any strategy. Reforming the current rules concerning corporate research performed in university facilities needs to be considered, given that the IRS rules have not been updated in over 30 years. The debate over the infrastructure bill or other competitiveness initiatives provides such an opportunity to make these reforms. Now is the time.

Summary

Small to medium-sized manufacturing (SMM) companies are the backbone of the U.S. industrial base. However, they do not have the financial or technical resources needed to protect themselves from cyberthreats such as computer hacking, embedded malicious software, and “internet of things” sensors sending sensitive information to foreign counties. These cyberthreats can cause huge damage to the U.S. economy and national security. With relatively limited investment, cybercriminals can disrupt critical supply chains, damage key sectors, and delete or corrupt important information resources.

The Biden-Harris administration should address these threats through a government-industry partnership that uses “wargaming” analyses — i.e., virtual techniques to model and assess threats — to evaluate manufacturing cyberthreats and test strategies for ensuring supply-chain cybersecurity. As part of this partnership, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) should implement a pilot program to spread robust and scalable cybersecurity best practices throughout manufacturing-based supply chains. Coordinating the resources and expertise of other federal agencies — including the Nuclear Security Enterprise (NSE), the Department of Defense (DOD) Digital Manufacturing Institute (MxD), the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP), and the DOD Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) program — with the resources and expertise of external entities (e.g., academic institutions) will enable the administration to become more proactive in anticipating and neutralizing cyberthreats, thus enhancing the stability and security of U.S. manufacturing supply chains.

Summary

To bring nationwide access to voter tools, the Biden-Harris administration should direct the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to establish a standard application programming interface (API) for election administration systems.

Our democracy is most representative when the greatest number of Americans vote, but access is hindered by manual, form-based operations that make it difficult for citizens to register to vote or access a ballot. As Americans faced a global pandemic and an overwhelmed postal service, the 2020 election amplified the importance of digital tools for voters to register, apply for absentee ballots, and track their ballot status. It also highlighted the deficiencies in (or lack of) these capabilities from locality to locality. Further, state legislatures have begun passing sweeping voter suppression measures that further limit ballot access.

With the next federal election rapidly approaching in 2022, the time to take steps at the federal level to expand voting access is now. While proposed legislation would mandate making these functions available online, without incentives or standards, these tools would remain available only on local government websites, which suffer from discoverability and usability hurdles. Creating a standard API for election administration systems will enable civic groups and other outside organizations to create consistent, discoverable and innovative nationwide voter tools that interoperate directly with local voter rolls, resulting in a more participatory electorate and a stronger, more representative democracy.

The Biden administration can respond to the rise in disinformation campaigns and ensure the long-term viability of American democracy by championing an expanded Corporation for Public Broadcasting to transform, revive, and create local public service newsrooms around the country.

Local newsrooms play key roles in a democracy: informing communities, helping set the agenda for local governments, grounding national debates in local context, and contributing to local economies; so it is deeply troubling that the market for local journalism is failing in the United States. Lack of access to credible, localized information makes it harder for communities to make decisions, hampers emergency response, and creates fertile ground for disinformation and conspiracy theories. There is significant, necessary activity in the academic, philanthropic, and journalism sectors to study and document the hollowing out of local news and sustain, revive, and transform the landscape for local journalism. But the scope of the problem is too big to be solely addressed privately. Maintaining local journalism requires treating it as a public good, with the scale of investment that the federal government is best positioned to provide.

The United States has shown that it can meet the opportunities and challenges of a changing information landscape. In the 1960s, Congress established the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), creating a successful and valuable public media system in response to the growth of widely available corporate radio and TV. But CPB’s purview hasn’t changed much since then. Given the challenges of today’s information landscape, it is time to reimagine and grow CPB.

The Biden administration should work with Congress to revitalize local journalism in the United States by:

1. Passing legislation to evolve the CPB into an expanded Corporation for Public Media. CPB’s current mandate is to fund and support broadcast public media. An expanded Corporation for Public Media would continue to support broadcast public media while additionally supporting local, nonprofit, public-service-oriented outlets delivering informational content to meet community needs through digital, print, or other mediums.
2. Doubling CPB’s annual federal budget allocation, from $445 to $890 million, to fund greater investment in local news and digital innovation. The local news landscape is the subject of significant interest from philanthropies, industry, communities, and individuals. Increased federal funding for local, nonprofit, and public-service-oriented news outlets could stimulate follow-on investment from outside of government.

Challenge and Opportunity

Information systems are fracturing and shifting in the United States and globally. Over the past 20 years, the Internet disrupted news business models and the national news industry consolidated; both shifts have contributed to the reduction of local news coverage. American newsrooms have lost almost a quarter of their staff since 2008. Half of all U.S. counties have only one newspaper or information equivalent, and many counties have no local information source. The media advocacy group Free Press estimates that the national “reporting gap”, which they define as the wages of the roughly 15,000 reporting roles lost since the peak of journalism in 2005, stands at roughly $1 billion a year.

The depletion of reputable local newsrooms creates an information landscape ripe for manipulation. In particular, the shrinking of local newsrooms can exacerbate the risk of “data voids”, when good information is not available via online search and instead users find “falsehoods, misinformation, or disinformation”. In 2019, the Tow Center at the Columbia Journalism School documented 450 websites masquerading as local news outlets, with titles like the East Michigan News, Hickory Sun, and Grand Canyon Times But instead of publishing genuine journalism, these sites were distributing algorithmically generated, hyperpartisan, locally tailored disinformation. The growing popularity of social media as news sources or conduits to news sources — more than half of American adults today get at least some news from social media — compounds the problem by making it easier for disinformation to spread.

Studies show that the erosion of local journalism has negative impacts on local governance and democracy, including increased voter polarization, decreased accountability for elected officials to their communities, and decreased competition in local elections. Disinformation narratives that take root in the information vacuum left behind when local news outlets fold often disproportionately target and impact marginalized people and people of color. Erosion of local journalism also threatens public safety. Without access to credible and timely local reporting, communities are at greater risk during emergencies and natural disasters. In the fall of 2020, for instance, emergency response to wildfires threatening communities in Oregon was hampered by the spread of inaccurate information on social media. These problems will only become more pronounced if the market for local journalism continues to shrink.

These are urgent challenges and the enormity of them can make them feel intractable. Fortunately, history presents a path forward. By the 1960s, with the rise of widely available corporate TV and radio, the national information landscape had changed dramatically. At the time, the federal government recognized the need to reduce the potential harms and meet the opportunities that these information systems presented. In particular, then-Chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Newton Minow called for more educational and public-interest programming, which the private TV market wasn’t producing.18 Congress responded by passing the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967, creating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). CPB is a private nonprofit responsible for funding public radio and television stations and public-interest programming. (Critically, CPB itself does not produce content.) CPB has a mandate to champion diversity and excellence in programming, serve all American communities, ensure local ownership and independent operation of stations, and shield stations from the possibility of political interference. Soon after its creation, CPB established the independent entities of the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).

CPB, PBS, NPR, and local affiliate stations collectively developed into the national public media system we know today. Public media is explicitly designed to fill gaps not addressed by the private market in educational, youth, arts, current events, and local news programming, and to serve all communities, including populations frequently overlooked by the private sector. While not perfect, CPB has largely succeeded in both objectives when it comes to broadcast media. CPB supports¹ about 1,500 public television and radio broadcasters, many of which produce and distribute local news in addition to national news. CPB funds much-needed regional collaborations that have allowed public broadcasters to combine resources, increase reporting capacity, and cover relevant regional and localized topics, like the opioid crisis in Appalachia and across the Midwest. CPB also provides critical — though, currently too little — funding to broadcast public media for historically underserved communities, including Black, Hispanic, and Native communities.

Public media and CPB’s funding and support is a consistent bright spot for the struggling journalism industry.25 More than 2,000 American newspapers closed in the past 15 years, but NPR affiliates added 1,000 local part- and full-time journalist positions from 2011–2018 (though these data are pre-pandemic).26 Trust in public media like PBS remains high compared to other institutions; and local news is more trusted than national news.27,28 There is clear potential for CPB to revive and transform the local news landscape: it can help to develop community trust, strengthen democratic values, and defend against disinformation at a time when all three outcomes are critical.

Unfortunately, the rapid decline of local journalism nationwide has created information gaps that CPB — an institution that has remained largely unchanged since its founding more than 50 years ago — does not have the capacity to fill. Because its public service mandate still applies only to broadcasters, CPB is unable to fund stand-alone digital news sites. The result is a dearth of public-interest newsrooms with the skills and infrastructure to connect with their audiences online and provide good journalism without a paywall. CPB also simply lacks sufficient funding to rebuild local journalism at the pace and scope needed. Far too many people in the United States — especially members of rural and historically underserved communities — live in a “news desert”, without access to any credible local journalism at all.²

The time is ripe to reimagine and expand CPB. Congress has recently demonstrated bipartisan willingness to invest in local journalism and public media. Both major COVID-19 relief packages included supplemental funding for CPB. The American Rescue Act and the CARES Act provided $250 million and $75 million, respectively, in emergency stabilization funds for public media. Funds were prioritized for small, rural, and minority-oriented public-media stations.30 As part of the American Rescue Plan, smaller news outlets were newly and specifically made eligible for relief funds—a measure that built on the Local News and Emergency Information Act of 2020 previously introduced by Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Representative David Cicilline (D-RI) and supported by a bipartisan group. Numerous additional bills have been proposed to address specific pieces of the local news crisis. Most recently, Senators Michael Bennet (D-CO), Amy Klobuchar (D-MI), and Brian Schatz (D-HI), along with Representative Marc Veasy (DTX) reintroduced the Future of Local News Commission Act, calling for a commission “to study the state of local journalism and offer recommendations to Congress on the actions it can take to support local news organizations”.

These legislative efforts recognize that while inspirational work to revitalize local news is being done across sectors, only the federal government can bring the level of scale, ambition, and funding needed to adequately address the challenges laid out above. Reimagining and expanding CPB into an institution capable of bolstering the local news ecosystem is necessary and possible; yet it will not be easy and would bring risks. The United States is amid a politically uncertain, difficult, and even violent time, with a rapid, continued fracturing of shared understanding. Given how the public media system has come under attack in the “culture wars” over the decades, many champions of public media are understandably wary of considering any changes to the CPB and public media institutions and initiatives. But we cannot afford to continue avoiding the issue. Our country needs a robust network of local public media outlets as part of a comprehensive strategy to decrease blind partisanship and focus national dialogues on facts. Policymakers should be willing to go to bat to expand and modernize the vision of a national public media system first laid out more than fifty years ago.

Plan of Action

The Biden administration should work with Congress to reimagine CPB as the Corporation for Public Media: an institution with the expanded funding and purview needed to meet the information challenges of today, combat the rise of disinformation, and strengthen community ties and democratic values at the local level. Recommended steps towards this vision are detailed below.

Recommendation 1. Expand CPB’s Purview to Support and Fund Local, Nonprofit, Public Service Newsrooms.

Congress should pass legislation to reestablish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) as the Corporation for Public Media (CPM), expanding the Corporation’s purview from solely supporting broadcast outlets to additionally supporting local, nonprofit newsrooms of all types (digital, print, broadcast).

The expanded CPM would retain all elements of the CPB’s mandate, including “ensuring universal access to non-commercial, high-quality content and telecommunications services that are commercial free and free of charge,” with a particular emphasis on ensuring access in rural, small town, and urban communities across the country. Additionally, CPB “strives to support diverse programs and services that inform, educate, enlighten and enrich the public”, especially addressing the needs of underserved audiences, children, and minorities.

Legislation expanding the CPB into the CPM must include criteria that local, nonprofit, public-service newsrooms would need to meet to be considered “public media” and become eligible for federal funding and support. Broadly, local, nonprofit newsrooms should mean nonprofit or noncommercial newsrooms that cover a region, state, county, city, neighborhood, or specific community; it would not include individual reporters, bloggers, documentarians, etc. Currently, CPB relies on FCC broadcasting licenses to determine which stations might be eligible to be considered public broadcasters. The Public Broadcasting Act lays out additional eligibility requirements, including an active community advisory board and regularly filed reports on station activities and spending. Congress should build on these existing requirements when developing eligibility criteria for CPM funding and support.

In designing eligibility criteria, Congress could also draw inspiration from the nonprofit Civic Information Consortium (CIC) being piloted in New Jersey. The CIC is a partnership between higher education institutions and newsrooms in the state to strengthen local news coverage and civic engagement, seeded with an initial $500,000 in funding. The CPM could require that to be eligible for CPM funding, nonprofit public-service newsrooms must partner with local, accredited universities.39 Requiring that an established external institution be involved in local news endeavors selected for funding would (i) decrease risks of investing in new and untested newsrooms, (ii) leverage federal investment by bringing external capabilities to bear, and (iii) increase the impact of federal funding by creating job training and development opportunities for local students and workers. Though, of course, this model also brings its own risks, potentially putting unwelcome pressure on universities to act as public media and journalism gatekeepers.

An expanded CPM would financially support broadcast, digital, and print outlets at the local and national levels. Once eligibility criteria are established, clear procedures would need to be established for funding allocation and prioritization (see next section for recommended prioritizations). For instance, procedures should explain how factors such as demonstrated need and community referrals will factor into funding decisions. Procedures should also ensure that funding is prioritized towards local newsrooms that serve communities in “news deserts”, or places at risk of becoming news deserts, and historically underserved communities, including Black, Hispanic, Native, and rural communities.

Congress could consider tasking the proposed Future of Local News Act commission with digging deeper into how CPB could be evolved into the CPM in a way that best positions it to address the disinformation and local news crises. The commission could also advise on how to avoid two key risks associated with such an evolution. The first is the perpetual risk of government interference in public media, which CPB’s institutional design and norms have historically guarded against. (For example, there are no content or viewpoint restrictions on public media today—and there should not be in the future.) Second, expanding CPB’s mandate to include broadly funding local, nonprofit newsrooms would create a new risk that disinformation or propaganda sites, operating without journalistic practices, could masquerade as genuine news sites to apply for CPM funding. It will be critical to design against both of these risks. One of the most important factors in CPB’s success is its ethos of public service and the resulting positive norms; these norms and its institutional design are a large part of what makes CPB a good institutional candidate to expand. In designing the new CPM, these norms should be intentionally drawn on and renewed for the digital age.

Numerous digital outlets would likely meet reasonable eligibility criteria. One recent highlight in the journalism landscape is the emergence of many nonprofit digital outlets, including almost 300 affiliated with the Institute for Nonprofit News. (These sites certainly have not made up for the massive numbers of journalism jobs and outlets lost over the past two decades.) There has also been an increase in public media mergers, where previously for-profit digital sites have merged with public media broadcasters to create mixed-media nonprofit journalistic entities. As part of legislation expanding the CPB into the CPM, Congress should make it easier for public media mergers to take place and easier for for-profit newspapers and sites to transition to nonprofit status, as the Rebuild Local News Coalition has proposed.

Recommendation 2. Double CPB’s Yearly Appropriation from $445 to $890 million.

Whether or not CPB is evolved into CPM, Congress should (i) double (at minimum) CPB’s next yearly appropriation from $445 to $890 million, and (ii) appropriate CPB’s funding for the next ten years up front. The first action is needed to give CPB the resources it needs to respond to the local news and disinformation crises at the necessary scale, and the second is needed to ensure that local newsrooms are funded over a time horizon long enough to establish themselves, develop relationships with their communities, and attract external revenue streams (e.g., through philanthropy, pledge drives, or other models). The CPB’s current appropriation is sufficient to fund some percentage of station operational and programming costs at roughly 1,500 stations nationwide. This is not enough. Given that Free Press estimates the national “reporting gap” as roughly $1 billion a year, CPB’s annual budget appropriation needs to be at least doubled. Such increased funding would dramatically improve the local news and public media landscape, allowing newsrooms to increase local coverage and pay for the digital infrastructure needed to better meet audiences where they are—online. The budget increase could be made part of the infrastructure package under Congressional negotiation, funded by the Biden administration’s proposed corporate tax increases, or separately funded through corporate tax increases on the technology sector.

The additional appropriation should be allocated in two streams. The first funding stream (75% of the additional appropriation, or $667.5 million) should specifically support local public-service journalism. If Free Press’s estimates of the reporting gap are accurate, this stream might be able to recover 75% of the journalism jobs (somewhere in the range of 10,000 to 11,000 jobs) lost since the industry’s decline began in earnest—a huge and necessary increase in coverage. Initial priority for this funding should go to local journalism outlets in communities that have already become “news deserts”. Secondary priority should go to outlets in communities that are at risk of becoming news deserts and in communities that have been historically underserved by media, including Black, Hispanic, Native, and rural communities. Larger, well-funded public media stations and outlets should still receive some funding from this stream (particularly given their role in surfacing local issues to national audiences), but with less of a priority focus. This funding stream should be distributed through a structured formula — similar to CPB’s funding formulas for public broadcasting stations — that ensures these priorities, protects news coverage from government interference, and ensures high-quality news.

The second funding stream (25% of additional appropriation, or $222.5 million) should support digital innovation for newsrooms. This funding stream would help local, nonprofit newsrooms build the infrastructure needed to thrive in the digital age. Public media aims to be accessible and meet audiences where they are. Today, that is often online. Though the digital news space is dominated by social media and large tech companies, public media broadcasters are figuring out how to deliver credible, locally relevant reporting in digital formats. NPR, for instance, has successfully digitally innovated with platforms like NPR One. But more needs to be done to expand the digital presence of public media. CPB should structure this funding stream as a prize challenge or other competitive funding model to encourage further digital innovation.

Finally, the overall additional appropriation should be used as an opportunity to encourage follow-on investment in local news, by philanthropies, individuals, and the private sector. There is significant interest across the board in revitalizing American local news. The attention that comes with a centralized, federally sponsored effort to reimagine and expand local public media can help drive additional resources and innovation to places where they are most needed. For instance, philanthropies might offer private matches for government investment in local news. Such an initiative could draw inspiration from the existing and successful NewsMatch program, a funding campaign where individuals donate to a nonprofit newsroom and their donation is matched by funders and companies.

Conclusion

Local news is foundational to democracy and the flourishing of communities. Yet with the rise of the Internet and social media companies, the market for local news is failing. There is significant activity in the journalistic, philanthropic, and academic sectors to sustain, revive, and transform the local news landscape. But these efforts can’t succeed alone. Maintaining local journalism as a public good requires the scale of investment that only the federal government can bring.

In 1967, our nation rose to meet a different moment of disruption in the information environment, creating public media broadcasting through the Public Broadcasting Act. Today, there is a similar need for the Biden administration, Congress, and CPB to reimagine public media for the digital age. They should champion an expanded Corporation for Public Media to better meet communities’ information needs; counter the rising tide of disinformation; and transform, revive, and create local, public-service newsrooms around the country.

Summary

Online disinformation continues to evolve and threaten national security, federal elections, public health, and other critical U.S. sectors. Yet the federal government lacks access to data and computational power needed to study disinformation at scale. Those with the greatest capacity to study disinformation at scale are large technology companies (e.g., Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), which biases much research and limits federal capacity to address disinformation.

To address this problem, we propose that the Department of Defense (DOD) fund a one-year pilot of a National Cloud for Disinformation Research (NCDR). The NCDR would securely house disinformation data and provide computational power needed for the federal government and its partners to study disinformation. The NCDR should be managed by a governance team led by Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) already serving the DOD. The FFRDC Governance Team will manage (i) which stakeholders can access the Cloud, (ii) coordinate sharing of data and computational resources among stakeholders, and (iii) motivate participation from diverse stakeholders (including industry; academia; federal, state, and local government, and non-governmental organizations).

A National Cloud for Disinformation Research will help the Biden-Harris administration fulfill its campaign promise to reposition the United States as a leader of the democratic world. The NCDR will benefit the federal government by providing access to data and computational resources needed to combat the threats and harms of disinformation. Our nation needs a National Cloud for Disinformation Research to foresee future disinformation attacks and safeguard our democracy in turbulent times.

The federal lab system is an enormous, $50 billion-plus enterprise of internal research and development (R&D) across the United States. As governments around the world, including China, pour billions of dollars into advanced technologies, it is imperative that we use our nation’s federal lab ecosystem as effectively as possible.

However, because federal labs have varying legal authorities, missions, and cultures, their records of local economic engagement and technology commercialization vary considerably. Universities, by contrast, have demonstrated a strong record of supporting regional innovation ecosystems through use of place (creating incubators, research parks, and adjacent innovation districts), talent (allowing university researchers to be involved with private-sector technology under approved and managed relationships), and innovation (using intermediary university foundations to take on business aspects of technology commercialization).

The Federal Authority for Science, Technology, Entrepreneurship, and Research (FASTER) Federal Labs Act will make it possible for all federal labs to use the tried-and-true tools that universities use for economic engagement and technology commercialization. The FASTER Federal Labs Act will do this by: (i) allowing surplus federal land to be used for public-private partnership facilities, (ii) creating clearer pathways for federal researchers to work with startup companies, and (iii) authorizing a federally charted tech-transfer organization based on models established at leading research universities. The FASTER Federal Labs Act will not require significant outlay of federal appropriations as many of its provisions simply give federal labs greater discretion over deployment of existing resources. The Act can be implemented relatively easily as an add-on to legislation expected to be considered by this Congress.

Summary

Algorithmic governance concerns are critical for US foreign policy in the 21st century as they relate intimately to the relationship between governments and their citizens – the very fabric of the world’s societies. The United States should strategically invest resources into the principal multilateral forums in which digital technology regulation is currently under discussion. In partnership with like-minded governments and international organizations, the Biden-Harris Administration should set clear priorities championing a collective digital rights agenda that considers the impact of commercial algorithms and algorithmic decision-making on both American citizens and technology consumers around the world.

These investments would build substantially upon initial forays into national AI regulatory policy advanced by the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) established by Congress in August 2018 and the Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence issued in January 2019. Both policy moves featured broad approaches focused on national security and competitiveness, without seriously engaging the complex and context-specific problems of international governance that must be squarely addressed if the United States is to develop a coherent approach to AI regulation.

We suggest the federal government pay special attention to impacts on people living in regions outside the geographic focus of the most prominent regulatory deliberations today – which occur almost exclusively in Washington and the developed world. Such an inclusive, global approach to digital policymaking will increase the potential for the United States to bring the world along in efforts to develop meaningful, consumer-first internet policy that addresses the economic and social factors driving digital disparities. At a time when the risk of a global “splinternet” increasingly looms, this clarified focus will help establish effective rules toward which jurisdictions around the world can converge under U.S. leadership.