Summary

Addressing inequality, closing achievement gaps, and tackling opportunity gaps in schools requires a highly effective educator in every classroom, a diversified teacher workforce, and an implementation of culturally responsive policies and practices. The 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires State Education Agencies (SEA) to identify and close gaps in equitable access to effective teachers but does not offer specific definitions about what constitutes teacher effectiveness. There is an opportunity to build on state equity plans and collaboratively work with districts, schools, educator preparation programs, and other stakeholders to close the gap in access to effective educators, diversify the workforce, and ensure that the training of educators includes a focus on culturally proficient practices.

The homework gap—which refers to the divide between students who have home access to the technology tools necessary for education versus those without—has existed for decades.

The next administration should maximize the use of all available policy tools to close the homework gap and keep it closed. First, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should update the existing E-rate program to allow schools to ensure home access to broadband for every student and teacher (Pre-K to Grade 12). Second, the FCC, in coordination with the Department of Education, should launch a one-to-one device program for students and teachers (Pre-K to Grade 12). Third, the FCC should incentivize the deployment of “future-proof” networks that are capable of at least 100/100 mbps to meet the needs of distance learning. Fourth and finally, the FCC should provide schools and states clear guidance on the key data needed to assess their homework gap and include this data in a public facing dashboard for broader stakeholder analysis.

Challenge and Opportunity

The homework gap—which refers to the divide between students who have home access to the technology tools necessary for education versus those without—has existed for decades.

At the start of the pandemic, 55 million students were sent home due to school closures and school districts initiated large-scale distance learning efforts. However, an estimated 16 million students and 400,000 teachers lacked access to an adequate home broadband connection or device needed to effectively engage in distance learning. Recent reports find that the homework gap disproportionately impacts lower-income and minority students. For these students in the homework gap, some schools—striving to continue any form of education—began to offer paper packets. Others opted to close early for the year, understanding that if they proceeded with a distance learning program without addressing the homework gap, they would further exacerbate existing inequities in education. The pandemic has forced our nation to see the consequences of the homework gap in real time. Educational and economic experts connect the disruption in access to education to learning loss, which negatively impacts childrens’ long-term economic well-being and the U.S. economy as a whole. Of course, it is worth underlining the fact that a pandemic is not the only reason schools have been closed in recent years as the effects of climate change, including extreme heat, wildfires, flooding, hurricanes, and tornadoes, have all caused extended disruptions to in-school instruction, and will continue to in the future. It is incumbent on policymakers to support school efforts to nimbly shift to distance learning when needed.

While policymakers have made progress on this issue by focusing on connecting and resourcing anchor institutions, such as schools, libraries and other community-based organizations, efforts to date have largely focused on providing students in the homework gap with an alternative public resource outside of the home. While some of these outside supports have their own benefits (e.g. trained staff, access to printers) they force students in need of access to remain outside of the home after school hours. For a family with limited time and resources, shuttling to and from various public computing centers (e.g. libraries, community-based organizations) cuts into work hours and requires additional funds for transportation. Even when these public resources are known to be available, teachers avoid assigning homework that may require heavy use of the internet because of the lack of home access to broadband for students. With years of institutional connectivity investments in place, anchor institutions are well positioned to help close the homework gap at home for teachers and students alike, once and for all.

In Congress, several bills (See HEROES Act and Emergency Educational Connections Act) have been introduced to fund the homework gap and to be administered through the FCC’s E-rate program, indicating that significant support exists to bolster the FCC’s current commitment to ensure connectivity for schools also extends to students with both funding and necessary updates to relevant statutes.

Prioritizing the resilient delivery of education and supporting equitable access to education by closing the homework gap helps to shelter our nation’s students in times of crisis and helps to ensure that all students have an opportunity to thrive when times are calm.

Plan of Action

E-rate

The FCC should update the existing E-rate program to clarify that the program will support schools to ensure home access to broadband for every student and teacher (Pre-K to Grade 12). The E-rate program is well known to schools, libraries and community-based organizations who are already working to address the homework gap. Since the start of the pandemic, states and schools have quickly built programs to try to cover the homework gap for as many students as possible. Without reliable funding these initiatives are at risk of ending, pushing students back into the homework gap. Ensuring reliable funding depends both on Congress doing its part to legislate and commit necessary funds, as well as the FCC to modernize the E-rate program to better serve the educational needs of students and robustly support home broadband access.

Because the FCC has E-Rate as an existing program that schools already work with on connectivity, expanding E-rate to also coordinate funding for student devices is efficient, schoolfriendly, and common-sense policy. Separating the device component of the homework gap to a new program would slow down delivery of support and require schools to navigate additional and a potentially new administrative process. The FCC should collaborate with Department of Education (ED) and Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) to ensure that both the device and connectivity components of a support program meet the needs of students and educators.

Connectivity

The FCC should

• Allow schools to use E-rate funded networks to support innovative programs to deliver home broadband access to students.
• Allow E-rate funds to pay for home broadband subscriptions for students.
• Allow for consortia and bulk purchasing.
• Extend rules around pricing transparency to funds used for home broadband subscription for students and publish pricing information on the FCC website.

Devices

The FCC, in coordination with ED and BIE, should launch a one-to-one device program to

• Ensure access to developmentally appropriate devices for students and teachers (Pre-K to Grade 12), as well as supplying the kind of equipment necessary for high quality STEM learning opportunities and equitable STEM education broadly.
• Develop a joint taskforce with Department of Commerce, ED, and BIE to address supply chain constraints for devices, ensure that the educational market is prioritized, require transparency in pricing and publish pricing information on the FCC website

Infrastructure Upgrades and Deployment

The FCC should incentivize deployment of “future-proof” networks—capable of at least 100/100 mbps— that can meet the needs of distance learning. Distance learning efforts since March have revealed that even if the cost of a monthly broadband subscription could be addressed, many students still lack access to a broadband service capable of delivering a synchronous distance learning program (at least 200/10 mbps). The FCC should

• Ensure that supported networks are able to deliver synchronous distance learning programs where the FCC provides funding for broadband infrastructure deployment.
• Prioritize infrastructure upgrades and deployment in areas that have broadband service of 25/25 mbps or less. Review rules, regulations and guidance from the FCC to encourage community broadband projects and other forms of public/private partnerships to apply for infrastructure funding.
• Encourage open access of funded infrastructure.

Supporting School-level Assessments

To ensure these programs continue to serve schools and students effectively, the FCC should provide schools and states clear guidance on the key data needed to assess the current state of the “Homework Gap” and include this data in a public facing dashboard for broader stakeholder analysis. Schools across the country have already begun to assess the homework gap in their own districts down to the address level and plan to continue these assessments periodically. The Administration should also encourage these efforts by launching a national homework gap mapping project to assess gaps. The FCC should encourage data collection on

• Broadband service availability
• Broadband service speeds
• Quality of broadband service
• Service providers available
• Needs for IT support (for both students/caregivers and teachers)
• Needs for digital literacy support (for both students/caregivers and teachers)
• Location information (while remaining FERPA compliant)
• Demographic information
• Language(s) primarily spoken

Conclusion

The FCC should modernize and expand its approach to closing the homework gap. Students, parents, and teachers need the federal government to step up and commit to a historic effort to ensure poor Internet access is no longer a systemic barrier in our society. Programs must be expanded or developed to ensure that all students and teachers have continuing support for home access to broadband and devices that meet the current and future demands of distance learning. Federal funds used for the expansion of broadband infrastructure must prioritize communities that lack the ability to adequately support distance learning (25/25 mbps or less) and require that any new deployment not only meet today’s demand for distance learning but also be able to evolve to meet future educational requirements. The FCC has an opportunity to work in partnership with schools, cities, and states to develop a recurring, granular, robust, assessment of the homework gap that would provide current, actionable data to support and encourage efforts to keep the gap closed.

Summary

How can public engagement and transparency at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) be improved? Congress has wrestled with this question repeatedly over the last several years. While Congress should continue to pursue legislative reform, the next FCC Chair can immediately improve transparency and public debate on pending agency actions by adding a second monthly meeting of the FCC Commissioners.

This proposal outlines a series of actions to introduce a second monthly meeting of the FCC Commissioners. During the additional meeting, FCC staff should present on major items that might be brought before the Commission for a vote in the next several months. This forward-looking monthly meeting gives the public information needed to provide meaningful input to the Commission prior to its decision-making. The meeting would also improve the Commissioners’ own ability to respond to policy recommendations.

Summary

The next leadership team of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) must prioritize restoring the agency’s authority to protect consumers and competition in the broadband market. Under the next administration, FCC leadership should quickly commence a proceeding proposing to reclassify broadband as a “telecommunications service” under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. This reclassification puts the FCC on the firmest legal ground to

1. Restore or strengthen the 2015 network neutrality rules that prohibit providers of broadband Internet access from blocking, throttling, or otherwise discriminating against certain Internet traffic
2. Fund broadband through the FCC’s four universal service programs
3. Protect consumers from fraud and privacy violations
4. Promote broadband competition, and
5. Protect public safety.

FCC leadership should simultaneously work with Congress to develop legislation to codify this authority as law, thereby protecting against potential future reversals.

Summary

The Biden-Harris Administration should launch a concerted broadband data-collection and analysis effort to support smart, timely, and informed decision-making by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and other agencies that work on broadband, such as the Rural Utilities Service. Specifically, the FCC should collect (or work with others to collect) comprehensive data on the following eight indicators:

1. Broadband deployment
2. Broadband adoption
3. Broadband performance
4. Competition
5. Pricing
6. Anchor institutions
7. Specialized networks
8. International benchmarks

These data should be centralized on a “broadband data dashboard” to support informed decision-making by the FCC as well as analysis and application by stakeholders in government and industry as well as the general public. The dashboard would also support the FCC in developing and assessing progress towards clear, quantifiable goals for each indicator.

Summary

To better prepare for future public-health emergencies, the next president should establish several high-level COVID Commissions—modeled on the 9/11 Commission—to examine our nation’s response to the 2020 pandemic. One Commission should focus on public health communication and messaging.

The next president should task this Commission with assessing the information about the pandemic: what was made publicly available, how the information affected our societal response, and what should be done to limit the impact of false and dangerously misleading information moving forward.

Summary

Semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) will continue to play an increasingly significant role in society as smart phones, internet-of-things (IoT) devices, artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, 5G communications, and other vastly interconnected technologies redefine many facets of daily life in the United States. The interconnectedness of these technologies presents novel opportunities for adversaries to exploit these systems for financial or strategic gain. The present geopolitical difficulties between China and the US, coupled with supply chain interruptions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic have made concerns about the robustness of the IC supply chain especially germane. In particular, China’s enormous investment in expanding its production capacity of advanced ICs is of grave concern. Against this landscape, there is an exciting opportunity for the next administration to develop a sophisticated American IC security infrastructure by launching a National Secure Electronics Initiative (NSEI). The NSEI will set a goal of achieving levels of security for electronic hardware in defense and commercial sectors at the design, manufacturing, and deployment stages with quantifiable strength comparable to the protections available at the software and data level, such as the Advanced Encryption Standards (AES).

Through NSEI, the next administration will ensure that not only defense, but also municipal and commercial supply chain processes, data, toolsets, key personnel, and facilities are secured against penetration by external threats or subversion by internal threats. The NSEI will integrate defense efforts and advancements with the commercial and municipal sectors by developing a more robust innovation pipeline through investments in early stage research, working across industry, government, and academia to develop a comprehensive set of security metrics, and fully leveraging the resources and expertise of other government agencies beyond those tied to defense. Making the United States a pioneer of such efforts would also represent a significant value add for domestic design and manufacture of electronic devices.

To reach these goals, the federal government should undertake a comprehensive agenda, led by the White House via the NSEI, to greatly expand existing efforts in the secure microelectronics space, such as the DoD Trusted and Assured Microelectronics (T&AM) program, and extend those efforts to better include the commercial and municipal sectors in addition to defense. The NSEI should complement but not depend upon other potential parallel efforts in this space. For example, two pieces of legislation, the CHIPS for America Act and American Foundries Act of 2020, have recommended the expansion of onshore capacity in advanced node ICs. The Semiconductor Industry Association has made similar recommendations and provided estimates for the potential impact of either $20B or $50B worth of federal investment in this space. The technologies developed under the NSEI would improve electronic security regardless of where the devices were manufactured, but would benefit from an expansion in domestic capacity. This is critical because although an increase in US manufacturing of advanced ICs is desirable on its own merits, the security of defense, consumer, and municipal electronics should not hinge on such developments.

Accomplishing the goals outlined below will secure the nation’s place at the forefront of global microelectronics security. The consequences of inaction may lead to more powerful cyber-attacks (e.g. rising attacks on health or financial infrastructure, military hardware subversion by adversarial states) on personal data, infrastructure, or vulnerable defense targets.

Summary

Due to technology’s disruptive force in society and on the labor force, voices representing business and state governments have recently emphasized the need to revisit the social contract among firms, employees, governments, and citizens. This need has only intensified with the COVID-19 pandemic. The economic emergency associated with the pandemic has left 21.5 million workers unemployed and an additional 11.5 million workers with reduced pay to date. Today’s unemployment numbers are far worse than during the 2008 Great Recession. Underscoring the racial disparity seen in this economic crisis, Black and Latinx workers are currently experiencing higher rates of unemployment than white workers.

The next president should immediately sign two Executive Orders (EOs) to address the current crisis in work and the urgent economic emergency that has left Americans evicted, unable to pay bills, make rent, or put food on the table. The first EO would modernize unemployment insurance nationwide by boosting state unemployment insurance programs. The second would establish a U.S. Future of Work Commission tasked with developing a new model of work that addresses the key challenges the Fourth Industrial Revolution presents to American workers today.

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

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

Challenge and Opportunity 

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

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

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

Plan of Action

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

• First, an open-source approach would enable the entire scientific community to work together on challenges that are difficult for any single entity to solve (in keeping with the open-source mantra in software that “with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow”).
• Second, an open-source approach would draw on the sum total of human knowledge, without being constrained by discipline-specific technical expertise, or being limited to knowledge with high profit potential.
• Third, an open-source approach would focus on creating universally accessible medicines and vaccines with substantial public-health benefits, even when those medicines and vaccines do not generate substantial revenue streams.
• Fourth, an open-source approach would create knowledge accessible to all, and accelerate the advance of science.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summary

Tens of thousands of students experience violence in schools in the form of corporal punishment. Nineteen states continue to allow for corporal punishment as a means of disciplining students in public schools. And public schools in nine states use corporal punishment as a disciplinary strategy for preschool-aged children. There is no federal law or regulation governing the practice, however the federal government should be clear that it does not condone it.

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

Challenge and Opportunity

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

• Lack of strong financial incentives for states and localities to use formula funding for data, analytics, evaluation, and adoption of evidence-based approaches.
• Lack of clarity about ways that existing program funds may be used to build data, analytics and evaluation capacity.
• Confusion about how to share and analyze data while meeting FERPA privacy requirements.
• An overemphasis on reporting compliance measures rather than outcomes and evaluation findings that would help programs improve. Many of these impediments could be addressed through ED regulatory and administrative reforms that do not require legislation. These reforms would help address systemic weaknesses and equity issues in state and local education systems that have been amplified by the COVID19 pandemic.

Plan of Action

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

Regulatory reforms. ED should revise EDGAR provisions to:

• Require, as a condition of funding, that grantees use data and analytics to answer key questions that can improve program effectiveness. This common-sense change to both formula and competitive grants is long overdue, since no organization or program can function effectively without using data to guide decisions.
• Clarify that grantees with formula and competitive grants may use program funds (beyond those included in indirect costs) to strengthen their data, analytics, and evaluation capacity. This would include capacity to integrate and analyze education and non-education data to improve cross-program coordination that could lead to better student outcomes. This is consistent with GAO’s “necessary expense rule”, which clarifies that statutes need not specify all allowable uses of funds.
• Modify the “Strategy to Scale” selection criteria for competitive grants to award extra points to projects designed to scale up evidence-based interventions that will leverage formula grant funding (e.g., Title I, CTE), or state and local funding, above the minimum required by statute (e.g., 10 percent for EIR). This change would (1) increase adoption of effective interventions that cannot reach scale using competitive grant funds alone; and (2) increase the share of ED formula funding that supports evidence-based strategies. (There is precedent for this model, which was previously used in HHS’ 2008 home visiting initiative.)

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

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

• additional guidance and examples on how individual level data can be shared and integrated with non-education data while meeting FERPA requirements;
• case studies on how to answer key questions with data analytics and evaluation;
• open-source technology solutions that can be deployed at the state and local level, including data-linkage platforms to link data across programs;
• ways to build staff data and technology skills;
• cost-allocation tools, vetted with auditors, for building shared data and analytics capacity with multiple funding streams; and
• strategies to reduce bias and promote equity in data analytics.

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

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

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

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

Challenge and Opportunity

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

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

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

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

Plan of Action

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

Funding

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

Logistics

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

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

Mission Selection

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

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

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

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