Enabling Federal Agencies to Tackle Complex Problems with the Help of Makers-In-Residence
Summary
Across the U.S., there are approximately 2,000 makerspaces and Fab Labs where makers with a broad and diverse set of skills have developed innovative approaches to solving pressing problems in their communities. The next administration should implement a Maker-In-Residence (MIR) fellowship program that allows federal agencies to leverage the incredible skills and knowledge of the American maker community to address complex problems specific to their missions.
Implementation of the MIR fellowship program would enable American makers and innovators to:
- Contribute their knowledge and unique and diverse skill sets to fulfilling the missions of federal agencies while learning first-hand about federal policy and the policymaking process
- Utilize their learnings to solve complex societal problems and affect policy change in their local communities.
The research community lacks strategies to incentivize collaboration on high-quality data acquisition and sharing. The government should fund collaborative roadmapping, certification, collection, and sharing of large, high-quality datasets in life science.
In anticipation of future known and unknown health security threats, including new pandemics, biothreats, and climate-related health emergencies, our answers need to be much faster, cheaper, and less disruptive to other operations.
To unlock the full potential of artificial intelligence within the Department of Health and Human Services, an AI Corps should be established, embedding specialized AI experts within each of the department’s 10 agencies.
The U.S. government should establish a public-private National Exposome Project (NEP) to generate benchmark human exposure levels for the ~80,000 chemicals to which Americans are regularly exposed.