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In the summer of 1862, at the height of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which set aside federal land for new colleges to “promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.” Two months earlier, President Lincoln created the United States Department of Agriculture. Less than a year later, while Union and Confederate forces were still fighting fiercely, he signed legislation establishing the National Academies of Science.
Even during the most difficult political and fiscal times, the U.S. government has found ways to advance the creation and dissemination of knowledge. That commitment to science and engineering helped the allies win World War II and forged an enduring partnership between the federal government and universities. Public support for science in the U.S. really took off post-war, with the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA, along with increased defense research and development funding and a vast expansion of the National Institutes of Health. Lofted by that investment, the U.S. led international science by almost every metric during the second half of the 20th century.
Now America’s scientific standing is being put through a series of wrenching tests. Whoever wins the upcoming presidential election will have to make tough decisions about how to maintain scientific leadership in an increasingly competitive global environment. Tight budgets and visa restrictions have been further eroding the U.S. position. In addition, the next president will face intense pressure to protect domestic research and development against foreign competition—even as some of those competitors, especially China, have been significantly boosting their investments in science.
Although the U.S. might never return to the kind of scientific preeminence it had during the Cold War, we need not slide into full decline or self-destructive isolation. With the right leadership, we can chart a smart course of international engagement, openness, immigration, and strategic research funding that will expand our knowledge, enrich our economy, and ensure our national defense. If we can break through partisan blocks and us-versus-them formulations that hold us back, the U.S. has an inspiring future as a beacon of global innovation.
Federal budget limits will seriously restrict the next administration’s ability to make critical investment in U.S. scientific research and development. Despite considerable discussion from Congress about the need to increase federal support for R&D, the final 2024 funding agreement actually cut $800 million from the NSF’s budget, one of the largest single-year reductions in the agency’s history. As a share of gross domestic product, federal funding provided by the NSF, Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and National Institute of Standards and Technology, has fallen to its lowest levels since 1997. And the spending caps set by Congress under the Fiscal Responsibility Act leave little room to increase science investment in 2025.
One of the most urgent areas of need is funding to keep up with rapid advances in the development and application of artificial intelligence. AI’s potential to be used for both positive and negative ends echoes the breakthroughs in nuclear physics that occurred during World War II. The wartime research enabled nuclear weapons, nuclear power, nuclear medicine, and other associated technologies, all of which required significant government support and regulation. AI is likely to have similarly unpredictable and transformative societal impacts.
Even during the most difficult times, the U.S. government has found ways to advance the creation of knowledge.
A major task for the new administration and the next Congress will be finding ways to invest in such critical research areas even within political gridlock and budgetary constraints. Competing nations, including China, have announced major increases in funding to fuel their scientific research. Now is not the time for the U.S. to take its pedal off the gas.
Simply expanding federal funding for R&D will not be enough; the government needs to ensure that fundamental research is not held back by excessive and unnecessary security requirements. Congress has repeatedly passed such requirements, driven by increasing concerns about intellectual property theft, national security, and strategic competition, particularly with China. However, the policies surrounding these security efforts are often drafted without differentiating between fundamental advances in scientific knowledge from applied technologies that have clear military applications.
Security policies intended to prevent research from falling into the hands of our adversaries should be evaluated by experts who understand in detail the technical nature of national security risks and who can assess the benefits of secrecy versus its costs. These policies should also be applied consistently across federal agencies so researchers and universities can comply with the requirements while minimizing the administrative burdens they impose. This is an area in which presidential guidance could make a big difference. The Trump and Biden administrations already made some progress with a presidential memorandum directing federal agencies to “standardize disclosure processes, definitions, and forms.” The White House’s Office of Science can help the next president ensure that security policies are efficiently addressing genuine risks.
In addition to bolstering domestic research, the next president would be wise to increase scientific collaboration with allied nations—both to support research in emerging technologies and to build international STEM talent pipelines, including with India and developing countries in Africa and South America. Horizon Europe, a multilateral funding program that supports research across the 27 nations of the European Union, offers a useful model for how such a project might operate. The U.S. could take inspiration, too, from the way China has been forging global scientific ties as a part of its Belt and Road Initiative, which has supported the creation of dozens of collaborative labs and universities abroad.
Many of today’s most dangerous challenges—with climate change and the threat of future pandemics at the top of the list—will require the coordinated efforts of scientists around the world. Yet politicians in the U.S. (and in many other nations) increasingly question the value of international scientific collaboration. In recent years, geopolitical tensions have interfered with life-saving international disease monitoring, as well as with international collaboration and data sharing on global environmental challenges such as climate change. Concerns about national security, travel and visa restrictions, data access, and privacy keep getting in the way of the work needed to address these existential threats.
These days, large research problems can rarely be tackled by an individual researcher or even an individual lab.
In the face of growing isolationist sentiment, the next president should be aware that many of the most consequential scientific initiatives of the post-Cold War era, including the International Space Station and the Human Genome Project, would have been impossible without the robust participation of governments and researchers from around the world. Many of the recent U.S. advancements in mRNA research, which enabled the rapid development of a COVID-19 vaccine and likely saved millions of lives, were driven by immigrant researchers and by open global scientific collaboration.
It is unclear if the U.S. still has the will and ability to lead grand, globe-spanning scientific endeavors. Forging international agreements and securing funding for research happening outside American borders will require vigorous presidential leadership. There is no valid alternative, however. These days, large research problems can rarely be tackled by an individual researcher or even an individual lab or department. More and more, science is conducted internationally. It needs to be funded, coordinated, and regulated internationally as well. Climate agreements, digital privacy protection, disease monitoring and control, and ethical standards for gene editing and artificial intelligence—all of these require international engagement.
Being a leader in global science requires a commitment to the free and open exchange of information. President Reagan may be best remembered for his anti-Soviet stances, but he also recognized the importance of scientific openness. In 1985, he issued a national security directive that established clear boundaries between classified and fundamental research, protecting the latter from intrusive government controls. He understood that hiding away scientific results while their applications are still unclear will only prevent other scientists from reproducing, replicating, and testing the results for accuracy, impeding the advancement of knowledge.
Many politicians seem to believe that international controls, such as domestic security rules, will give American scientists an advantage. The assumption underlying “scientific protectionism” is that the U.S. has the lead across a wide array of critical technologies and research fields. That is no longer generally true across many areas of computer science, chemistry, and mathematics, and the trend lines show foreign nations advancing in many other fields as well. Even in areas where the U.S. still leads the international community significantly (as in some fields of biological and health sciences), restricting the sharing of information is unlikely to serve our interests; if anything, protectionism is more likely to cause harm.
Immigrants have founded or co-founded almost two-thirds of the top U.S. AI companies.
Before anyone threatens restrictions on scientific collaborations with nations they view as adversarial in sensitive areas like AI or quantum computing, they should assess who has more to gain from scientific openness: the U.S. or our potential adversaries. Building walls around research hinders the ability of U.S.-based scientists to learn from ideas and discoveries by their counterparts in other parts of the world. Without such awareness, domestic scientists don’t know what they don’t know and may miss out on important developments. The U.S. fell behind China in the development of 5G technology partially due to a failure to engage in international partnerships, which created a blind spot to how far China had advanced in its development of next-generation telecommunications technology.
Immigration has been one of the most contentious issues in this year’s U.S. presidential campaign. Unfortunately, immigration is also a key issue that this country needs to resolve to stay ahead in science and technology. Today, every country is engaged in an international competition for top STEM talent. Other nations, such as China, clearly understand this reality. They not only have been investing heavily in domestic scientific research, they also have been developing recruitment strategies to attract and retain outstanding researchers and engineers from around the world.
In 1990, China produced less than 2 percent of the global total in scientific publications. In 2023, that number had risen to 25 percent. China now leads the world in the total share of highly cited, openly published scientific papers underpinning key areas of science in physics, mathematics, engineering, and computer science—including artificial intelligence.
Meanwhile, the U.S. has not developed a global strategy for drawing and retaining top scientific talent, relying mainly on its historical leadership role. Attracting such people from around the world has been, and will continue to be, essential to advancing U.S. national security and economic interests. According to one analysis, immigrants founded or co-founded almost two-thirds of the top U.S. AI companies, with many of these founders having first come to study at U.S. universities while on student visas.
This lack of national talent strategy has been magnified by the adoption of outright harmful policies, such as the China Initiative—a Department of Justice program launched in 2018 that investigated Chinese-American academics—and the 2017 Muslim Travel Ban—which prohibited travel to the U.S. from seven predominantly Muslim countries. These actions have harmed the reputation of the U.S. as being a welcoming place for immigrant scientists.
If the U.S. is to maintain its role as a global leader in science and technology, it will need to develop policies that encourage talented immigrants to study, work, and stay here. One productive step would be to enact legislation aimed at retaining high-skill science and technology talent, such as the Keep STEM Talent Act of 2023 introduced last year by senators Dick Durbin (a democrat) and Mike Rounds (a republican). This bill aims to ensure that foreign STEM Ph.D. students studying at American universities can continue working in the U.S. after completing their degree. Although such legislation enjoys bipartisan support, Congress refused to consider the bill because of the fierce political fights over immigration and border security.
None of these changes will be easy. Many of the actions needed to secure America’s place in international science run directly against the political headwinds here at home. But that is the job of a leader: to recognize what needs to happen, and then to summon the will to make it happen.
This article is part of a series, Science at the Ballot Box, which is an initiative by the Aspen Institute, published in partnership with Nautilus.
Lead image: NicoElNino / Shutterstock
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