Across the partisan chasms of American politics, there has been for eight decades broad bipartisan consensus on a policy that truly made the country great. Following our victory in WW II, President Truman and then President Eisenhower inaugurated an era of scientific and technological leadership by applying recommendations of Vannevar Bush, President Roosevelt’s science adviser. His seminal report, “Science, The Endless Frontier,” proposed a unique tripartite coalition: Because fundamental research is a public good, the federal government would fund most basic science, which would be conducted primarily by independent scholars in research universities, the results of which would be converted by the private sector into commercializable and socially useful technologies, demonstrating the problem with cutting federal science investment.

If you are reading this on your mobile phone or tablet, you are enjoying one of the innumerable fruits of that partnership: The underlying physics and computer science in ubiquitous cellular technology were developed in federally funded university-based labs and classrooms. Similarly, the lithium-ion battery, which powers Tesla automobiles (to choose a random example), was the result of federally funded research. The National Science Foundation and other agencies supported the work of John B. Goodenough of the University of Texas at Austin and M. Stanley Whittingham of the State University of New York at Binghamton for more than 30 years. In 2019, Goodenough and Whittingham shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Akira Yoshino of Asahi Kasei Corp. of Japan, for work that made possible what owners of electric cars and many other devices today take for granted.

Those examples of long-term benefits of federal support for university-based basic scientific research are by no means outliers. The Association of American Universities reports that “new scientific and technological advancements emerging from America’s leading research universities led to the creation of 622 new startup businesses just in 2022 alone. The discoveries also led to 5,724 transfers of new innovations to private sector businesses so they could further develop and bring them to market.” Patricia Pelfrey and Richard Atkinson estimate that 80% of leading new industries derive from research in universities, which, according to Stanford professor Steven Blank, “spin off more than 1,100 science-based start-up companies each year, leading to countless products that have saved and improved millions of lives, including heart and cancer drugs, and the mRNA-based vaccines that helped to bring the world out of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Read the full article about cuts to federal science investment by Michael Feuer at Brookings.