Assessment

In order for technology to be a continuing and greater competitive advantage, the U.S. must

• • Create a solid foundation of science and technology that is relevant to commercial uses;
• • Apply advances in knowledge to commercial products and processes; and
• • Protect intellectual property by strengthening patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret protection.

Although the U.S. spends a greater share of its GNP on research and development (R&D) than its international competitors, much of the R&D is for defense and space programs in which commercial application is an incidental objective. Furthermore, government needs better management of R&D funds. In any event, private R&D incentives are needed to fuel advances in commercially useful new technologies. Reversing inadequate support for university research is the starting point. Greater attention to manufacturing technology is essential to translating new product technologies into commercial success. Finally, greater protection must be given intellectual property to enhance incentives for investments in innovation.

Recommendations

• • Create a Cabinet-level Department of Science and Technology to coordinate and integrate fragmented government efforts and highlight the importance of science and technology.
• • Make the R&D tax credit permanent and make it available for total R&D spending (instead of just incremental spending), for accounting expenses, and for development of equipment and processes involved in prototype development.
• • Increase and manage better government support for basic research at universities.
• • Improve manufacturing technology and manufacturing-related university curriculum.
• • Improve international protection for intellectual property rights.

By 2005, it was no longer Japan—by then, in the midst of a 10-year economic funk—that got the juices flowing on Capitol Hill, but rather China. The 1985 threat had come from an ally; the 2005 threat came from an adversary. At least that’s how a number of members of Congress saw it. Frank Wolf, a Republican who represented a northern Virginia district in suburban Washington was one of them.

On a sunny afternoon in early March of 2005, four of us were gathered outside Frank Wolf’s office in the Cannon House Office Building waiting to be ushered in. Norman Augustine, the retired CEO of Lockheed-Martin, Charles “Chuck” Vest, who had recently stepped down as president of MIT, Jack Crowley, MIT’s head of government affairs, and I, representing the American Physical Society (APS) and the newly created Task Force on American Innovation. We had secured a 15-minute meeting with Wolf, who was chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee that handled some of the key federal science and technology accounts, including NASA, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

For more than a year, Steve Pierson, a staff member in the APS Washington Office, and Tobin “Toby” Smith, a senior government relations officer at the Association of American Universities, had been assessing the global stature of the United States in research and development (R&D). We wanted more than a snapshot of our nation’s present-day standing. We wanted to know where we had stood decades back, and what the current trends predicted for the future. The graphs Steve and Toby generated forecast troubling times for American competitiveness. By a number of measures—patents, publications, R&D spending relative to the size of the economy, and advanced technical degrees—we were on track to lose our international leadership in science, technology, and innovation sometime between 2015 and 2020.

The challenges came from both Europe and Asia, especially China at the end of the decade. We had captured the breadth and depth of the problem, and we believed Wolf would find the issue compelling, if not extremely alarming. Norm Augustine, who had strong Republican credentials, having served as Acting Secretary of the Army during the Ford Administration, took the lead in the discussion. Chuck Vest and I waited, trying to gauge Wolf’s interest and reaction. Finally, Chuck, whose 15 years as MIT’s president gave him unusual standing on Capitol Hill, began to paint the picture of the future. As he was speaking, I spread out on the table in front of us the graphs Steve Pierson and Toby Smith had created. They provided a compelling visual counterpoint to Vest’s words, and they grabbed Wolf’s attention immediately.

At that moment, a knock at the door broke the policy spell.

“Excuse me Mr. Wolf,” the staffer said, poking his head into the office, “your next meeting has arrived.”

“Tell them to wait,” Wolf replied. And then turning to me, he asked, “Where did you get the data?”

“It’s all publicly available, from the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Patent Office, and various scientific publishers,” I replied, handing him a copy of a report, The Knowledge Economy: Is the United States Losing Its Competitive Edge, which the Task Force on American Innovation³ had just released.

Norm Augustine picked up the thread of the discussion. And then came another knock at the door. We were 15 minutes over our allotted time.

“Mr. Wolf, you now have two groups waiting to see you. What should I tell them,” the staffer asked.

“Tell them to wait.”

We spent the next 15 minutes discussing the next steps. Wolf laid out his ideas: First, an Innovation Summit run by the Commerce Department to highlight the problems. Second, a rapid study and a report by the National Academies of Science (NAS) and Engineering (NAE) and the Institute of Medicine (IOM)—now the National Academy of Medicine—to recommend solutions. And, third, legislation to implement the National Academies’ recommendations. It was an ambitious plan.

The first step was the easiest. Wolf controlled the purse strings of the Commerce Department in the House, and he could simply write the Summit into the department’s budget. The other two, he wisely noted, should have bipartisan buy-in. The timing was propitious.

A month earlier in February, at their annual joint meeting, the councils of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering had taken a close look at the standing of the United States in what they termed “today’s global knowledge-discovery enterprise.”⁴ What they found concerned them deeply. The American science and technology enterprise was flagging, and they warned that if the trend were to continue, it “would inevitably degrade [the nation’s] social and economic conditions, and in particular, erode the ability of its citizens to compete for high-quality jobs.”

In mid-May, the National Academies’ Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy (COSEPUP) held a meeting to develop a course of action. Lamar Alexander, former president of the University of Tennessee and former secretary of education was one of the speakers. He was now the junior senator from Tennessee, and as a Republican, he chaired the Energy Subcommittee of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, working closely with the chairman of the full committee, Pete V. Domenici, the New Mexico senator who had jump-started the Human Genome Project almost two decades earlier.

Competitiveness was now one of the top items on Domenici’s agenda, and he had asked Alexander to help orchestrate a bipartisan strategy to address it. Alexander came to the COSEPUP meeting to give the attendees a heads-up: Within 2 weeks, the Academy would be getting a request to study the problem and provide recommendations to reinvigorate American science and the nation’s global competitiveness. The letter arrived on May 27, 2005, signed by Alexander and New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman, the Democratic ranking member of the Energy Subcommittee.

Alexander’s role was baked in by virtue of the 55 to 45 majority Republicans maintained in the Senate that year. But he was relatively new to the science and technology table, winning his Senate seat only 2 years earlier. Bingaman, his co-signer, had the real bona fides. For the better part of two decades, along with Pete Domenici, his fellow New Mexican, he had been a prime go-to legislator on all things science.

Bingaman valued science, but he also valued scientists. Bypassing lawyers and politicos, he had named Robert M. Simon, a chemist with a doctoral degree from MIT, as his committee staff director in 1999. And in 2004, with Simon and Adam Rosenberg, an AAAS congressional fellow who worked for the Energy Committee, he co-authored a hard-hitting article for Issues in Science and Technology.⁵ In it, he warned that the lack of federal investment in research was putting America’s future economic growth at risk.

A year later, shortly after he and Alexander sent their letter to the Academy, Bingaman offered a set of policy prescriptions designed to shore up the nation’s technological competencies. Expressing his views to the nation’s physicists⁶—who were mostly academics—he led with a proposition he knew would appeal to their self-interests: increased funding of long-term research. But he also advanced ideas for strengthening America’s near-term competitiveness: expanding R&D tax credits, developing more and better science parks, and providing incentives for investments in high-tech manufacturing on American soil.

As Bingaman, Alexander, and Domenici were beating the Senate drums, Wolf was moving ahead rapidly in the House. He enlisted the support of two Republican members of the Science Committee, Sherwood “Sherry” Boehlert, its chairman from New York, and Vern Ehlers from Michigan, chairman of its Research and Education subcommittee, and the first research physicist to serve in the House. Wolf also reached out to Bart Gordon, a Tennessee Democrat, who was the Science Committee’s ranking member. Shortly after the Academy received the request from Alexander and Bingaman, an even more urgent plea arrived from Boehlert and Gordon.

When Congress petitions the National Academies for help, it often provides funding for the work. But in this case, the gang of four making the request believed the issue needed a rapid response. And they had little expectation appropriators could move their bills fast enough to meet their timeline. With the competitiveness buzz on Capitol Hill getting louder by the day, the Academies decided to take up the challenge using their own resources. Norm Augustine chaired the hastily assembled ad hoc team, which COSEPUP gave the unwieldy name the Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st century an Agenda for American Science and Technology. Marketing had never been a strength of the Academies, and the new committee’s title broke no new ground in that regard. But the committee’s membership was truly impressive: major university presidents, Nobelists, Fortune 500 CEOs, and former federal officials, 20 in all.

The charge to the committee was specific. Determine “the top ten actions, in priority order, that federal policymakers could undertake to enhance the science and technology enterprise so that the United States can successfully compete, prosper, and be secure in the global community of the 21st century.” And identify a “strategy, with several concrete steps, [that] could be used to implement each of those actions.” The committee was free to identify the thematic principles it would use in its deliberations. It settled on two: job creation and clean, affordable, and reliable energy. The first was noncontroversial. The second was phrased broadly enough so that it would not trigger a debate over climate change, an issue that was already so politically fraught that it could potentially marginalize the committee’s findings and recommendations.

But even at the risk of running afoul of the House and Senate petitioners, the Augustine Committee rejected the idea of identifying ten prioritized actions, opting instead for four major recommendations, arguing further that all of them should be viewed as one “coordinated set of policy actions.” Ignoring one, the report warned, would substantially weaken the other three, noting, for example, that “there is little benefit in producing more researchers if there are no funds to support their research.” The interdependence of science and technology policies intriguingly mirrored the interdependence of the sciences that Harold Varmus identified in his Washington Post op-ed of 2000.

The National Academies and its operational arm, the National Research Council, were notorious for their thorough but laborious approach to all issues that made it over the transom. But Congress made it clear it was in no mood to wait, and the Augustine Committee’s marching orders had a 10-week term limit. Remarkably, it met its goal and produced a truly formative and informative report articulating some of the most compelling policy imperatives for 21st century American science and technology. The report remains as relevant today as it was in 2005. And its Findings and Recommendations in the Executive Summary are worth reading:⁷

Findings

Having reviewed trends in the United States and abroad, the committee is deeply concerned that the scientific and technological building blocks critical to our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations are gathering strength. We strongly believe that a worldwide strengthening will benefit the world’s economy—particularly in the creation of jobs in countries that are far less well-off than the United States. But we are worried about the future prosperity of the United States. Although many people assume that the United States will always be a world leader in science and technology, this may not continue to be the case inasmuch as great minds and ideas exist throughout the world. We fear the abruptness with which a lead in science and technology can be lost—and the difficulty of recovering a lead once lost, if indeed it can be regained at all.

The committee found that multinational companies use such criteria as the following in determining where to locate their facilities and the jobs that result:

• • Cost of labor (professional and general workforce).
• • Availability and cost of capital.
• • Availability and quality of research and innovation talent.
• • Availability of qualified workforce.
• • Taxation environment.
• • Indirect costs (litigation, employee benefits such as healthcare, pensions, vacations).
• • Quality of research universities.
• • Convenience of transportation and communication (including language).
• • Fraction of national research and development supported by government.
• • Legal-judicial system (business integrity, property rights, contract sanctity, patent protection).
• • Current and potential growth of domestic market.
• • Attractiveness as place to live for employees.
• • Effectiveness of national economic system.
  Although the US economy is doing well today, current trends in each of those criteria indicate that the United States may not fare as well in the future without government intervention. This nation must prepare with great urgency to preserve its strategic and economic security. Because other nations have, and probably will continue to have, the competitive advantage of a low wage structure, the United States must compete by optimizing its knowledge-based resources, particularly in science and technology, and by sustaining the most fertile environment for new and revitalized industries and the well-paying jobs they bring. We have already seen that capital, factories, and laboratories readily move wherever they are thought to have the greatest promise of return to investors.

Recommendations

The committee reviewed hundreds of detailed suggestions—including various calls for novel and untested mechanisms—from other committees, from its focus groups, and from its own members. The challenge is immense, and the actions needed to respond are immense as well.

The committee identified two key challenges that are tightly coupled to scientific and engineering prowess: creating high-quality jobs for Americans, and responding to the nation’s need for clean, affordable, and reliable energy. To address those challenges, the committee structured its ideas according to four basic recommendations that focus on the human, financial, and knowledge capital necessary for US prosperity.

The four recommendations focus on actions in K–12 education (10,000 Teachers, 10 Million Minds), research (Sowing the Seeds), higher education (Best and Brightest), and economic policy (Incentives for Innovation) that are set forth in the following sections. Also provided are a total of 20 implementation steps for reaching the goals set forth in the recommendations.

Some actions involve changes in the law. Others require financial support that would come from reallocation of existing funds or, if necessary, from new funds. Overall, the committee believes that the investments are modest relative to the magnitude of the return the nation can expect in the creation of new high-quality jobs and in responding to its energy needs.

The committee notes that the nation is unlikely to receive some sudden “wakeup” call; rather, the problem is one that is likely to evidence itself gradually over a surprisingly short period.

10,000 TEACHERS, 10 MILLION MINDS, AND K–12 SCIENCE AND MATHEMATICS EDUCATION

Recommendation A: Increase America’s talent pool by vastly improving K–12 science and mathematics education.

SOWING THE SEEDS THROUGH SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING RESEARCH

Recommendation B: Sustain and strengthen the nation’s traditional commitment to long-term basic research that has the potential to be transformational to maintain the flow of new ideas that fuel the economy, provide security, and enhance the quality of life.

BEST AND BRIGHTEST IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING HIGHER EDUCATION

Recommendation C: Make the United States the most attractive setting in which to study and perform research so that we can develop, recruit, and retain the best and brightest students, scientists, and engineers from within the United States and throughout the world.

INCENTIVES FOR INNOVATION

Recommendation D: Ensure that the United States is the premier place in the world to innovate; invest in downstream activities such as manufacturing and marketing; and create high-paying jobs based on innovation by such actions as modernizing the patent system, realigning tax policies to encourage innovation, and ensuring affordable broadband access.

The committee’s first inclination was to name its report, The Gathering Storm, but a number of members thought the title should convey a more optimistic message⁸ and amended it to Rising Above the Gathering Storm, which has the unfortunate acronym, RAGS. But its content was far richer than its acronym implied, and an expectant Capitol Hill was poised to accept its call for engagement, reacting to it with a fervor no other National Academies’ work had ever elicited. The report contained twenty separate action items, and over the course of the next 2 years, Congress and the president embraced a majority of them—although in the case of the White House, not without some unexpected twists caused by a comparatively weak Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The National Academies released the RAGS report on October 12, 2005, meeting its 10-week deadline. Lamar Alexander moved swiftly following its publication, arranging a dinner for his colleagues so that Norm Augustine could present its results. Amazingly, one third of the Senate showed up.

Science was suddenly roaring down the track, and Augustine was driving the train. He had the reputation, credentials, and connections to keep it running. It was no accident, for example, that Shirley Tilghman, president of Princeton University, convened a meeting on RAGS, which Democratic House Leader Nancy Pelosi and other senior political leaders attended. Norm, after all, was a Princeton grad and a former member of its board of trustees. Of course, it didn’t hurt that he was a winner of the National Medal of Technology, retired CEO of Lockheed-Martin, former Acting Secretary of the Airforce, former Under Secretary of the Army and a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). It also didn’t hurt that physicist Rush Holt, Jr. was the local congressman.

On December 6, 2 months after the National Academies released the Augustine report, Wolf’s National Summit on Competitiveness took place at the Reagan Center in downtown Washington. The half-day convocation, which drew 63 senior officials from the high-tech industry, universities, and government, issued a six-page statement⁹ that began with a stark warning. “The National Summit on Competitiveness has one fundamental message; if trends in U.S. research and education continue, our nation will squander its economic leadership, and the result will be a lower standard of living for the American people.”

Echoing the recommendations of the RAGS report, the Summit called for action on three fronts: (1) Revitalizing fundamental research by doubling federal investments focused on science, engineering, and mathematics over 10 years, and allocating at least eight percent to high-risk, high-payoff programs; (2) Expanding the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) talent pool by doubling the number of science, math, and engineering bachelor’s degrees over 10 years, expanding the number of K-12 science and math teachers, reforming immigration policies to attract talented STEM workers from around the world, and creating more public-private partnerships to support STEM careers; and (3) Stimulating deployment of advanced technologies—especially in nanotechnology, high-performance computing, and energy technologies—to ensure national security and sustain American global economic leadership.

A presidential initiative is a well-worn method of advancing any new policy agenda. But at the close of the Competitiveness summit, there was little indication that the White House had any intention of creating one. It’s occupant, George W. Bush, except for several speeches he delivered during a 3-day speaking tour following the release of the RAGS report, had rarely indicated any interest in science and technology. He was mostly known for his controversial opposition to embryonic stem-cell research and his reluctance to accept the scientific consensus on climate change.

Shortly before he took office in January 2001, Bush indicated that he intended to abolish the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP). He backed away from his plan, only after he learned its elimination would require an act of Congress. But he had so poisoned the well with his apparent disdain for the office that he ran into early trouble finding anyone who would agree to be its director and simultaneously serve as his science advisor, as all directors had since OSTP was established in 1976. Finally, in June, he found a taker in John H. Marburger, III, a physicist with a Princeton and Stanford University pedigree, who had burnished his credentials as president of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and director of Brookhaven National Laboratory. Marburger, a lifelong Democrat, would be serving a Republican president, whose election many Democrats refused to accept, because it had effectively been decided by a five to four vote of the United States Supreme Court, smacking of partisanship.

Marburger didn’t need the job, but he felt a responsibility to do what he could to inject science into White House policy-making, as well as to provide guidance on administration appointments. He did not see his party affiliation posing any difficulties. As he told The New York Times, “If there’s any subject that should be bipartisan, it’s science.”¹⁰ It was probably a naïve view.

The contrast between D. Allan Bromley’s relationship with George H.W. Bush and Marburger’s relationship with his son, “W,” could not have been greater. Bromley had an office in the West Wing of the White House and had convinced Bush “41” that OSTP should be located in the Old Executive Office Building (OEOB) across the West Executive Drive on the west side of the White House. He also had a seat at the Cabinet table.

Marburger had none of those trappings. He reported to Bush “43” through the White House Chief of Staff, Andrew “Andy” Card, and when he showed up for work on October 23, 2006, he found that his office was on Pennsylvania Avenue near 18th Street, more than a block away from the White House. But Jack, as all of his friends called him, never complained publicly. A congenial person, he put his head down and made the best of his situation. He would provide the president with science and technology policy advice whenever the occasion arose.

If Jack had any failing, it was painting a rosier picture of science under Bush than was really the case. That flaw was in evidence on May 20, 2005, when he gave an after dinner speech at a meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics in Lincoln, Nebraska.¹¹ That he traveled halfway across the country to give a 30-minute talk to a group of physicists on a corn-belt campus suggested that either he had something monumental to share with a Midwestern, largely agricultural community, or he had little on his plate and could afford to be away from Washington. By the time he wrapped up, he had lent credence to the latter and reinforced the perception that he was burnishing Bush’s support of research more than it deserved.

Every presidential science advisor is obligated to provide the occupant of the Oval Office with the highest level of technical advice he or she can. But once White House policies are set, as a member of the Administration, the science advisor must support them publicly. The other option is to resign if the policies are too odious. At the University of Nebraska, Jack Marburger tried to walk a tightrope. He touted the Administration’s commitment to research, but did not own up to the parsimony of its research budget requests. In reality, he had few options, but in the minds of many physicists in the audience, his parsing of the policies was a bridge too far.

I had known and considered Jack a friend since the late 1970s, when he was dean of the University of Southern California College of Letters, Arts, and Science and had tried to entice me to move there from Yale. I knew he wouldn’t take my criticism personally, so after his talk ended and as the banquet hall was emptying, I presented him with the budget reality, as I saw it: The Bush Administration was allowing federal support of science to stagnate or decline at the same time the economy, overwhelmingly driven by science and technology, was growing.

I drew the analogy of the United States to a flourishing high-tech company and argued that such a company would eventually cease to exist if it didn’t continuously renew its technology portfolio. It could do so by investing in research and development or acquiring intellectual property from another company that had made the required investments. In the case of our nation, the second option does not exist. The only debatable issue is whether government support of long-term, basic research is indispensable, or whether the industry has the ability to pick up the tab. The next chapter will reprise the narrative I used with Marburger, emphasizing that in 21st century America, industry not only has few incentives to pay for long-term research, basic or applied—especially if it carries high risks—it has huge disincentives to do so. In that case, the federal government’s role is vital.

The proper metric for a high-tech company’s research and development spending, I suggested, was a percentage of the company’s bottom line, defined by either its profits or its revenues. For the nation, by analogy, I argued, it was a percentage of the total economy, defined by the gross domestic product (GDP) that mattered—as Allan Bromley and Paul Anderson had at their Washington press conference 8 years earlier. Developing a universally accepted model to determine a GDP target percentage is almost impossible based on macroeconomic theory,¹² but using the results of past performance as a predicate for current policy is more than a reasonable proposition.

Jack readily acknowledged that federal support of long-term research as far back as 1950, but especially between 1960 and 1980, had transformed American life in the succeeding decades. It generated all the technologies Steve Jobs used in Apple’s iPhone: the large-scale integrated circuit, the global positioning system—usually abbreviated as GPS—and the touch screen. It led to laser-enabled technologies in telecommunications, manufacturing, retail, entertainment, and medicine. Today, those technologies account for more than one third of the American economy.^13,14 It delivered medical diagnostic tools, such as CT and PET scanning, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and proton therapy. It produced the Internet, and through a many decades-long commitment to high-energy physics, the World Wide Web and the browser.¹⁵

Jack and I also spoke briefly about the synergy between defense and non-defense research: The impact on national security of programs at the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce and Energy, and agencies, such as NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation. As well as the flip side, the spill-over of Defense Department research and development projects into the civilian domain.

In policy circles, those synergies are often called dual-use technologies. And over the years they have been significant. That is especially true of the work sponsored by the Advanced Research Projects Agency. Established during the Eisenhower era, ARPA—which later acquired the prefix “Defense” and the acronym DARPA—developed the mystique early on of a technological magician. The Transit satellite network, which was the precursor of GPS, carried the ARPA label. Tiros, the first weather satellite, was an ARPA creation. So, too, was the computer mouse and the first computer networking system, ARPANET.¹⁶

The defense research agency also gave the field of materials science a jump start, eventually delivering carbon and polymer-matrix composites that made “stealthy” aircraft difficult to detect. They helped the military, but they also revolutionized sports equipment, wind turbines, cars, and boats. Historically, (D)ARPA’s directors recognized the important role risk-taking plays in delivering blockbuster outcomes, and the agency was fortunate to be led over the years by talented technologists and managers. If it had any failing, it was its lack of diversity in its leadership. From its inception in 1958 until 2009, every (D)ARPA director was a white male, almost always over the age of forty.¹⁷ The testosterone streak ended with Barack Obama’s appointment of Regina E. Dugan in 2009 and Arati Prabhakar in 2012, a hopeful sign perhaps, of the growing influence of women in defense science policy.

I am convinced Jack recognized the shortfalls in the Bush science budgets. He knew fully well that federally-funded research and development, as a percentage of U.S. GDP, had peaked at 1.86 percent¹⁸ in 1963 at the height of the space program and had been declining since, reaching 0.74 percent in 2005.¹⁹ Competitiveness aside, he surely recognized that such a trend did not bode well for the future of a nation whose economic growth depends overwhelmingly on science and technology.

Following our conversation at the University of Nebraska, Jack suggested we meet again in Washington after Labor Day. The calendar might have read September, but Washington was still hot and sultry. We met for lunch at a restaurant not far from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, as OEOB was now known, and where OSTP was again more appropriately located. By that time, the Augustine Committee was well underway, and Jack wanted to wait for the RAGS report to be released before settling on a strategy.

A month later, the report was out, and Administration budget-making was in full swing. But when Jack and I spoke by phone, he held out little hope the president would take any action. Science, it seemed, was still a low-priority item for the White House. Still, he said he would try to get some face time with President Bush and his chief of staff, Andy Card. Three more weeks passed without any movement. At about that time, Norm Augustine called me. He knew I had been talking to Marburger, and asked whether Jack had been able to use the Academies’ report to his advantage.

“Apparently not,” I told him. “He’s made no progress.”

Norm has a great deal of patience, but with Thanksgiving approaching and the presidential budget request close to being put to bed, his patience was wearing thin. “Why,” he asked, “do we have to go through Marburger? I know he’s a good guy, but he doesn’t seem to have the president’s ear.”

Clearly that was the case.

“I know Card and Bolten pretty well,” Augustine continued, referring to Josh Bolten, the director of the Office of Management and Budget. “I also know Cheney from his days as defense secretary. Do you see any reason why I shouldn’t go to them directly?”

“No,” I said, “I think Jack gave it his best shot, and he’ll be fine if you get the president to act.” I was also thinking that Jack would take credit for anything Norm achieved, but I kept my thoughts to myself. One Washington lesson I learned early was to let good people in high positions take credit for worthy science and technology policies that could improve their chances of becoming more influential. Jack Marburger was certainly someone who could use a leg up.

Andy Card, Josh Bolten, and Vice President Dick Cheney were the Administration’s big three when it came to science and technology budgets. I accompanied Norm to the meeting with Bolten, which took place in early December in one of the small offices on the second floor of the West Wing. Bolten seemed persuaded by Norm’s arguments, but made no commitment to follow through. Norm was guardedly optimistic, and said if Card and Cheney got on board, he believed the president would take action. The other two meetings, which I did not attend, took place before Washington emptied out for the Christmas and New Year holidays.

The stars seemed to be aligning, but we didn’t know with any certainty how Bush would respond. We found out a month later, when he delivered his State of the Union Address.²⁰ One section of the speech focused on competitiveness, and for science, the message could not have been better. In Bush’s words,

All that remained were the dollars needed to support the initiative, and 2 days later, on February 2, 2006, the president put his monetary stamp on ACI, as the American Competitiveness Initiative was quickly dubbed in Washington jargon. Two paragraphs in the presidential letter accompanying the ACI budget release summed it all up:²¹

At the official OSTP roll-out of the president’s fiscal year 2007 budget 5 days later in the small 4th floor auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Jack Marburger was all smiles, touting ACI. And as Norm Augustine and I had expected, he never mentioned the role Chuck Vest, Norm, or I had played or, for that matter, any of the key members of Congress.

Without question, ACI improved Jack’s standing in the science community, and likely in the White House, as well. That was all to the good. Achieving science and technology policy objectives requires far more than a deep understanding of the science of science policy—paradoxically, a research area that Marburger had embraced.²² It requires political connections, advocacy networks, and impeccable timing. And Bush’s adopting ACI gave Jack a leg up he sorely needed.

By the time Bush gave his State of the Union Address and released his budget request, the 2006 election season had begun. Polls were showing that a blue wave was building. And Democrats were relishing the opportunity to retake control of Congress for the first time in a dozen years.

Smart money was on minority leader Nancy Pelosi to become the first woman speaker if Democrats won in November. A liberal from San Francisco, she was a superb tactician, but of more significance to the science community, she was a big booster of research. Before the calendar had begun to turn from 2005 to 2006, Pelosi already was traveling the countryside to promote the Democratic Party’s vision for economic growth and global leadership. She summarized the vision, which focused on innovation and competitiveness, in a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government on December 2, 2005.²³

The Democrat’s “Innovation Agenda: A Commitment to Competitiveness To Keep America #1” might have differed in detail from Bush’s ACI, but in spirit, it was very much the same.²⁴ It called for enhancing STEM education and doubling funding for basic research in the physical sciences. It also called for improving broadband access, especially in rural and underserved communities; increasing investments in research and development to promote energy independence and clean energy; and providing a healthier environment for small business innovation and risk-taking entrepreneurship.

Competitiveness as a science policy imperative had clearly awakened from its 20-year slumber. After the new Democratic-controlled Congress was sworn in on January 4, 2007, it developed an even more vibrant life. Bart Gordon, who had been the ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee, spearheaded the effort to develop a legislative plan. As chairman of the renamed House Science and Technology Committee, he was a moderate accustomed to working across the political aisle. He had partnered with Republican Sherry Boehlert in calling for the Academies study, and with Boehlert now retired, he looked to Vern Ehlers to take the Republican lead on a competitiveness bill.

Ehlers had been elected in 1993 and had established his policy bona fides with two signature efforts beginning in 1995, following the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional election. Newt Gingrich, who had been elected House Speaker, was a science geek at heart, and in Ehlers he saw a thoughtful, knowledgeable, physicist who could command the respect of Republican House members on all manner of technological issues. His assessment would prove correct.

Gingrich immediately asked Ehlers to oversee the creation of the first online congressional database. For scientists, online communication (the Internet) and online data transfer (the World Wide Web) had already become essentials of professional life. For Congress, they represented a radical departure from prior practices.

Ehlers had scarcely any background in computer science, but his physics pedigree provided him with sufficient cover among his colleagues, almost all of whom were woefully ignorant of anything having to do with science and technology. The Library of Congress had direct responsibility for the project known as “Thomas,” named for Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s earliest science advocates. But Ehlers gained great credibility with his colleagues when Thomas was launched successfully, thereby enhancing his ability to help shepherd science bills through the House.

About 2 years after the Thomas project began, Gingrich gave Ehlers another assignment: develop an overarching plan to help guide American science and technology policy into the 21st century. Gingrich saw it culminating in the first comprehensive set of U.S. science and technology policy prescriptions since Vannevar Bush’s 1945 report, Science, The Endless Frontier.²⁵ He also knew it would be the first such project the House had ever undertaken. It was a bold plan, and Ehlers was probably the right person to accomplish it. But in the end, it fell short of expectations, as some observers of Congress thought it inevitably would.

Using information gleaned from testimony, interviews, and documents submitted to the House Science Committee, Ehlers and his staff toiled for a year and a half before releasing the product of their work, Unlocking Our Future: Toward a New National Science Policy.²⁶ It contained a laundry list of recommendations, forty in all, without any priorities indicated. Many of them rehashed well-accepted principles; a few of them represented Republican must-haves and several contained new insights. It was a potpourri, as the following partial list demonstrates:

The recommendations largely followed a consensus view. But the document, as Ehlers, himself, admitted,²⁷ did not provide much in the way of a roadmap for achieving them. To get the report across the finish line, he noted, required satisfying a majority of his colleagues, each of whom had a slightly different set of priorities. The result, he said, was an unsatisfying all-of-the-above approach.

The report was far from a failure, but its shortcomings illustrate the difficulty of generating a science and technology policy document when there are tens or hundreds of players on the field, and when few of them have much knowledge of the subject. Nonetheless, Ehlers’s effort gained him further respect among his House GOP colleagues and allowed him to garner Republican support for the America COMPETES Act of 2007.²⁸

Two years had passed since Frank Wolf set the course for a competitiveness initiative. What had transpired probably exceeded his expectations. The innovation summit had been held on schedule; the Academies had issued a report in record time; the House Democrats had made it a central part of their legislative agenda; and, thanks to Norm Augustine, the Bush Administration had unexpectedly given the initiative a big financial boost. All that remained was policy legislation that would articulate a clear vision for the future.

The Association of American Universities and the National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges (now known as the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities) lent their support on behalf of academia. The Council on Competitiveness, the Business Roundtable, and two new actors, the Task Force on American Innovation and the Information Technology and Information Foundation, provided industrial heft.

The Senate was first out of the chute. It had a 10-year history of authorizing increased support of the physical sciences, and on March 5, Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada introduced the “America Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science Act.” Eighteen Democrats and seventeen Republicans joined him as original co-sponsors²⁹ of the COMPETES legislation. Less than 2 months later, the full Senate passed it by a vote of 88 to 6.

The House also moved swiftly, passing its own version of the bill on May 21, just 11 days after Bart Gordon and seven original co-sponsors³⁰—four Republicans and three Democrats—had introduced the bill. Vern Ehlers immediately began working to corral GOP commitments, and on August 2, 143 Republicans joined 224 Democrats in voting for the language that had emerged from a House-Senate conference committee. That afternoon, the Senate approved the legislation by unanimous consent, and a week later President Bush signed it into law.

The final bill called on the president to convene a “Science and Technology Summit to examine the health and direction of the United States’ science, technology, engineering, and mathematics [STEM] enterprises.” It further ordered “the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy [OSTP] … [to] enter into a contract with the National Academy of Sciences to conduct and complete a study to identify, and to review methods to mitigate new forms of risk for businesses beyond conventional operational and financial risk that affect the ability to innovate…” And to inspire more students to pursue STEM careers, it called on OSTP’s director to encourage all elementary and middle schools to observe a STEM day twice a year.

Homing in on the essence of the issue, the act directed the president to establish a Council on Innovation and Competitiveness to develop “a comprehensive agenda for strengthening the innovation and competitiveness capabilities of the Federal Government, State governments, academia, and the private sector in the United States.” It also directed the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) “to identify and prioritize [annually] the deficiencies in research facilities and major instrumentation located at Federal laboratories and national user facilities at academic institutions that are widely accessible for use by researchers in the United States.”

The bill contained a number of important policy prescriptions, but among the nation’s scientists, the 3-year funding levels specified for the science agencies³¹ attracted the greatest attention. Consistent with President Bush’s American Competitiveness Initiative, the 2007 COMPETES Act set a course for doubling federal support of physical science basic research over 10 years. But those were just targets, and, using a familiar sleight of hand, the legislation only specified them for 3 years. More significantly, it would be up to appropriators to follow through, and often that’s not a good bet.

Washington insiders know that policy prescriptions in authorization bills are far more enduring than proposed spending levels. But scientists generally aren’t as savvy, and when future appropriations failed to live up to the 2007 COMPETES Act targets—which scholarly societies had touted to their members—consternation rippled through the research community. On the positive side, the legislation seared innovation and competitiveness into 21st century science and technology policy making.