Early in his presidency, Joe Biden promised to be a leader on science policy with proposals for new advanced research projects agencies centering on biomedical and climate research. And now, working their way through Congress are two bills designed to boost federal support for scientific research, the America COMPETES Act and US Innovation and Competition Act. To learn more about those bills and to get a better idea of how federal science programs should be designed, I invited Tony Mills on Political Economy.
Tony is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies the federal government’s role in scientific research and innovation, as well as how to integrate scientific expertise into our governing institutions.
Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.
Pethokoukis: Is the United States about to embark upon a great period of federal science research?
Mills: That’s a good question. To a certain extent, it requires predicting political events, which is a hazardous game. I think if we back up a little bit, what we can say is there was this push—it really picked up in 2020, interestingly before COVID really took off. The best example of this was the Endless Frontier Act. It was very ambitious, and among its ambitious proposals was a $100 billion investment in the National Science Foundation and a considerable reorganization of that agency. Fast forward to today, that bill passed the Senate, but it is currently still being negotiated with the House.

What happened in the meantime is the House introduced its own version of this bill. That’s kind of still where we are. It looks like Congress is hoping to pass something by this summer. It could turn out that a version of this bill will in fact pass, but it’s a very different kind of bill than what was originally introduced. It’s also considerably less ambitious in terms of its budgetary targets.
Other than increasing funding, how would the current proposals change federal science support?
The NSF traditionally is the agency that funds basic scientific research. It’s the only agency in the federal government whose sole mission really is to do that. One of the issues that was hotly debated in the lead up to the creation of the NSF was how to allocate federal funding. Should it be allocated meritocratically—give the federal spending to the best science, the best institutions—or should it be distributed geographically? The meritocratic view more or less won out in 1950, and the NSF has essentially operated in some version of that.
What’s interesting about the Endless Frontier Act is that its two central pillars were the contradiction of both of those things. It was a geography-based innovation program in which they proposed a regional tech hub program to try to build up innovation in areas that are traditionally less competitive in science and technology. The other was this tech directorate, which would be keyed into strategic areas of technology. What’s notable about this is that this would be quite a change for the NSF, right? Not only in terms of its budget, which is under $10 billion. (The original proposal was $100 billion and it would all go to this new directorate.)
I often hear things like, “Well, we should do a super DARPA. That’s how America should do its science R&D.” Is that how we should do science research in the US?
A lot of people have asked, “Well, why don’t we imitate DARPA in other areas?” We actually have done that. There is an ARPA-E in the Department of Energy, for example, modeled on DARPA. One of the motivations behind the tech directorate in the Endless Frontier Act was to create a DARPA-like entity within NSF. There have been proposals for a health ARPA, ARPA-H, which has recently become reality.
It’s a successful model in a lot of ways, but it shouldn’t be confused with scientific research. It’s really more of a way of organizing technology research. Now, is it applicable to every domain? I think that you have to go case by case. People like DARPA and they want to imitate it, but DARPA exists, it’s still doing what it does, right? A lot of the breakthrough technologies that it has helped give rise to—from GPS to the internet—that wasn’t really the intention. The intention was to develop technologies that were useful for the military. In a sense, by trying to imitate DARPA to do a predetermined outcome, you’re kind of not doing what DARPA does, in a way. I think that there’s a lot of excitement about that idea, but in practice I’m a little bit more lukewarm about whether it would actually be effective.
Should we change the incentives or the way we fund scientific research?
Yes. The established way of funding science research is to evaluate the merits of a proposal using a peer review system. You get people in the relevant fields to look at it and decide, “Does this look promising or not?” I think peer review is actually very, very important. Whether it’s the most effective way for the federal government to allocate its research funding is a different question.
The Senate bill mentions almost nothing about any of these kinds of metascience questions. There’s some discussion of replication in the House bill. It’s pretty limited. It’s mostly in the computer science field. To me, this is very unfortunate because there are longstanding debates and lots of scholarship on these questions that we could be drawing on in thinking about ways to reform our scientific institutions.
Do you think the current push for expanding federal investment is a singular moment and we’ll be on cruise control after this moment? Or do you think, because of concerns about long-term economic growth and geopolitical concerns about China, that this is the beginning of a period of ramping up science?
I don’t know. There is kind of a perfect storm of forces that incentivize people in Congress to want to increase federal R&D spending. Federal R&D spending always goes up. The question is, where is it going up how much? What I don’t think is likely is a fundamental shift whereby the federal government becomes the principal funder of R&D. That was the case in the postwar decades. The high point was 1964 when I believe it was close to 70 percent of all US R&D spending was federal government. It’s basically flipped now, with the private sector taking the lead.
The private sector tends to be more interested in applied research and development by a lot. That has skewed the overall priorities of the US R&D system. Will it flip back the other way? That seems very unlikely because the numbers would be really quite staggering. I think we are in a moment where there is this bipartisan appetite. I don’t know how long it will last, but I’m skeptical that it will fundamentally change the current R&D system.