Young, Pottinger Op-Ed: Funding for R&D Isn’t a Gift to Academia. It’s Vital to U.S. Security.
The following column by Senator Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Matthew Pottinger, Former Deputy National Security Advisor of the United States, was published in The Washington Post on March 24, 2025.
By Senator Todd Young and Matthew Pottinger
As President Donald Trump pledges to win the artificial intelligence race, send Americans to Mars and sustain U.S. military dominance, we would do well to remember a key reason the United States achieved its technological edge in the first place: federal investment in ambitious research and development. The U.S. is racing against its adversaries to lead not only in artificial intelligence but also biotech, quantum computing, robotics and other technologies that will be pivotal for U.S. prosperity and security. The pace of innovation and deployment of these next-generation capabilities will only accelerate.
The Chinese Communist Party — our primary strategic adversary — is leveraging China’s engineering talent and manufacturing prowess to advance the regime’s interests, diminish U.S. power, and assert a totalitarian model of censorship and surveillance on users of China’s technology products worldwide. Beijing’s explicit strategy for global technological dominance hinges not only on its well-known theft of American technology but also on significant investment in China’s own R&D efforts.
China’s public spending on R&D has grown 16-fold since 2000, placing it second in the world behind the United States for total spending. This month, China announced an 8.3 percent increase in science and technology spending, among other investments unveiled in an effort to surpass the United States’ lead. In several critical technologies — from drones to advanced manufacturing using robots to quantum communications — China is gaining on or already beating the United States in terms of making discoveries and applying them in the real world.
Just as China’s commitment to research and development has grown, the U.S. government’s has waned. Federal funding for R&D has declined significantly as a share of total spending since its Cold War peak, leaving strategic blind spots in our research ecosystem.
Our private sector and capital markets are the best in the world. But investors tend to gravitate toward easily marketable solutions in sectors such as health care, energy and consumer software apps, while avoiding more challenging or long-term investments in emerging technologies critical to our national security. Beijing’s heavy subsidies for its national champions make it even less enticing for American private companies to try and compete in many strategic sectors — further jeopardizing U.S. national security.
Just as we did when the Soviet Union drew ahead in the space race, the U.S. must meet the moment by accelerating strategic investments in scientific research and development of future technologies. The space race and U.S. commitment to putting a man on the moon led directly to our world-leading aerospace, microelectronics and internet industries — as well as the trillions of dollars in private economic activity it spurred.
Borrowing lessons from this and other successes from the Cold War, the United States can again widen its technological lead. We should follow two steps:
One, policymakers must sufficiently fund federal investment in basic and applied science research as part of the annual congressional appropriations process. The United States’ biotechnology innovators, our electronics wizards and our military leaders uniformly point to the importance of a strong science-and-technology ecosystem that starts with the university. Through public funding sources such as the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department, these targeted investments lead to advancements in materials, lifesaving therapies, and weapons for warfighters. Importantly, this research is often driven by curiosity, not profit.
Second, these innovations need to find pathways out of the labs and into boardrooms and factories. It is not enough for smart scientists and researchers to discover new solutions in the U.S. We need to make sure they develop them and bring them to market here, too. To make this a reality, we need a regulatory and business environment that incentivizes talented people to make things in America. Policymakers must take steps to streamline outdated regulations that hinder cutting-edge research.
Sustained investment in fundamental and transformational science is consistent with the president’s stated vision of a new Golden Age, particularly in the area of innovation. Just days into his second term, Trump issued an executive order to ensure American leadership in artificial intelligence.
Our policymakers should lock arms with the science-and-technology dreamers and doers across the country — from Silicon Valley to the Silicon Prairie — and recognize that basic research isn’t a federal handout to help sustain academia.
Instead, it is a vital ingredient in our innovation future, economic and geopolitical competitiveness, and national security.
Todd Young, a Republican, represents Indiana in the U.S. Senate. Matt Pottinger chairs the China program at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and was deputy national security adviser from 2019 to 2021.