Science Community Weighs in on Federal Plans to Accelerate US Innovation

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy received more than 12,000 comments in response to a request for information on how to accelerate the American scientific enterprise — with many responses from scientific societies and research institutions highlighting a desire for a more stable federal funding environment with fewer regulatory hurdles.

The RFI, issued in late November, asked representatives from academia, private sector organizations, industry groups, and local governments to share their views on how to strengthen the U.S. science and technology ecosystem. The comment period closed in late December.

Thirteen prompts were included in the RFI on a wide range of issues — including questions on how the federal government can support public-private collaboration, create jobs, reduce regulatory barriers, and boost the translation of research from the lab bench to the marketplace, as well as strengthen research security and leverage advances in AI that may transform scientific research.

OSTP has not made the responses to its RFI publicly available, but some respondents have published their responses through their own channels. Of these, some responses reviewed by FYI chose to focus on just a few questions, while others, including those from the National Academies, COGR, and Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, took a broad approach. Common themes across these responses included a desire to reduce regulatory barriers, harmonize research security standards, and encourage stronger collaboration between universities and industry partners.

The American Council on Education and more than a dozen higher education associations provided a joint response to the RFI, highlighting their desire for a more stable federal funding landscape.

“This year, colleges and universities across the country have struggled to navigate the ongoing uncertainty around the availability and distribution of federal funding for new and existing research projects,” the response states. It adds that federal delays in distributing funding have led some researchers to move their work to other countries, including “scientific competitors like China.”

ACE, the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, and many other groups representing universities also strongly opposed a proposal from Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to tax universities on their patent revenue, with many noting in their responses that this proposal runs counter to the Bayh-Dole Act, bipartisan legislation that has for decades allowed universities to retain ownership of inventions that result from federally funded research.

Many of the responses shared by science groups encouraged public-private partnerships and streamlining the process for commercializing federally funded research. The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, for example, suggested that the federal government could increase support for existing initiatives such as the National Science Foundation’s Technology, Innovation and Partnerships Directorate and its Engineering Research Centers program, as well as consider modeling federal intellectual property agreements on those implemented by some states between universities and the private sector, such as Virginia’s Lab-to-Launch initiative. ITIF also encouraged OSTP to draw on NIST’s 2019 Return on Investment Initiative green paper for “readily accessible and easily implementable policy ideas.”

Of the responses that tackled the use of AI in scientific research, many were broadly supportive of the technology’s potential, but some also urged caution. COGR, for example, encouraged research funding agencies to work together to set standards for how AI may or may not be used in preparing grant proposals and conducting research.

At the time of publication, OSTP had not responded to a request for comment on its next steps. In the RFI, the office said responses would be reviewed and would “inform the formulation of executive branch efforts to advance and maintain U.S. S&T leadership.”