America Competes! (in Science, too)

This news may not be directly related to medical diagnostics, but as scientists and engineers the political climate for science funding is certainly of significant interest to all of us. Chemical and Engineering News is covering the substantial amount of cash headed our collective way under the proposed America Competes Act. I think most of you will agree with me that money spent on R&D is money pretty well spent. Some of the juicy totals boil down as follows:

• $3B NSF
• $2B NIH
• $1.9B DOE
• $600M NASA
• $300M NIST

The investment obviously focuses heavily on the Big 2 (Energy and Health), with a substantial amount of funding to the NSF that is sure to reach a broader audience. As someone working in medtech, however, the $2B to the NIH is a little disappointing when compared with some of the numbers further down in this post. That being said, I have every confidence that the NIH will still be able to support some amazing work with that money. It will be interesting to see whether the money that may go to NASA will support their core scientific mission or help expand their support of commercial space ventures like SpaceX and Orbital. I think either scenario is win-win for the broader community of scientists and engineers- not to mention the bulk of humanity (in case we, you know, ever need to leave this place).

It seem’s that Nathan Lewis’ concerns about the skewed funding of Health over Energy may be assuaged by this bill. Some $24B are going to be directed toward funding development of next-generation energy technologies like a high-efficiency grid ($11B, as a shameless plug to my alma mater see: FREEDM), home energy efficiency ($9B), efficiency and renewables research ($2B) and advanced batteries research ($2B).

This is certainly a fairly aggressive investment, and while one can say that STEM always could use more, its certain to deliver huge returns as funding starts to become available and plentiful again. All in all, these numbers still represent only 3.85% of the total bill and its not hard to imagine that it will also be the single most successful group of investments in strengthening the economy and America’s commercial competitive potential in the long run.