Senate fast-tracks a bill to boost domestic technological innovation

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced Tuesday that he has instructed Senate committees to prepare a legislative package aimed at bolstering US competitiveness with China in critical technology sectors. He said its “centerpiece” will be the Endless Frontier Act , a bipartisan bill he introduced last year that envisions dramatically expanding NSF through a new arm dedicated to advancing select technologies.

Schumer added that the package could also include “emergency funding” to implement the recently enacted CHIPS for America Act , which authorized an array of semiconductor R&D initiatives and a subsidy program to support domestic chip production. He said the package would also seek to alleviate the current acute shortage of chips worldwide, which is slowing production in the automotive industry, among other sectors.

“I want this bill to address America’s short-term and long-term plan to protect the semiconductor supply chain and to keep us number one in things like AI, 5G, quantum computing, biomedical research, storage,” Schumer remarked. He is aiming to gain bipartisan support for the package and have the Senate vote on it this spring.

Endless Frontier

The version of the Endless Frontier Act introduced last year proposed the most significant restructuring of NSF since its establishment in 1950: The act recommended renaming the NSF the National Science and Technology Foundation and creating a new agency directorate to advance a set of “key technology focus areas.” The legislation set an initial list of 10 such areas and stipulated they be refreshed every four years with input from a new advisory board.

The bill also recommended Congress allocate $100 billion to the directorate over five years, well outstripping the agency’s current annual budget of $8.5 billion. The additional funds would be channeled toward an assortment of university-led research centers, test beds, and consortia, and a portion would be allocated through the agency’s existing directorates.

Unlike NSF’s other directorates, the technology directorate would have authorities analogous to those used by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which allows its program managers considerable leeway to drive toward targeted R&D outcomes. Typically, NSF has used external peer review of grant proposals to steer its programs.

The reception of the Endless Frontier Act in science policy circles has been mixed, with some experts worrying it could dilute NSF’s traditional focus on fundamental research. For instance, Arden Bement, a former director of NSF and NIST, has argued such funds are better channeled through agencies that already have a mandate to support specific technology areas.

Others have asserted the bill is premised on a flawed understanding of technological innovation. A set of such critiques were published last year by the policy magazine Issues in Science and Technology as part of a series reflecting on the legacy of the 1945 report that helped spur NSF’s creation. In one article, Patrick Windham, a former Senate staff member, joined two science policy scholars in contending that universities are ill equipped to spearhead large engineering projects or translate technological innovations into new products.

In a rebuttal to critics of the bill, MIT president Rafael Reif argued that the legislation would not diminish NSF’s traditional mission and that the time for the idea is ripe. “Small-scale policy experiments and tinkering across multiple government agencies are unlikely to prevent the next 5G debacle or to yield the next industry-spawning invention,” he wrote.

In any event, the Endless Frontier Act is apt to be modified as it advances through Congress. The committees with jurisdiction over NSF have yet to formally weigh in on the bill. Among them, the House Science Committee has been preparing its own legislation to update policy for NSF and other science agencies under its jurisdiction.

Supply chain concerns

In his remarks yesterday, Schumer said he has three overarching goals for the package: to “enhance American competitiveness with China by investing in American innovation, American workers, and American manufacturing; invest in strategic partners and alliances: NATO, Southeast Asia, and India; and expose, curb, and end, once and for all, China’s predatory practices, which have hurt so many American jobs.”

As a reason for moving quickly with the new package, Schumer pointed to concerns about the chip supply chain, remarking, “Semiconductor manufacturing is a dangerous weak spot in our economy and in our national security. That has to change. You’ve all seen that auto plants throughout America are closed because they can’t get the chips. We cannot rely on foreign processors for the chips.”

Momentum is continuing to build around action to alleviate the current chip shortage, which has been attributed in part to an underestimation of demand during the pandemic. Earlier this month, 15 senators urged President Biden to take rapid action as well as to help secure funding for implementing the CHIPS Act. Wednesday, the president met with a bipartisan group of senators to discuss the problem further and signed an executive order mandating a review of supply chains for semiconductors, among other “critical goods.”

Recounting the meeting, Senator John Cornyn remarked , “We need some additional funding in order to incentivize the reshoring of high-end semiconductor manufacturing here in the United States. Right now, China is building 17 semiconductor fabrication manufacturing facilities; we have one in the early stages of being built in Arizona. So the president was very receptive, as was the vice president. He said, ‘We’re all in.’ We all understand this is important not only to our economy but to our national security.”

At the signing ceremony for the executive order, Biden indicated he will push for $37 billion to implement the CHIPS Act.

Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a 24 February post on FYI, which reports on federal science policy. Both FYI and Physics Today are published by the American Institute of Physics.