Senator Jeff Bingaman
Where's Our Competitive Edge?
December 05 / January 06
Volume 3 Number 6
Now is not the time to be complacent: Greater investments in science and technology are needed.
Unquestionably, America today is the world's R&D powerhouse.
There are, however, disturbing indications that U.S. dominance in science and technology is starting to wane. More and more ideas are being generated in laboratories outside our country.
We can no longer take the supremacy of America's scientific and technological enterprise for granted because other nations are on a fast track to overtake the United States in discovery and innovation.
A number of mid-course corrections, new policies, and additional investments will be needed to put us back on the solid path of scientific preeminence which this nation has enjoyed since World War II.
It goes without saying that one of the basic policies of our nation's economic security must be to maintain a sustained investment in science and technology. There is no dispute that science, and the technology that flows from it, are duly recognized as the principal engine of our economic growth.
Nor is there any contention of the fact that America's present strength, prosperity and global preeminence depend directly on fundamental research. The scientific record of the past half century constitutes overwhelming proof. At the present time, we lead the world in such areas as nanoscience, genomics and proteomics, and advanced scientific computing.
Still, there are signs that we are beginning to slip in our leadership role in science. Troubling trends across the R&D spectrum were spotlighted in a report prepared by The National Academies of Science entitled, Rising Above the Gathering Storm—€”Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future.
The report was written in response to a request Senator Lamar Alexander and I sent to the Academy as the co-chairs of the bipartisan Senate Science and Technology Caucus.
The inch-thick report included detailed proposed actions to implement its four overarching recommendations that urge the nation to: 1) increase America's talent pool by vastly improving K-12 mathematics and science education; 2) sustain and strengthen the nation's commitment to long-term basic research; 3) develop, recruit and retain top students, scientists and engineers from the U.S. and abroad; and 4) ensure that the U.S. is the premier place in the world for innovation.
Congressman Sherwood Boehlert, the Chairman of the House Science Committee, stated that "the overarching message of the report is simple and clear, and it's one the Congress had better heed. And the message is this: complacency will kill us. If the United States rests on its withering laurels in this competitive world, we will witness the slow erosion of our pre-eminence, our security and our standard of living. It's a sobering message."
In the area of education, we are now finding that undergraduate science and engineering degrees within the United States are being awarded less frequently than other countries. According to a report by the Future of American Innovation, the ratio of our university degrees in science and engineering now stand at 5.7 per 100 people of college age. Taiwan and South Korea now award 11 per 100, or roughly twice what we produce.
The U.S. share of worldwide undergraduate S&E degrees awarded annually has dropped. In 2000, Asian universities accounted for almost 1.2 million of the world's S&E degrees, and European universities (including Russian and Eastern Europe) accounted for about 850,000 S&E degrees, while North American universities accounted for only about 500,000 degrees.
As for doctoral degrees, the U.S. has a smaller share than both Asia and Europe. In fact, in 2000, about 89,000 of the approximately 114,000 degrees earned worldwide were earned outside the United States.
Countries that once sent their students to the United States are now able to educate them at home. As a result, they have an expanding workforce of undergraduate engineers to staff manufacturing facilities, as well as a growing increase in intellectual property because of a flourishing number of graduate degreed scientists. Lagging international interest in U.S. graduate study is not recovering from record lows. Last year applications dropped another five percent, and the number of Asian students pursing Ph.D.'s in the United States has dropped by 19 percent, while it has doubled in their own countries.
Our science and engineering workforce is aging while many of those overseas are young and vibrant. In fact, more than half of those with science and engineering degrees in our workforce are now over 40.
Another troubling issue is in the area of R&D investment. Currently, the United States invests about 2.7 percent of its GDP in R&D. That is pretty good and it puts us as number five in the world, yet still behind Korea and Japan who invest over three percent.
However, the issue is not to look at the static picture, as scientists and engineers know—€”it is the rate of change. From 1995 through 2001, the United States increased its R&D investments by 34 percent, while the world's fastest growing economies such as China, Korea and Taiwan boosted their R&D investments by a whopping 140 percent. During that same time period, China's R&D percentage of GDP jumped from 0.6 to 1.2 percent—€”still well behind our country—€”but it has doubled in slightly more than a half-dozen years at a 7 percent annual growth rate.
Moreover, considering benchmarks per GDP, federal funding of basic research in engineering and physical sciences has experienced little to no growth for the past three decades. In fact, as a percentage of GDP, federal investment in the physical sciences has declined by 50 percent over the past 30 years, from 0.1 percent per GDP to today's 0.05 percent.
What do these disturbing trends indicate? It means that other nations are coming up fast behind us on the scientific track. The rapidly developing Asian economies are forging ahead, nearly matching their R&D investments with their GDP growth rates, while the United States is lagging behind.
The paradigm of the United States producing cutting edge R&D that is then manufactured in lesser developed countries has been turned on its head. U.S. companies are not waiting for foreign students with visas to come here —€” they are simply building R&D centers over there where the intellectual capital is, bypassing the U.S. visa bottleneck issue that has dramatically constricted the flow of foreign graduate students due to new security screening restrictions.
The question is what are we doing in the R&D arena to reverse the situation because by the time the majority of our policymakers read the handwriting on the wall, their backs will be up against it.
The first thing we can do to shore up research is increase funding but for how much, what research and for how long? That is a hard question for the Congress to answer in programmatic detail, but it seems realistic to me that we should develop a five-year funding profile that grows our long-term basic sciences in the federal science and technology budget by five percent per year.
We can also make some improvements that are not directly related to increasing science funding. I am introducing legislation to offer incentives to our existing science parks to expand while also constructing new ones. The rise of Taiwan's microelectronics miracle can be directly attributed to their government's role—€”not in picking winners and losers—€”but by building the necessary infrastructure allowing competition to flourish through their science parks. The same holds true with India's software science parks and their rise as a world powerhouse in that industry.
In addition, we should modify our R&D tax credits so that participants in a research consortium—€”five or more unrelated companies working on a specific type of mutually beneficial research—€”receive a flat 20 percent research tax credit. We should endorse collaboration to share the cost of research. Furthermore, we should be encouraging at a national level foreign direct investment in the U.S. to locate manufacturing plants that would be built by U.S. or foreign firms overseas. Ideally, the Department of Commerce should administer a program that acts as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation in reverse. It would lay out incentives to encourage U.S. and foreign firms to locate high tech manufacturing in the U.S.
The challenge we face is global in nature and broader in scope than anything we have seen in the past. It will take great determination, considerable resources and a sustained national effort involving academia, industry, along with state and federal governments to ensure that America continues to be the world leader in science and technology.
My greatest fear is that we become so preoccupied with other issues that countries with rapidly developing S&T based economies surpass us and become regional giants influencing the decisions of countries in that region who were staunch allies of the U.S. We must be on alert that these indicators and shortfalls in our scientific enterprise not translate into strategic sources of conflict later, because by the time we recognize that we as a nation have fallen behind, it will cost far more to remedy than it will be to address it head-on today.
America has always been a nation built on hope—€”hope that we can build a prosperous, healthy world for ourselves and for our children. But it is clear that these long-standing American aspirations depend critically on our far-sighted investment in science and technology that lies at the center of this promise. Leadership in science and engineering and the world's best education and training system are essential for ensuring Americans well-paying jobs and essential for our security.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt, warned about Germany's plan to build an atomic weapon, wrote in a secrret letter to J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1943 that "whatever the enemy may be planning, American science will be equal to the challenge." Never has a prediction been so prescient.
We know with every fiber of our being that the dominance of our fundamental research enterprise is a core American strength that must be preserved—€”and we must not let our position erode and compromise our future economic and
national security.
By sustaining our investments in science and engineering research, we can ensure that America remains at the forefront of scientific capability, thereby enhancing our ability to shape and improve our nation's and the world's future.
Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) is the ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
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