US Is Faulted for Risking Edge in R&D

With Asia emerging as the world’s powerhouse of research and development, the US risks losing its position as a magnet for the world’s best academic researchers, according to a report "The Future Postponed" published on April 27 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The MIT authors warned that the US government was spending an ever-smaller percentage of its budget on basic research and development, fundamental exploration in a variety of fields that lays the groundwork for commercial products that may not emerge for years or decades, if ever.

The cutbacks might appear to be economical, but the report says they come at a high cost to both national prestige and long-term economic opportunity. “We are undercutting ourselves by not supporting basic science,” said Andrew Lo, a finance professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management who helped write the report. The report lays out the funding challenges for research in 15 areas as diverse as plant sciences and robotics. It comes as lawmakers are completing the next federal budget and is, to a certain extent, directed at policy makers, Lo said.

In 1968, the US spent 9.1 percent of the federal government’s annual budget on R&D, or $16.2 billion out of $178 billion, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Today the percentage has shrunk to 3.6 percent, or $134.2 billion of the $3.8 trillion 2015 budget. Though the US leads the world in total R&D outlays, Europe and Asia have been raising their government investment. The Battelle Memorial Institute, a basic-research lab, and R&D Magazine estimated in 2013 that China would spend more than $600 billion annually on R&D by the early 2020s, making it the world’s biggest such investor. The same report estimated that US R&D spending would total $465 billion, or 2.8 percent of gross domestic product, in 2014. For China, spending was pegged at $284 billion, or 2 percent of GDP.