In a first-ever “State of the Science” address at the end of June, National Academy of Sciences president Marcia McNutt warned that the U.S. was ceding its global scientific leadership to other countries—highlighting China in particular. McNutt, a widely respected geophysicist, said this slippage could make it harder for the U.S. to maintain the strength of its economy andprotect its national security. She also laid out a provisional plan of action to reverse the decline.
The June 26 speech served as a scientific parallel to the State of the Union address by the U.S. president and came from the chief of a body originally chartered to provide nonpartisan advice on science and technology to the nation’s government. It surveyed the strengths and weaknesses of the current scientific landscape and underscored an urgent need for a new coordinated approach to research and development.
“It’s critically important we keep shouting [this message] from the rooftop,” says Carrie Wolinetz, a science policy expert who has previously advised the White House and the National Institutes of Health. Similar sentiments have circulated in policymaking circles for a few years now, she points out, but they have yet to gain traction among government officials and members of the public.
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In her address, McNutt presented a flurry of figures that indicated a slump in American science. The U.S. has a declining share of the most cited science papers, for instance, and the rate at which new drugs and technologies hit the market has flatlined over the past several decades. The U.S. still spends the most money out of any other country on research and development, but China is set to soon outpace those investments. China currently files more patents than the U.S. and hosts more than a quarter of the world’s clinical trials, as compared to only 3 percent in 2013.
“U.S. science is perceived to be—and is—losing the race for global STEM leadership,” McNutt said. A country’s strength in science, she argued, shapes its defense capacities as well as its ability to spread its values abroad.
McNutt suggested that the country’s failure to innovate and stay ahead ran counter to its history. In the decades after World War II, the U.S. achieved widespread excellence in the sciences by investing heavily in both basic and applied research and soliciting foreign talent. Landmark institutions such as the National Science Foundation and NASA emerged during this period, as did the country’s pattern of dominating the Nobel Prizes.
Then, as federal investment dipped in the 1980s, the scientific landscape grew more complex and difficult to coordinate. Companies and philanthropies began funding and conducting greater portions of research and development. This shift affected which scientific questions were addressed, how they got answered and what forms of knowledge entered the public arena. The private sector tends to pursue narrower, applied interests, McNutt explained, and to keep its findings to itself. When companies take over entire fields—as they did with genetically modified organisms and are currently doing with artificial intelligence—research sometimes rushes ahead in a way that increases the public’s distrust of science and technology, she noted.
Public math and science proficiency fell during the 1980s as well, bringing fewer Americans into the STEM workforce.
McNutt followed her recitation of problems with suggested solutions, describing what a revitalized scientific landscape might require. She did not call for more government investment but instead focused on boosting the public’s support for research—and greater public involvement—as well as making the most out of existing science funding.
Of utmost importance, McNutt emphasized, was improving K–12 STEM education. By international standards, American students perform in the middle of the range in science; they are below average in math. She noted that foreign-born individuals play a key role in maintaining U.S. STEM prowess, accounting for 19 percent of the nation’s STEM workforce and 43 percent of its STEM Ph.D. population. This is a cause for concern, McNutt said, because as other nations rise in the ranks, the U.S. will need to compete with them for talent.
McNutt recommended that schools nurture students’ innate curiosity for science and use technologies such as AI to ease the teaching burden. Too often, she said, students in large classes are taught to view science as a collection of facts rather than a process of discovery.
To maximize the return on current research investment, the U.S. could benefit from more coordination, she added. The European Union and China both have strategic research visions that help them meet specific goals. The U.S. could develop such a plan to patches gaps left by local priority setting, she said. And industries and universities could establish partnerships to both advance research and make academia more financially sustainable for students of all backgrounds.
E. Albert Reece, a scholar in residence at the National Academy of Medicine, who is studying the challenges the biomedical research field faces, says the committee he helps staff has also gone back and forth on whether to request more government funding but ultimately decided it was better to justify the merits of existing support. “We need to demonstrate that we are using up all the available dollars now and are making progress,” he says. “Then, when we come back later [to ask for money, the federal agencies] will love that.”
Wolinetz, too, views the decision not to call for more funding as a shrewd tactical one. “As critical as continued and increasing investment in research is, it should be a means to an end,” she emphasizes. “Step one is: What’s the bold vision of science we’re trying to create as a country? I do believe if we build it, [investors] will come.”
She and others feel the time has come for even more “radical” ideas than those McNutt outlined. “I, for one, believe we need to go faster and stronger,” says Mary Woolley, president of Research!America, regarding efforts to rehaul the scientific landscape.
Woolley says she appreciates McNutt’s emphasis on a strategic research plan and the reinvigoration of public education but fears progress on the latter front will require a heavy lift, given how difficult it is to make countrywide systemic change. In 2005 the National Academy of Sciences issued a report on the worrisome state of K–12 STEM education entitled Rising Above the Gathering Storm. Five years later, the authors updated the report and subtitled the new version Rapidly Approaching Category 5. But the country has improved the educational system in the past, Woolley says, giving her hope the U.S. can do it again.
In 2022 Congress passed a law in line with many of McNutt’s recommendations: the CHIPS and Sciences Act. The statute—which McNutt called a “good start”—promised not only to revive homegrown semiconductor production for computers but also to invest $170 billion in broad research funding over the next five years, as well as to expand STEM education on the K–12, college and graduate levels. Almost two years since its passage, however, budget constraints have instead led scientific agencies to receive less and less support.
The outcome of the upcoming presidential election may shape the future of any broad federal scientific program as well. During the past four years, the Biden administration has supported modest increases to several scientific agencies’ budgets, including those of the National Institutes of Health and the Environmental Protection Agency. In 2020, the last year of his term, former president Donald Trump proposed widespread slashes, although those were dismissed by Congress.