Summary
Last week, President Joe Biden unveiled a proposed 2022 budget for the U.S. government that would boost federal spending on R&D by 9% to $171 billion, including what he calls “the biggest increase in non-defense [R&D] spending on record.” The plan would put an unprecedented emphasis on translating scientific discoveries into practical tools for fighting climate change and disease, bolstering the economy and security, and tackling other issues. The budget proposes adding a new technology director to the National Science Foundation, for example, and creating three new agencies, modeled after the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, designed to invest in high-risk, potentially high-payoff research. The budget’s emphasis on applied research suggests the Biden administration “is, to some extent, thinking about science as more of a problem-solving enterprise [than] a discovery enterprise,” says David Hart, an R&D policy specialist at George Mason University.
