I recently caught a Bloomberg interview with authors of a new book, Priority Technologies: Ensuring U.S. Security and Shared Prosperity, edited by MIT's Elisabeth Reynolds with a foreword by Nobel laureate economist Simon Johnson. Interesting enough that I went and read it. The book covers six technology sectors where the U.S. must lead or fall behind: semiconductors, biomanufacturing, critical minerals, drones, quantum computing, and advanced manufacturing. All of it worth your time. But the argument that stayed with me wasn't about any specific technology. It was about what actually produces technological leadership in the first place – and what we're currently doing to undermine it.
The thing private capital won't fund
Before World War II, the federal government spent almost nothing on R&D. The war forced the issue. Radar, synthetic rubber, penicillin, the Manhattan Project -- these weren't market outcomes; they were the products of deliberate, federally funded science. Congress recognized this, and the government-university research partnership was institutionalized in the 1940s, driven largely by then-MIT president Vannevar Bush.
Johnson's framing in the book's foreword is worth sitting with: "Vannevar Bush realized it wasn't about a stock of technology, it was about a flow of innovation." By some estimates, federal investment in non-defense R&D has accounted for up to 25 percent of U.S. economic growth since World War II. That flow starts in university labs.
Here's the part that critics of government research spending almost always miss: the value isn't just in what you set out to discover. It's in what you find along the way. ARPANET was a military communications project; nobody imagined it would become the commercial internet. GPS was a defense system before it became the foundation of the entire ride-sharing and logistics economy. Decades of NIH-funded basic research into mRNA as a biological mechanism preceded by many years anyone thinking to use it for vaccines. The serendipity isn't a bug in the system. It's arguably the most valuable feature.
Private capital is terrible at funding this kind of work, and for entirely rational reasons. Basic research is long-horizon, uncertain, and the returns -- when they come -- often accrue broadly rather than to the investor. A venture fund that backs a company expecting a 7-year return is already pushing its LPs' patience. Funding a university lab that might produce something transformative in 20 years, possibly in a direction nobody anticipated, is just not how private capital works. Government is the only institution with both the mandate and the time horizon to make these bets. When government stops making them, the pipeline doesn't slow down gradually. It empties.
The current administration's proposed budgets are cutting science agency funding across the board -- NSF, NIH, DARPA, NASA, all taking hits. I'll say it plainly: defunding the federal-university research partnership isn't trimming waste. It's draining the pipeline for the next decade of innovation, including in the six technology sectors the book identifies as most critical to national and economic security.
Talent, domestic and imported
American universities and research institutions have produced extraordinary scientists and engineers -- full stop. The domestic talent base is the foundation of U.S. technological leadership and shouldn't get lost in any discussion of immigration. The question isn't whether American-born scientists are capable. Obviously they are. The question is whether the country is developing enough of them across these fields to meet the competitive moment, and whether it's making itself attractive to the best talent that's available globally.
On both counts, the answer is currently no. Priority Technologies flags this as a cross-cutting theme across all six sectors: the U.S. faces a fundamental workforce shortage, compounded by "radically reduced immigration" and demographic trends that neither domestic education reform nor AI will fully offset in the near term.
Historically, international scientific talent has been a force multiplier for American domestic research, not a substitute for it. Foreign-born graduate students working alongside American researchers, often staying to start companies or join the workforce, have added to what was already a strong base. In 2019, 41 percent of all U.S. STEM PhD graduates were foreign-born visa holders -- and roughly 90 percent of them stayed in the U.S. to work after graduating, many going on to found companies or anchor research programs. That's not a replacement story. That's an amplification story, and it's one the U.S. built its post-war technological lead on.
China understands this dynamic well, which is why it's now actively working the other side of the ledger. Visa restrictions, rising scrutiny of Chinese-born researchers, and a general climate of unwelcome are pushing talented Chinese scientists – including those at MIT who would previously have stayed – to pursue careers elsewhere. Outstanding Chinese scientists at MIT have recently decided to take their careers to countries they view as more welcoming, often back to China itself. Beijing is not unhappy about this. A talent pipeline that used to flow strongly toward the U.S. is reversing, and we're providing the pressure.
Former MIT president L. Rafael Reif, whose endorsement appears in the book, was blunt in a recent NPR interview: "Stop attacking immigrants. This country needs them." He also noted that China, which has pursued an explicit "talent first" strategy for over a decade, has consistently graduated more advanced STEM students than the U.S. for the past 15 years and is closing the gap in top-tier research output. The U.S. has a natural advantage China can't replicate: it's historically been the world's top destination for globally mobile scientific talent. That advantage doesn't maintain itself, and it doesn't survive active dismantling.
Quantum as a case study
The book's quantum computing chapter, written by MIT's William Oliver and Jonathan Ruane, is a clean illustration of what's at stake. Quantum computing has near-term potential to accelerate drug discovery, materials science, and energy applications in ways classical computers can't approach. Oliver and Ruane's conclusion: "The country that achieves quantum leadership will gain decisive advantages in these strategically important industries."
The U.S. is currently in a strong position in quantum. Maintaining it requires exactly the combination of sustained federal basic research funding and deep scientific talent that current policy is targeting for cuts. The physics doesn't care about the political calendar.
The decade-long pipeline
What Priority Technologies gets right, and what tends to get lost in budget debates, is how slowly these systems respond to disruption. The semiconductor fabs we're now trying to rebuild domestically -- belatedly, expensively, correctly -- require a trained workforce that takes a decade to develop. The quantum and biotech breakthroughs that matter in 2035 come from graduate students doing basic research funded today. Choke the investment now, and you feel it in 2033, not in the next news cycle.
Reynolds states the stakes plainly in the book's introduction: the U.S. must "build on its decades of experience in developing frontier technologies" -- a measured way of saying that the lead we have today reflects choices made a long time ago, and the lead we'll have (or won't) in 2040 reflects choices being made right now.
Vannevar Bush understood this in 1945. The question is whether anyone in Washington is paying attention in 2026.