itif致科学技术政策办公室关于加快美国科学事业发展的意见

COMMENTS OF ITIF to the Office of Science and Technology Policy Washington, D.C. December 18, 2025 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) is pleased to submit the followingcomments in response to the administration’s Request for Information for Accelerating the AmericanScientific Enterprise. ITIF is an independent, nonprofit, nonpartisan research and educational institute The U.S. scientific enterprise has reached a fork in the road. While previous policy has encouraged principalinvestigators to pursue creativity and curiosity in conducting research, it is clear that this approach has nothad the desired effect on advancing American competitiveness and strengthening America’s position in maximizing national power. The science community must move beyond the linearScience, the EndlessFrontier-model of scientific research, developed and encouraged by Vannevar Bush, and realign scientific Undertaking this shift will mean prioritizing high-impact fields such as engineering, life sciences, andcomputer science over those with a less-direct impact on national competitiveness, and it means more closelyaligning the research and academic community with private industry, prioritizing technology transfer and While we hope the administration will consider ITIF’s comments and recommendations on these issues, wealso would like to urge the administration to consider the bipartisan policy blueprint already developed duringthe first Trump administration in the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) “Return onInvestment Initiative for Unleashing American Innovation” (the Green Paper). The Green Paper outlined aseries of readily executable policy ideas to improve America’s technology transfer ecosystem, increase the (i) What policy changes to Federal funding mechanisms, procurement processes, or partnershipauthorities would enable stronger public-private collaboration and allow America to tap into its vast First and foremost, the United States must recognize that it has already built the world’s most effective systemfor technology commercialization, especially where it pertains to intellectual property (IP)/technologiesderived from federally funded research and development (R&D) conducted at U.S. universities and researchinstitutions. While positive reforms can still be made on the margins, the Trump administration must refrain In September 2025, in anAxiosinterview, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called for the federalgovernment to claim half the patent earnings from university inventions derived in part from federal R&D, erroneously asserting that “the U.S. government is getting no return on the money it invests in federal research.”2Yet the reality is the U.S. taxpayer—and the government—benefits greatly from this R&Dfunding. They benefit first from the extensive innovations produced from the academic tech transfer process,which alone has produced hundreds of life-saving drugs and vaccines, including treatments for breast,ovarian, prostate, and skin cancer, not to mention other breakthroughs in everything from Honeycrisp applesand neoprene to cloud and quantum computing. Second, university IP licensing revenues help fund key innovation-enabling infrastructure at U.S. universities, such as labs, incubators, or innovation accelerators that keep the innovation flywheel churning. Third, the government benefits from the taxes produced by thetrillions in industrial output and millions of jobs created as a result of university tech transfer.3For instance, Similarly, the administration should refrain from proposals to charge patent holders between 1 and 5percent of a patent’s overall value. As ITIF has written, taxing patents would disincentivize innovation and harm American competitiveness all while be extraordinarily difficult to implement.5(It’s difficult enough for the private sector to accurately value IP, let alone a government agency doing so, and especially whendebatable valuations would be tied up in litigation for years.) If the United States wishes to develop more andmore useful IP—which is certainly should as a matter of technology and innovation policy—then increasingthe cost of that IP through an annual tax should be a proposal summarily dispatched. Indeed, the United Do not apply Bayh-Dole march in rights to control the price of resulting products. As late as 1978, the federal government had licensed less than 5 percent of the as many as 30,000 patents it owned.7Most of themlanguished on the shelves of government offices or labs. Congress transformed the situation by passing thebipartisan 1980 Patent and Trademark Law Amendments Act, better known as the “Bayh-Dole Act.” Thelegislation both created a uniform patent policy among the many federal agencies funding research and research.8The Bayh-Dole Act has transformed U.S. universities into engines of innovation, spawning robustacademic technology transfer and commercialization capab