As the U.S. Cuts R&D Spending, China Is Raising Its Stake

As a percentage of total federal spending, research and development is at its lowest levels since 1956, the year before the Soviets launched Sputnik. The past five years have seen a particularly sharp drop: Federal funding for R&D in areas such as medicine, defense, energy, and agriculture has dropped 10 percent since 2009, adjusted for inflation, according to a new analysis from the Congressional Budget Office. There’s no sign that will be reversed in the next congressional session. The most recent proposal by Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) suggests government should be “paring back applied and commercial research and development” and leaving it to the private sector.

As chair of the House subcommittee responsible for the National Institutes of Health, former Illinois Representative John Porter, a Republican, led a successful effort to double the NIH budget between 1998 and 2004, a period when federally funded researchers completed mapping the human genome. “What’s really different now is that people don’t work together like they used to” in Congress, says Porter, now chairman of Research!America, a nonprofit that lobbies for increased public funding for medical research.