Policy grandees sound alarm over Chinese challenge to US R&D

Calls for step change in funding as US reaches ‘tipping point’ in global research leadership

Current and former policymakers have warned that the United States is on the brink of losing its position as the global leader in R&D to China, calling for dramatic escalations in federal research funding in response.

“The nation seems oblivious to the consequences of what is occurring,” Neal Lane, former director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Norman Augustine, former under secretary of the Army, said in a 30 September report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Baker Institute at Rice University.