If you were someone who listened intently to the presidential debate last week with ears cocked for policy substance, you probably weren’t totally disappointed. Based on what the two candidates said, a second Biden term would include efforts to expand the Affordable Care Act and childcare, as well as raising taxes on the rich. As for Trump, more tax cuts and tariffs, less immigration. Of course, either candidate’s plans would hinge on the makeup of Congress.
So here’s an idea that might work no matter who serves their second presidential term and whether Democrats or Republicans run the House and Senate. It’s based on the thesis presented in my 2023 book, The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised. Among various reasons that might explain decades of disappointing productivity growth: too little federal spending on scientific research and too many regulations that make it costly and time-consuming to build in atoms rather than bits.
Both issues, I think, have gained added salience in recent years. Competition with China suggests the US needs to double down on its historic economic strengths, with science an obvious one. And climate change has finally awakened Democrats to the need to generate massively more clean energy, and to how environmental regulations can be a bottleneck.
So what about the Energy and Security Act of 2025? The first part would feature a massive deregulatory agenda centered around permitting reform that would especially help build clean energy infrastructure. Key elements would include limiting judicial delays on federally approved projects, simplifying approvals for environmentally benign projects, and empowering federal agencies to overrule state permit denials.
As James Coleman, a nonresident senior fellow at AEI and a law professor at Southern Methodist University, explains in his recent paper, “Permitting the Energy Transition,” the clean energy transition, generously funded by the Inflation Reduction Act, faces a paradoxical challenge: The infrastructure required for cleaner energy sources is particularly vulnerable to slow government-approval processes. Each of these projects — including power lines for solar and wind, mining operations for critical minerals, large-scale solar and wind installation, and (we can hope) nuclear power facilities — “will face serious hurdles acquiring the federal, state, local, and tribal permits that they need to operate,” Coleman writes. (I would love to toss a carbon tax in there, too, as a way of reworking the IRA).
And for the second part of my Energy and Security Act of 2025, you might be thinking, “Hey, didn’t we already boost science funding with the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022?” Not really, it turns out. In a piece that echoes the point made in my book, University of Arizona astronomer Chris Impey writes for The Conversation that federal R&D funding as a percentage of GDP has dropped from 1.2 percent in 1987 to under 0.8 percent. That places the US a mediocre 12th globally. What’s more, Congress reduced appropriations for science at many top government agencies, including the National Science Foundation’s budget down eight percent and NASA’s science budget down six percent.
Impey:
Meanwhile, America’s main geopolitical rival is rising fast. China has eclipsed the United States in high-impact papers published, and China now spends more than the United States on university and government research. If the U.S. wants to keep its status as the world leader in scientific research, it’ll need to redouble its commitment to science by appropriately funding research.
Redouble? Maybe “retriple” if we want to turn to Space Age levels of R&D funding, which would be my preference. More science investment and permitting reform should be a doable lift, given our history of weak productivity, our thirst for lots of clean energy, and the absolute need for the US to remain the world’s technological leader.
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