Dear Member of Congress:
The 133 undersigned national business, higher education, scientific, patient, and other organizations write to strongly urge you to pass an omnibus FY2015 appropriations bill this year that includes increased investments in scientific research and higher education needed to help close our nation's innovation deficit.
Members of the Senate and House from both political parties have highlighted the need to address the innovation deficit. Congress has already taken some preliminary steps in this direction. In most instances, individual appropriations bills considered by the House and Senate Appropriations Committees would provide for increased investments in scientific research at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, NASA, the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the Department of Defense's science and technology programs, and other federal research agencies. However, none of this matters if Congress makes FY2015 appropriations through a continuing resolution.
As many of us noted in our testimony to the Senate Appropriations Committee earlier this year, the innovation deficit is the widening gap between the actual level of federal government funding for research and higher education and what the investment needs to be if the United States is to remain the world's innovation leader. As the global innovation leader, we produce more discoveries and patents, and more technological and health advances, than any other nation. Economists have made very clear that these science-and engineering-driven advances have fueled most of our nation's economic growth in the decades since World War II. Yet today, our leadership faces a serious challenge from other nations that are rapidly increasing their investments in these critical areas while our own spending lags.
The fact that other nations are building up their research and innovation capabilities is not a bad thing. The world benefits from stronger research and education in other countries as well as our own. What should concern us is that those other nations are doing this while the United States is essentially standing still. This poses a serious challenge to our position as the world's innovation leader, and the economic and national security benefits that flow from it. Global leadership is a race, and we will lose by standing still. Bill Green, former CEO of Accenture, perhaps said it best in 2012: "All these other countries-India, China, Russia, you name it-they aspire to be like us because they realize how we got where we got. It's because of the national research infrastructure and ecosystem we have. They aspire to that and they're going to have that. But we've got to be gone when they get there." As modern Americans, we are accustomed to the economic, health, and national security benefits that emanate from our position as the global innovation leader - and we want our children, and their children, to enjoy them as well. If we lose our global leadership, we will lose the valuable collateral that comes with it, and those losses will occur quickly.
Our nation cannot compete effectively or close its innovation deficit by funding science and higher education through continuing resolutions. Past continuing resolutions have disrupted the scientific grants process, suspended and impaired ongoing research projects, and caused uncertainty to our nation's scientific and innovation enterprise. Other nations are enacting long-term strategic plans and making the necessary investments to out-compete the United States. Meanwhile, our nation is losing ground by insufficiently investing in scientific research and education and shackling itself with visionless continuing resolutions.
Your leadership is needed to make scientific research and higher education a priority in final FY15 omnibus appropriations legislation, and to take real steps this year toward closing the innovation deficit.
