Robust investment in R&D is critical to ensuring a nation’s leadership in science, technology, and innovation. The United States can no longer take its leadership position in any of these categories for granted. While many in Congress understandably do not want to impoverish the next generation of Americans by saddling them with unsustainable debt loads, if they try to address the debt by slashing productive investments in the future, they will end up impoverishing future generations of Americans just the same (and likely worse so). Therefore, Congress and the Administration should commit to restoring the R&D funds imperiled by the current sequestration and to more broadly maintain stable and robust funding for federal R&D, keeping the United States on a path to consistently meet the stated target of investing 3 percent of U.S. GDP in R&D annually.

Federal agencies and the nation's universities perform 70 percent of all basic R&D in the United States. Additionally, corporate spending on basic and applied research as a share of total corporate R&D actually fell by 3.6 percent from 1991 to 2008. What money the private sector is investing actually goes to the development of ideas they get from the knowledge mountain. Moreover, every dollar of federal investment induces the private sector to invest an additional 27 cents on R&D.

So wake up and stop complaining about innovation stagnation and focus on a real solution: dramatically increasing federal support for scientific and engineering research.