Innovation powers competitiveness and boosts living standards. Science and technology, in turn, are key enablers of innovation. This premise helped drive robust federal investment in science and technology in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s that fueled our post-war prosperity. It set the stage for the IT revolution, advances in life sciences, and the creation of millions of jobs and thousands of companies in the 1990s. But today we are shortchanging our future. The United States is now just eighth among OECD countries in R&D as a share of GDP. A key reason is that federal R&D investment grew in constant dollars at just 0.3 percent per year from 1987 to 2008. To restore federal support for research as a share of GDP to 1987 levels