The Impact Of Each Presidential Candidate On America’s Innovation

America has had an enormous research and development system since the end of World War II. This vast national innovation capacity was amassed through one of the largest public investments in the nation’s history coupled with a necessity to develop technologically during the post-war power struggle. From the post-war era to around 2016, America maintained an almost hegemonic position as the world’s forefront producer of scientific research. Today, America is still second place in total number of published annual science and engineering articles and is arguably still the world’s global innovation leader, due to its central position in the world’s innovation pipeline and its enormous innovation index score for a country of its size. For both candidates, promises surrounding the funding and national growth of basic science have taken a backseat to promises surrounding the creation of a domestic manufacturing boom. Both candidates still, ultimately, have to manage preserving and entrenching this position in a world of far more global scientific competition than their predecessors had to deal with.

Vice President Kamala Harris has pledged to continue her predecessor’s investments in American companies. This includes the Department Of Commerce, which has already poured $504 million into 12 major American tech hubs while also adding $54 million in funding for the Small Business Innovation Research program, which will help smaller companies obtain the necessary capital to research. Harris will likely maintain and expand these programs with the goals of establishing a large number of regional hubs of innovation and enhancing America’s existing scientific network. Harris also worked with Biden to pass the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act, which provided direct funding for research to many U.S. semiconductor firms and corporations. However, the Biden administration, despite promising to double NSF funding from nine billion dollars to $18 billion over the course of five years, slashed the NSF budget by eight percent in 2024 and only requested a three percent increase for Fiscal Year 2025. Nevertheless, they did still provide overwhelming increases in public funding for research and development. 

Former President Trump, meanwhile, has taken almost the exact opposite pathway to improving American innovation. For every year that he was in office, the executive branch requested an NSF budget cut. Congress refused to grant this, instead increasing the NSF’s budget an average of 6.8 percent per year, but his initial intention of reducing government spending reveals an apathetic attitude towards advancing the American science industry. Many American scientists fear a second Trump term due to his distrust in scientific expertise and the censorship he perpetuated. This includes director of The Climate Science Legal Defense Fund Lauren Kurtz, who mentioned that “[she] think[s] it was very hard to be a scientist in the Trump administration—a climate scientist for sure.” The risk of professional retaliation for making scientific conclusions was fairly high. While this has a greater impact on public health and climate experts as opposed to engineers, less credible public health and climate data from the scientific community as a whole may eventually damage the capacity of the total nation’s innovation.

While the candidates have essentially directly opposite policies on domestic innovation, they do agree that America needs to do a better job at maintaining its technological lead from rivals. This includes restricting China, specifically, from obtaining specialty manufacturing tools that they could utilize for semiconductor, high level computing, biotech research purposes, or procuring strategic technologies—particularly in the so-called industries of the future: AI, quantum science, advanced manufacturing, biotech and advanced communications. Both presidential candidates also have to tackle a fairly bipartisan push to make U.S. and China scientific collaborations more difficult and subject to more scrutiny. This is a relatively difficult policy to implement correctly, as refusing to collaborate with China risks a significant slowdown in pace of American technological innovation, especially if greater restrictions are placed on what projects Chinese immigrants can work on. 

            Venture capital (VC) firms—the corporations that generally directly invest in companies at the forefront of technical innovation and therefore benefit the most directly from a higher pace of Big Tech innovation—are heavily divided on which candidate to support. The reasons to support Trump include his promises to cut taxes, especially for corporations and the wealthy, along with policies that will hopefully drive stock market values. On the other hand, the VC firms that support Harris broadly view her as the long term pick for America’s future technological dominance due to her willingness to put public funding behind mobilizing America's research base. 

             Harris may be the stronger choice because America’s dominance in this sector was built by a public effort, which could not have been mobilized without government spending on research. Trump’s tax cuts would likely prevent the government from increasing the amount of money it can invest into research and development. If the tax cuts remove enough revenue, the government could eventually be forced to significantly reduce the number of grants they can award, preventing smaller companies from pursuing research entirely. America’s current innovation leadership is critical to the continuing growth of the economy and continuing the growth of the American standard of living; thus, it is our responsibility to care about each candidate's policies regarding scientific innovation, and vote accordingly.