Should the US increase government R&D and energy research funding to compete with China?

Andrew Ng · Nov 17, 2025

If America stops investing in attracting global talent, that would be an unforced error, and damaging university research funding would also be very unfortunate

Attracting talent has been one of America's huge competitive advantages, and higher-education resources are what train grad students and sustain science

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David Frankel · Aug 8, 2026

The US is underspending on R&D and energy research relative to China, and the Trump administration's cuts to research funding are a serious negative

DARPA-style R&D finds its way into every nook and cranny of the economy, and cutting spend that flows back into society is problematic

Scope: concedes universities have squandered a lot of the money

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Richard Socher · Aug 18, 2023

Governments should fund science and especially open science, but they are structurally bad at funding uncertain research because failures draw taxpayer complaints and force more bureaucracy

When a funded project doesn't work out, taxpayers complain that their money was wasted, which pushes the process toward bureaucracy

24:17 Government funding of uncertain research suffers structural bureaucratic risk aversion

Martin Casado · Jul 28, 2025

The US should make AI a national priority the way China does—funding it like crazy, involving the national labs and academia, and pursuing both open and closed efforts

The US did exactly this during the nuclear simulation era, when the same fears about compute proliferation existed; by choosing to lead and funding academia and the labs, the US won and controlled the technical discourse of the planet, and now it wants to put its head in the sand instead

29:59 Fund ai as a national priority like the nuclear simulation era

Martin Casado · Jul 28, 2025

The US should fund academia and the national labs as much or more than it does, and simultaneously the funding system needs structural change because indirect costs have gotten way out of hand

Indirect costs are a long-standing bipartisan problem—Obama tried and failed to address them—and every researcher he knows agreed they were terrible until Trump was the one doing it; but shifts in funding are genuinely disruptive, so the right path through is complex

31:38 Fund academia and labs more while fixing bloated indirect costs