Losing Government Innovators

An ideological current gained traction in the last quarter of the twentieth century in the United States, a growing claim that true innovation is a property of the private sector. Associated with the slow beginnings of a war on government spending, this perspective ignored the mid-century achievements of the Manhattan Project, Project Apollo, or the Cancer Moonshot and drove home a different message. Government agencies are slow, wasteful, and unnecessarily bureaucratic. When it comes to innovation, government is the problem, not the solution.

This is a fantasy, as scholarship shows. Most of the innovations we believe are emblematic of a boldly innovative private sector—Silicon Valley, artificial intelligence, electric or autonomous vehicles, spacecraft—are the result of government investment, stimulus, even regulation. Government provides the seed funding for risky technical endeavors or promises a procurement contract when the innovation cycle is complete. Government directives, meanwhile, ensure that private-sector activities are harnessed in the public interest.

This is especially the case at the National Institutes of Health. Natalie B. Aviles has studied its Cancer Institute assiduously as a sociologist for many years, documenting its track record for innovation. There are the extraordinary discoveries such as the viral causes of particular cancers. There are the revolutionary vaccines that shield us from HPV or HIV. And there is also organizational innovation in the role of the “scientist-bureaucrat” that Aviles recounts in “How Federal Science Agencies Innovate in the Public Interest” (Issues, Fall 2024).

These individuals are expertly skilled at navigating the requirements of public-sector oversight in such diverse areas as relating to congressional committees and managing governance and agency politics. They are no less skilled at balancing this with the need for scientifically and technically valid results, work that stood up to peer review and answered basic scientific questions about the mechanisms and etiologies of diseases and their remedies. Scientist-bureaucrats innovate, too, through unique licensing agreements that allow the private sector to capitalize on discovery without closing down competition, again in the public interest.

The scientist-bureaucrats that Aviles extols so brilliantly are soon to be relegated to the dustbin of history. The United States recently held an election whose implications for government-sponsored research in science, technology, and medicine are earth-shaking and profound. The postwar era of scientific enthusiasm is finally over. The next few years promise to dismantle the very organizations and systems that Aviles shows have reliably delivered both scientific discoveries and miraculous cures, underwriting public, private, political, and personal wins for a century. In advance of this change, experts are decrying the coming degradation of public health and safety.

Less obvious are the implications of Aviles’s argument: that this slash-and-burn approach to government is, ironically, bad for innovation.

Janet Vertesi