The New Currency of Power

Science and technology have often come to policymakers’ rescue when the United States was worried about threats to national security or competitiveness—think of the US response to Sputnik, or more recently, the CHIPS and Science Act after the COVID-19 pandemic. But industry, not government, is now the biggest funder of scientific research and technological development. How can the country coordinate this vast and unwieldy conglomerate in order to maintain its global preeminence? Fortunately, the scientific enterprise has been continually reinventing itself for decades, and essays in the Winter 2025 issue document this process and consider what insights we might glean for the future.