When Sheldon mocks Howard as a "repairman" on The Big Bang Theory, the show buries an easily overlooked fact: the engineer at the bottom of the pecking order is, of the four friends, the one who contributes the most to American national power. A fictional quarrel mirrors a real problem — the U.S. research system, built eighty years ago, was born with an inbuilt bias toward science and against engineering.
A report from ITIF (the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation) says it bluntly: this model can no longer beat China.
Bush's Legacy: The Birth of the Linear Funnel
During World War II, three inventions — radar, penicillin, and the atomic bomb — drove home to the United States the decisive role of science and technology in national power. After the war, Vannevar Bush, the head of wartime research, submitted the celebrated report that laid down the postwar order — Science: The Endless Frontier. It inaugurated a paradigm led by scientists rather than steered by national goals: the government simply writes the checks, scholars explore out of curiosity, and projects are judged with papers as their KPI.
At the core of this design is a linear logic: basic research → applied research → commercial development. The government funds only the leftmost segment — because the cycles are long and the returns uncertain, private capital will not touch it. As for how the budget is divided? The principal investigator decides, effectively a king within his own domain. The state has no right of acceptance review, and officials are kept outside the door.
Two Cracks in the Model
The first crack comes from the history of science and technology itself. The steam engine gave rise to thermodynamics, and the telescope to optics — in practice it has more often been technology that leads science, not the other way around. Much of the nourishment for basic research has to come from industry; without feedback from the real world, theory becomes an exercise behind closed doors.
The second crack comes from Pasteur's Quadrant. When research is mapped onto a two-dimensional matrix — one axis "understanding underlying principles," the other "practical application" — the innovations that have contributed most to humanity turn out to sit right at the intersection. Pasteur studied the principles of microbiology to keep wine from souring; pursuing a utilitarian goal, he made discoveries in basic science, and then gave industry pasteurization in return. This logic finds no place in Bush's linear model.
The Fivefold Critique
Building on these blind spots, ITIF dissects the failure points of the current system along five dimensions.
First, science is prized and engineering slighted.
In the text of the Bush report, "science" appears 119 times and "technology" only 5. Less than 16 percent of federal research funding flows to engineering. But theoretical breakthroughs without industrial production are like Sheldon with string theory and no spacecraft.
Second, the valley of death between academic output and industrial landing.
What the government funds is research at the concept stage; what the private sector picks up is mature technology that already has a working prototype. The territory in between is covered by no funding, and large numbers of results die there. Even more ironically, basic research that American industry cannot absorb spills over to countries such as China — the United States has been paying to do other people's basic research for them.
Third, the scope of funding is too broad.
There is no focus on the industries that play a decisive role in economic strength. In Israel and South Korea, industrial technology R&D accounts for 30 percent of government R&D budgets; in the United States, the figure is only 1 percent.
Fourth, industry participation is too low.
After World War II the government took on the research bill, and industry's share of contributions fell to 3 percent in the 1970s. Today it stands at only about 6 percent.
Fifth, funding cycles are too short.
Projects must repeatedly reapply for renewal, making it hard to sustain major, complex challenges. China's stable funding mechanism, by contrast, provides continuous cover for high-risk, high-reward projects.
The Turn Toward a Wartime System
ITIF calls for building a new paradigm. The goal is clear: defeat China in the techno-economic war. The standard is equally clear: the closer a project's cooperation with industry and the more aggressive its commercialization, the stronger the support it receives. Fields that are of no use to the wartime backstop — the social sciences, for instance — will have to excuse themselves: funding is limited.
The report urges the United States to learn from China: build research centers rather than orbiting around individual professors' projects; reform doctoral education around industry's needs instead of purely training academic scholars. It also advocates tracking China's early-stage research moves — not noticing things only after results have landed, but anticipating technological change in advance from patent and funding trends.
The American media constantly criticize the Trump administration for declaring war on science. More precisely, what it has declared war on is an academic system centered on scientist self-governance, devoted to free exploration, and open to the world. Replacing it will be a wartime science-and-technology system with politics at the helm, steering the allocation of funds to make science submit once again to the national will.
The road the United States now wants to travel — "politics in command, industry-oriented, driven by national goals" — is the road China has already been walking for decades. The Bush paradigm, which endured for eighty years, is being ended by the hands of its own believers — not because conservatives dislike science, but because this liberal model can no longer deliver national power once industry has hollowed out.