Today, Drew Endy urges US policymakers to reconsider public support for basic research so that the US does not fall behind China. Darrell Duffie floats his idea for an entirely new blockchain-linked official US security. And Elizabeth Economy and Declan Herrera explore the full way China is working to overmatch the US across science, energy production, research and AI.
Frontier Technology
In Freedom Frequency, Hoover Senior Fellow Drew Endy extols the scientific pioneers who adapted, invented, and managed their way toward the “endless frontier” prophesied by Vannevar Bush. Today, however, with support for basic research threatened and a scientific establishment mired in inertia, the United States needs to rethink that frontier to avoid falling behind China and missing out on opportunities still unimagined. The front line of that new frontier, Endy writes, is biology: the manipulation of elements and DNA for food, weapons, technology, medicine, and even life itself. And, as in that first “endless” arc of invention, America must devote itself to a whole-of-nation march toward that frontier. Read more here.
The Economy
In the Financial Times, Senior Fellow Darrell Duffie presents his idea to develop a new kind of blockchain-linked, official US security. Calling it Ports (Perpetual Overnight Rate Treasury Securities), he describes it in the piece as a “dollar-denominated security that combines the safety of Treasury credit, the liquidity of overnight funding from the Fed and the transparency of blockchain settlement.” He says this new security could reduce the need to issue longer-term securities and “strengthen the resilience of both traditional and digital-dollar markets, benefiting not only US taxpayers but also the stability of the global financial system.” Read more here. [subscription required.]
Confronting and Competing with China
In Defining Ideas, Hoover Senior Fellow Elizabeth Economy and Declan Herrera argue that while Trump’s 2025 “America First” tech push—consisting of deregulation, energy expansion, the new Stargate initiative, and support for fintech and drones—signals ambition, the US still lacks a comprehensive strategy to outpace China. China appears to be surging to the forefront in research and development, in its academic sector’s volume of publications in leading journals, and in the number of patents its firms and workers file annually. China also appears to be besting the US in the number of STEM PhDs issued, the deployment of clean energy, and the production of electric vehicles. The authors warn US science funding cuts and new immigration barriers could disadvantage the US in its competition with China. They urge the US to expand fellowships and work visas for high-skilled workers, boost public support for basic science and clean energy, scale public‑private partnerships like CHIPS, and build allied “trusted tech” stacks with like-minded partners. Read more here.
Fiscal Policy
At Senior Fellow Joshua D. Rauh’s Substack, Rauh, Research Fellow Benjamin Jaros and Policy Fellow Daniel Heil write about reforming the performance and mandate of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). They point out that the models both organizations use to make their fiscal projections are usually not made public, are changed quickly and sometimes without warning, and often assign confidence to their projections that the authors argue is not warranted by the data. In response, Rauh, Jaros, and Heil want an ombudsman assigned to oversee the CBO, for both entities to release their models publicly, and for the mandates of both the CBO and JCT to be narrowed to make them more effective. Read more here.
Revitalizing History
The Hoover History Lab (HHL), in partnership with Conexus Financial, a private Australia-based media company that organizes educational conferences for the world’s largest institutional investors, held a conference September 16–18 for chief investment officers and other senior investment professionals from the world’s largest pools of capital—sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, endowments—representing more than 20 countries. This highly influential group of decision makers overseeing trillions of dollars in investment capital convenes multiple times a year at university settings including Stanford, Harvard, Oxford, and Singapore, a model conceived by Senior Fellow Stephen Kotkin, HHL’s director. Read more here.
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