The Innovation Agenda

Many have characterized the January 2025 revelation of DeepSeek’s advances in AI compute efficiency as America’s 2025 “Sputnik moment.” In fact, we’ve witnessed several “Sputniks” in recent years, with growing Chinese technological advantage in areas such as energy storage, hypersonic missiles, solar manufacturing, biotechnology, and electric vehicles– indeed, in 37 out of 44 key technologies tracked by one think tank, and 7 out 10 key industries tracked by another institute.

The 1957 launch of Sputnik summoned American technological leadership. America’s response made us the envy of the world: we put Americans on the moon, successfully tackled polio, invented the computer and the semiconductor industries, created photovoltaics and a clean energy economy, and launched the internet. We created ARPA, built the world’s greatest research universities, and attracted the planet’s best and brightest innovators.

To be sure, American companies and their founders still enjoy tremendous success—as measured by multi-billion-dollar valuations and extraordinary wealth accumulation. Beyond Big Tech, however, innovators often struggle—start-up founders increasingly flee high-cost metros like Silicon Valley and Seattle, and shortages of high-skill labor severely constrain domestic growth. “Tech bashing” has become a poll-driven electoral strategy across the ideological spectrum. Under Trump, moreover, our great research institutions and universities have come under assault, and scientific truth falls victim to political opportunism.

America now faces many existential threats that compel a new relationship between our government and our innovation economy. Federal laws must facilitate the innovation needed to tackle our world’s great challenges, such as climate change, global disease and pandemics, and cybersecurity threats, and to do so in an intensely competitive global environment. We can and must empower the innovator without bolstering the oligarchs.

This requires an approach that:

• Recognizes the security and economic imperative of U.S. global leadership and competitiveness.

• Contrasts the Trump Administration’s approach with a renewed focus on openness to ideas, people, and markets.

• Creates a regulatory environment that provides predictability and uniformity.

• Acknowledges the unique capital needs and structure of innovation-focused companies.

• Embraces the tech industry’s historically enlightened self-interest in advocating for pro-immigration, housing, and climate policies.

• Advocates for innovation within the government, to disrupt sclerotic and bureaucratic processes, and expedite decision-making.

Outline

While impossible to present a comprehensive approach to technology regulation and support, this agenda makes a broad attempt at this terrain by diving into the following categories: