The United States has lost its focus after more than 80 years as the world's undisputed innovation leader, and current policies are making the problem worse rather than better. That is the core argument of L. Rafael Reif, president emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a sweeping essay published in Foreign Affairs, as "Hvylya" reports.
Reif identified three interconnected failures. The first is an assault on basic science: the Trump administration has hollowed out research funding agencies, frozen or terminated university grants, and caused disruptions estimated at $1.4 billion since January 2025. The administration is also trying to replace merit-based funding with what Reif called political favoritism - offering advantages to universities that submit to ideological demands. Climate science and messenger RNA vaccine research are now virtually off-limits to researchers seeking federal support.
The second failure is talent. Foreign-born scientists and entrepreneurs have long anchored U.S. scientific leadership - earning a disproportionate share of doctoral degrees and founding many of the country's most valuable startups. Grant freezes, visa crackdowns, and political attacks on universities are now driving that talent away, with Harvard halving its science PhD admissions and European institutions actively recruiting disaffected American academics.
The third failure is commercialization. The United States still lacks what Reif called "patient capital" - the long-term funding that science-based startups need to cross the gap between a laboratory breakthrough and a working factory. As a result, technologies invented in American labs end up manufactured at scale abroad, handing China near-monopolies in sectors from electric vehicle batteries to solar energy.
Reif proposed creating a government corporation modeled on the Export-Import Bank, with a board serving fixed terms independent of political cycles. It would offer investments, loans, and procurement guarantees to tough-tech startups at their riskiest stages. Federal research found that tariffs - which the current administration promotes as a reindustrialization tool - actually reduce innovation in the long run by decreasing domestic companies' incentives to innovate and shrinking available markets.
Earlier, "Hvylya" examined how China's economic espionage operations have surpassed in scale anything attempted by pre-World War I Germany.