TECH EROSION

Under the Trump administration, America's historical advantages are deteriorating rapidly. Sustaining innovation -the source of America's prosperity -requires actively defending institutions, not protecting industries

- The writer is Associate Professor of AI & Work at the Oxford Internet Institute

From Sputnik in the 1950s to Japan’s electronics boom in the 1980s, Americans have repeatedly feared losing their technological edge to foreign rivals.

Each time, though, the US responded by doubling down on its strengths-attracting global talent, investing in cutting-edge research, enforcing competition (antitrust) law and ultimately emerged stronger. Today, however, the gravest threat to America's tech leadership isn't another Sputnik or Sony; it's the internal erosion of core advantages. President Donald Trump's policies almost seem designed to dismantle the very pillars of US innovation.

The first pillar is America's research institutions. During the Cold War, a bipartisan consensus supported ambitious programs such as the Apollo program and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Researchers and investigators enjoyed considerable intellectual autonomy. Seminal precursors to the modern internet - J. C. R. Licklider's concept of “interactive computing” and the ARPANET packet-switching network - originated within a deliberately loose federal/ university lattice linking Stanford, MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, Columbia, and other campuses.

But the Trump administration's spending cuts have undermined this model: the budgets for the National Science Foundation, NASA's science directorate, and the National Institutes of Health face reductions of 56%, nearly 50%, and about 40%, respectively. Such deep cuts, together with political litmus tests for research grants, will suffocate the ecosystem on which breakthrough discoveries depend.