With newly proposed funding cuts to the National Science Foundation (NSF), leaders in government and industry agreed that the United States is struggling to clearly communicate the value of its research investments and translate them into real-world capabilities fast enough.
While the U.S. innovation system remains strong, weak “storytelling” around science funding and persistent gaps between research and deployment threaten its effectiveness, panelists said during a Center for Strategic and International Studies event on Friday.
The Trump administration’s funding proposal for fiscal year 2027 seeks a near 55% budget cut to NSF. While most of those cuts are for biological and engineering sciences, basic quantum information science and artificial intelligence research funding would also be cut by nearly 37% and 32%, respectively.
“It’s a hard story to tell, from the science all the way to the capability that the military really cares about,” said Bess Dopkeen, founder of Keen Edge Strategies and former senior advisor to the under secretary of defense for research and engineering.
“Congress knows the benefit of science … and I hope that … the hill is very interested in making sure that science continues to be funded,” Dopkeen added. “But it is always hard to get people very, very excited about something that’s going to happen in 30 years.”
Larry Schuette, director of global science and technology engagement at Lockheed Martin, agreed with Dopkeen, adding that “our storytelling isn’t nearly as good as our story.”
“I can look at any piece of technology, any piece of capability, and I can devolve out the science that begat it. And in some cases, I know the individual researcher at the university,” Schuette said.
Schuette said political headwinds have made it harder to amplify that message, even when the research pipeline is producing tangible outcomes.
“I think that’s really our challenge going forward, is, ‘how do we tell that shared story in a way that make the public understand that the investment that’s being made at universities in the critical sciences that are needed is working, best?’” he added.
Dopkeen urged researchers, universities, and companies to focus on “telling our stories backwards” – starting with innovations that lawmakers can see today, then linking those outcomes to the university labs, grants, and research that made them possible.
“The company needs to say also, ‘by the way, I’m the CTO [chief technology officer] that came out of this university, and I had this funding, and my professor had this research funding,’” Dopkeen said.
Alongside the communications challenges, Erwin Gianchandani, assistant director of the Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships (TIP) at NSF, pointed to the difficulty of turning scientific discovery into deployable technology.
“There’s a valley of death that exists in between … and it’s not a single valley, it’s multiple micro-valleys that exist,” Gianchandani said. “There is a pretty big gap that exists between that basic science space and where industry actually starts to take it up.”
Gianchandani explained that closing the gap is what his TIP office aims to achieve, noting that if the office doesn’t succeed, it becomes an issue of national security.
“I think is critically important for us to be sure that we are appropriately boosting up, because there are so many entrepreneurs with great ideas, right, who just need that bit of resourcing or that bit of mentoring, or that bit of guidance,” he said.
“If we don’t solve for that … I think we absolutely run the risk of those entrepreneurs finding other investors, and those other investors may not necessarily be the most friendly in terms of what we’re trying to achieve here in the U.S.,” Gianchandani added.
As a solution, he said that NSF is working to reshape the tradtional research pipeline.
“We want to change that linear pathway … [where] you start with discovery science … and then you harness that,” the NSF leader said. Instead, the goal is to integrate real-world needs earlier in the process.
That includes aligning research with defense and industry use cases from the outset, Gianchandani explained.
“What are the real-world use cases … that can help to inform and shape some of that use-inspired research … and accelerate that to actually have impact at the end of the day?” he said.