Where New Things Come From, And Whether We Can Still Make Them.

Innovation policy is what the federal government does to ensure that new ideas — scientific, technical, commercial — emerge, scale, and benefit the public that funded them. American innovation policy has been historically successful (the internet, GPS, the moon landing, mRNA vaccines) and is now under-resourced, uncoordinated, and unevenly captured. The proposals here address the administrative architecture of federal R&D — unified grant applications, a single researcher profile system, independent oversight of the $195 billion annual federal investment — alongside intellectual property reform (patent troll litigation, AI training data, copyright orphan works), AI governance, and the climate transition.