Response to Request for Information: NSF draft 2026 – 2030 Strategic Plan
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), with more than 100,000 members worldwide, is the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society. ACM’s U.S. Technology Policy Committee (USTPC) serves as the focal point for ACM’s interaction with all branches of the U.S. government, the computing community, and the public on policy matters related to information technology.
NSF’s mission for the past 70 years has been to support foundational research in all areas of science, not just topics of immediate interest. The proposed strategy abandons the vision enunciated by Vannevar Bush in "Science: The Endless Frontier", for a vision of applied science (“innovation”) in a few topical areas. This approach sacrifices America’s long-term interests for short-term advances. Who could have predicted 50 years ago that NSF and ARPA/DARPA-funded innovations would lead to today’s Internet? NSF must continue its broad mission.
Further, measuring scientific advances by the number of patents issued is unwise. Many scientific areas yield discoveries or inventions that are not patentable, yet advance scientific knowledge and its applications. The technology underlying the World Wide Web was purposely left unpatented by Tim Berners-Lee. Additionally, because of patent timelines, patents are frequently not issued until years after a research grant is completed, and for that reason, are never reported to NSF. Using patent issuances to evaluate the effectiveness of research grants will, at best, be misleading.
