Who Pays for America’s Research and Development?

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, the U.S. government was the unrivaled patron of American science. It funded nearly two-thirds of the nation’s research and development — much of it for defense — defining the early Cold War. In a phenomenon that’s been widely explored in our Arsenal of Innovation series, for several decades federal dollars pushed the technological frontier, and the private sector followed.Today, that arrangement has been inverted. Industry now funds roughly three-q

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ethics.ai (11 August 2026), “Who Pays for America’s Research and Development?,” evidence record 18568, https://ethics.ai/record/18568 (originally published by War on the Rocks).

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