News Journal: Sequestration’s pain will hit us in the future

We knew from the beginning that the mindless across-the-board sequestration cuts would hurt a lot of people. They have, but the effects so far haven’t been as visible as they might have been. So over the past few months, the media has greatly reduced the number of sequester stories reported, and there isn’t much talk about the cuts among people who haven’t yet been directly affected.

One of the reasons for that is that many of the cuts that are going to hurt all of us in the long run are in the “we’ll never know” category.

We’ll never know how many thousands of kids will drop out of school years from now because they got kicked out of Head Start programs. We’ll never know how many billions of dollars of federal revenue were lost, and how many tax cheats got away scot-free, because the I.R.S. had to slash its enforcement staff.

We’ll never know what advances in treatments for diabetes or cancer were lost when the National Institute of Health was forced to kill hundreds of promising research projects. In fact, we’ll never know exactly how devastating the severe cutbacks in all of the government’s research and development programs will be on future economic growth.

Let’s concentrate on that one area in this column. What we do know is that virtually all reputable economists, no matter what their political views, agree that if we are to create new jobs and prosper in a globalized economy, maintaining and increasing those R&D programs is crucial.

How crucial? Can’t we just rely on private sector R&D? A report issued by the Breakthrough Institute think tank sums it up nicely: “Technologies ranging from rail transport to nuclear energy and from microchips to the Internet were all invented by government-supported researchers, developed with public funding or first deployed through government purchasing and incentives; likewise, public investments routinely trained the high-caliber human capital or built the enabling infrastructures required for the widespread deployment of many of these technologies. Far from being a hindrance to innovation, the state historically has been one of its greatest drivers, playing a critical role in the development of many of the technologies and industries that now form the bedrock of modern society.”

Nobody questions the fact that one of the reasons for America’s great success has been a system that creates and rewards risk-taking business entrepreneurs.

All the now-gigantic businesses that started in garages in Silicon Valley are prime examples. But it is also true that the technologies that go into the iPhone, for example –microelectronics, wireless networks, touchscreen displays, even SIRI –were all originally developed by government researchers. Apple did a great job of putting them all together, but it was the beneficiary of seventy years of federal innovation.

A 2012 report from the National Science Board found that:

•“Basic and applied R&D that the private sector is unlikely to support sufficiently requires funding by the federal government to create a knowledge base of potentially transformative ideas that are critical building blocks of innovation.

•“Public funding is essential to sustaining the excellence of public research institutions that play a significant role in the U.S. innovation system.

•“The public sector plays a critical role in sustaining the essential advantages the U.S. has long enjoyed in research and education that undergird private sector science and technology-based innovation. Strengthening these assets is wise public policy that will stimulate economic growth and contribute broadly to national prosperity in the coming years.”

At this point, what we are seeing is wise public policy pitted against a cut-government-at-any-cost ideology. And it is unclear which side will win in the next two months, for there is a very real possibility that the sequestration cuts are going to get worse.

Even more severe automatic, across-the-board cuts are mandated for 2014 and will go into effect unless the current joint House-Senate budget talks result in some agreement by Jan. 15 to revoke that mandate. If agreement isn’t reached, the short-term damages will be far more apparent and substantial than what we have seen so far.

As for the long-term, no one seriously questions that our future economic growth is highly dependent on technological innovation. It is time to dump sequestration and get back to funding the research and development that will make that growth a reality.

Ted Kaufman is a former U.S. senator from Delaware.