October 12, 2017
WASHINGTON - The Council on Competitiveness – a leadership group of nearly 200 CEOs, university presidents and labor leaders – urges Congress to support bipartisan efforts to reauthorize and fully fund the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) by passing the ARPA-E Reauthorization Act of 2017 (H.R.3681) and Senate Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies Appropriations Act of Fiscal Year 2018 (S. 1609).
The Department of Energy (DOE) – as the nation’s leading source of federal investment in basic physical science research; and as the steward of some of the world’s most important and innovative shared infrastructure for fundamental discovery and applied research – plays an absolutely critical role in America’s long-term productivity and prosperity.
And DOE’s ARPA-E is a transformative agency that provides funding for high-risk, high-reward research and development (R&D) efforts. It is a powerful tool in America’s innovation arsenal and a vital player in the U.S. innovation ecosystem. As the recent National Academy of Sciences’ review of the agency stated: “ARPA-E has the ability to make significant contributions to energy R&D that likely would not take place absent the agency’s activities.”
ARPA-E is one of the most productive and effective agencies in our great nation’s shared innovation infrastructure – helping to start strategic new companies (over 50 to date) and leveraging significant private sector investment to turbocharge innovation (attracting $1.8 billion in private sector investment to date). These efforts are absolutely crucial for a sector that demands a very different approach to innovation than the “app economy” – one that values long time scales for research and development; one that the Council’s own research and studies have shown faces multiple “valleys of death” on the road to deployment in the marketplace. ARPA-E projects are leading to increased energy security, better technologies in a variety of industries, and improvements to our nation’s energy strength and productivity.
The Council on Competitiveness urges Congress to seize on this moment and commit in a bipartisan manner to support an agency fundamental to America’s long-term global competitiveness. ARPA-E is a global differentiator for our nation – in a world increasingly more complex, competitive and innovative. We join a chorus of other leadership organizations in asking Congress to pass the ARPA-E Reauthorization Act of 2017 and provide at least $330 million for ARPA-E in a final fiscal year 2018 appropriations bill.
