Throughout my campaign for Congress last year, I heard repeated griping from Silicon Valley business and technology leaders about Biden-era barriers to innovation.
Many shared frustrations with blunderbuss antitrust enforcement, foot-dragging on Medicare approvals for life-saving drugs, regulation by litigation, or red tape. Above all, they complained about “tech-bashing,” treating every early stage company like it was Amazon, which they conceded deserved scrutiny. Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama once led the “party of innovation,” some said, “but no longer.”
From the perspective that six months of Donald Trump’s presidency has given us, Biden’s critics weren’t wrong. Trump simply demonstrated that it could get worse.
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Indeed, if we imagined China hatching a plan to undermine the foundations of America’s innovation economy, the scheme might involve the U.S. sporadically imposing and rescinding tariffs to disrupt supply chains, politicizing and defunding the work of scientists in critical labs and research institutions, bleeding American universities, facilitating pay-to-play tech regulatory schemes, and expelling our best foreign students and research scientists to compete against us from abroad. China didn’t have to devise such a scheme, of course; Trump’s Luddite agenda beat them to it.
Rep. Sam Liccardo is the former mayor of San Jose. (Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group)
Yet China can win the 21st century without Trump’s help. While DeepSeek’s advances in computing efficiency comprise a “Sputnik moment” for some, China has confronted us with several “Sputniks” in recent years: in energy storage, hypersonic missiles, solar manufacturing, electric vehicles and many other technologies. If China wins the race to artificial general intelligence or quantum computing, Beijing will write the rules that govern the 21st century. We will be playing in China’s world.
We have much work ahead. Rebuilding our nation’s innovation economy will require honesty, a clear strategy and new leadership. America needs an innovation agenda.
Let’s start with honesty. Democrats cannot help America prevail in a global competition by merely supplanting Trumpian dysfunction with Democratic orthodoxy. We can condemn toxic and kleptocratic governance while acknowledging that DOGE had a defensible (yet horribly executed) mission: to disrupt sclerotic, process-choked governmental institutions that hold us back. Rather than simply reinstituting recently decimated programs for scientific research or drug approvals, for example, we must reimagine them.
We also must stop reflexive tech-bashing that conflates the oligarch with the innovator. We need technological progress to tackle our many perils — like climate change, a widening economic divide, massive workforce displacement, nuclear proliferation, bioterror and global hunger — at scale. Even where tech comprises a source of these maladies, we must concede that we cannot solve them without innovation.
A successful innovation agenda must nimbly enable technological progress in a rapidly evolving world.
Yes, we need public investment in basic science and research, but our tax code must acknowledge the primacy of private investment in technology development. We must prepare our workforce to use AI before we are supplanted by it; effective upskilling requires Congress to incentivize the private sector to invest in tools and teaching in our community colleges and universities. Climate mitigation at scale calls for reassessment of long-disfavored options, such as small modular reactors, and for eliminating regulatory barriers to expansion of the grid, transit and other infrastructure.
While partisans pit border enforcement against immigration fairness, an innovation-focused immigration plan could embrace both, while expanding pathways for legal immigration. A nuanced antitrust policy would hold behemoths accountable for their anticompetitive conduct, but not for their competitive success.
As chair of the New Democratic Coalition’s Innovation and Technology Working Group, I will lead a group of pragmatic, pro-innovation members of Congress to introduce an innovation agenda — one that urges both parties to think differently about American innovation in a perilous world. America’s future — and our planet’s — depends on our collective willingness to rise to that challenge.
Rep. Sam Liccardo is the former mayor of San Jose.