The Case for a NIST Foundation

Executive summary

The National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) mission is to promote American competitiveness through advancing measurement science, standards, and emerging technologies. Despite its size — it receives just half a percent of federal R&D funding — the agency has an impressive track record. Thanks to its strong history of performance, today NIST is a key agency underpinning the government’s plan to maintain American leadership in emerging technologies. In recent years its responsibilities have expanded to include:

• Distributing $39 billion in incentives and $11 billion in R&D investments to develop semiconductor manufacturing in the United States.¹
• Developing the foundational science of AI measurement and safety.²
• Building cybersecurity guidelines to help protect the nation against increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks.³

However, NIST may not be adequately equipped to deliver on its mission. Resource gaps have left the agency with crumbling buildings and leaking ceilings, damaging cutting-edge scientific equipment and forcing workers out of their offices.⁴ The rapid growth of industry salaries for emerging technology jobs means that NIST can no longer compete with the private sector for top talent. China’s manipulation of international standards organizations means that U.S. experts risk losing influence over which technical standards succeed on the world stage. And during an era of rapid progress in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, the agency is constrained by the slow pace of new funding and hiring. Appropriations can solve some of these problems, but not all. Federal hiring regulations, the slow pace of the appropriations cycle, and restrictions on how agencies can engage with the private sector and foreign entities mean that NIST’s ability to deliver on its mission faces limits.

Many agencies have faced these problems in the past, and there exists an underrated mechanism for addressing them. Congress has long used “agency foundations” as a flexible vehicle to complement agencies’ missions by deploying philanthropic investment.⁵ The Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) supports NIH by funding fellowships to attract top scientists to the agency.⁶ The Center for Disease Control’s (CDC) foundation hosts an emergency response fund, which raised nearly $600 million in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic to distribute 8.5 million pieces of PPE and hire more than 3,000 surge health workers.⁷ The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) supports the Department of Agriculture by hosting ambitious prize competitions in service of the agency’s mission.⁸ These foundations have been an efficient mechanism for amplifying their agency’s work, with funds raised greatly exceeding their annual appropriations for administration, averaging a return of $67 for every $1 in federal contributions.⁹

We believe it’s time for a foundation for NIST, to give the agency the flexibility that other R&D agencies already enjoy. Much like existing foundations, a NIST foundation should not substitute for appropriations. Instead, it should provide support for activities that NIST is not well-suited to do itself. In this report, we propose four ways a NIST foundation could supercharge the agency’s work on emerging technologies:

1. Strengthen the United States’ influence over global standards by supporting increased private sector participation in standard-setting, especially from startups and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
2. Attract top scientists and engineers to NIST to work on research missions in the national interest, by hosting an ambitious technical fellowship and comprehensive benefits program.
3. Give NIST the ability to respond rapidly to new technological developments by quickly spinning up new public-private partnerships.
4. Accelerate the adoption of emerging technologies by incubating new emerging technology consortia and hosting ambitious prize competitions.

Recently, the bipartisan Expanding Partnerships for Innovation and Competitiveness (EPIC) Act passed the House Science Committee,¹⁰ garnering endorsements from more than forty high-profile science and innovation organizations and leading voices, including four former NIST directors.¹¹ The bill seeks to establish a foundation for NIST, and lays out a sensible framework for its design. The House and Senate should prioritize its full passage. In doing so, they should pay close attention to two key challenges: ensuring effective safeguards against conflicts of interest between the foundation and its donors, and preventing needless delays in getting the foundation to full operational capacity during a critical period.

Why NIST?

NIST’s role among federal agencies is unique. It is not a regulator, and it doesn’t focus on a particular set of scientific or technical domains. Rather, its focus is at a higher level of abstraction: the science of measurement (“metrology”), and using that science to help create standards for technologies.

Why is the science of measurement useful for technological innovation? Once it’s possible to measure something, it then becomes possible to test it and make it better. Technical standards provide industries with a common language to facilitate global trade, and enable scientists and engineers to work on common goals that cut across technical disciplines. NIST’s mission is thus tightly linked with American innovation and technological competitiveness.¹²

A conference of transportation officials funded by the Rockefeller Foundation led to the development of “National School Bus Chrome,” or Color 13432 in NIST’s Federal Standard No. 595a. The color was selected based on careful deliberation to maximize conspicuousness and the legibility of black writing in semi-darkness.

The NIST deadweight machine, the largest machine of its kind in the world, is a three-story, million-pound stack of steel disks used to measure the thrust of powerful engines, providing the means to calibrate new jet and rocket technologies. Image credit: Jennifer Lauren Lee/NIST.

In pursuit of its mission, NIST has punched far above its weight. Of the 19 Nobel Prizes in Physics awarded to American scientists since 2000, 3 (~15%) were for work done at the NIST.¹³ A further two Nobel Prizes in Physics were directly enabled by measurement work done at NIST.¹⁴ These achievements have come despite NIST receiving less than half a percent of federal R&D funding, and far less than other R&D-focused agencies.

NIST has played an especially important role in facilitating technological innovation in emerging technologies. A few examples:

• Biotechnology: In recent decades, a new class of drugs called “biologics” has emerged to supplement chemically synthesized drugs like Aspirin. Biologics are built from proteins and DNA using living systems like microorganisms, plants, and animal cells, and are used to treat a wide range of conditions, from arthritis to cancer. But compared to their simpler chemical counterparts, biologics are much harder to manufacture — being composed of living matter, they’re almost impossible to replicate perfectly. These slight differences between batches create issues for quality control and safety. To address this, NIST developed “NISTmAb,” a stable reference molecule with extremely well-understood properties.¹⁵ Biologics manufacturers use NISTmAb to test their measurement and manufacturing tools work as intended, and the molecule has been widely adopted by the biopharmaceutical industry (both in the U.S. and internationally) since its release in 2016.
• Quantum information science:  In 1994, Peter Shor of Bell Labs showed that a hypothetical sufficiently powerful quantum computer could break RSA encryption, the technology used across the internet to keep data private and secure.¹⁶ In subsequent decades, quantum computing progressed from theory to rudimentary processors, and some scientists began to predict even odds that quantum computers powerful enough to break RSA encryption would emerge by 2031.¹⁷ In response to these developments, in 2016 NIST launched the Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization program to discover and implement new “quantum-resistant” cryptography schemes, and in 2022 released an initial set of four algorithms.¹⁸
• Artificial intelligence: For years before the current AI boom, NIST has worked behind the scenes on the science of AI measurement and the development of AI standards. The MNIST database, famous in the field of machine learning, was originally developed at NIST in 1995 and has served as one of the most important benchmarks for testing and comparing image recognition algorithms, one of the earliest applications for neural networks.¹⁹ Other AI-focused standards developed at NIST include the AI Risk Management Framework, the Face Recognition Vendor Test, and standards for high-performance computing security.
• Space flight: It costs around $1,000 to launch a pound of payload into low Earth orbit using SpaceX’s Falcon series rockets. Given the price, and the costs of space payloads themselves, it’s important to ensure that rocket launches work reliably. Success requires the force generated by the rocket to be known and controllable, but the amount of force generated by rockets makes measurement extremely difficult. The NIST “deadweight machine” (the largest machine of its kind in the world) solves this problem — a three-story, million-pound stack of steel disks used to calibrate the large-force sensors used throughout the U.S. aviation and space industries.²⁰

In recent years, NIST’s role in emerging technologies has dramatically expanded. NIST is the home of the CHIPS Program Office and the CHIPS R&D Office, responsible for distributing $39 billion in incentives and $11 billion in R&D to strengthen semiconductor manufacturing and innovation in America. It has also been given a prominent role in implementing three recent executive orders on cybersecurity, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence. In cybersecurity, NIST has been entrusted to develop guidelines to protect government data and critical infrastructure from increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. In AI, NIST has been tasked with what is perhaps one of the most challenging scientific endeavors of our time: building the science of AI measurement and safety from its current pre-paradigmatic state to a point where we can accurately evaluate the capabilities and mitigate the potential risks of new systems. 

Despite its critical role, we are not equipping NIST to meet these challenges. But there is an underrated mechanism that can address many of NIST’s most urgent problems. “Agency foundations,” which Congress has long used, can flexibly complement agencies’ missions by deploying philanthropic investment.

What are agency foundations, and why are they useful?

Since the 1980s, Congress has created seven R&D-focused nonprofit foundations to support the missions of different agencies.²¹ Each foundation solicits philanthropic investment to complement its agency’s work while guarding against potential conflicts of interest with donors. Agency foundations have generally been quite successful in amplifying their agency’s mission, with funds raised greatly exceeding their annual appropriations for administration, averaging a return of $67 for every $1 in federal contributions.²²

Because of differences in the missions and structures of different agencies, these foundations all play different roles. Generally, however, they focus on programs within one or more of the following areas:

1. Attracting and retaining top talent
2. Coordinating broad and/or urgent projects through public-private partnerships
3. Supporting commercialization of federal R&D

Across these areas, many R&D-focused agencies have benefited heavily from the support of their affiliated foundations. However, one R&D agency conspicuously lacks the support of a foundation: NIST. Perhaps more than any other agency, NIST is deeply linked to the future of emerging technology in the United States, as it helps define the technical foundation for innovation in artificial intelligence, biotechnology, quantum information sciences, and next-generation communications. We believe it’s time for a new foundation to support NIST’s work.

What should a NIST foundation do?

Ultimately, the priorities of an agency foundation are determined by its board, which works to support the agency’s mission based on the strengths, capability gaps, and needs of the agency. The role of an agency foundation is not to substitute for Congressional appropriations, but instead to provide support for activities that the agency is not well-suited to do itself. Different R&D-focused agency foundations therefore have different focuses, but generally fall within areas they’re uniquely positioned to execute, such as attracting and retaining talent, coordinating broad or urgent projects, and aiding with technology transfer and commercialization.

Compared to other R&D-focused agencies, NIST’s key strength is in working with industry, serving as a trusted, neutral convener. It also has an unparalleled level of programmatic efficiency, delivering high-quality programs across a wide range of technical domains with a relatively small budget. NIST also fulfills a critical role in the U.S. emerging technology ecosystem, building the fundamental measurement techniques, tools, and frameworks that advance R&D, enabling the development of technical standards.

Like many other agencies, NIST often lacks the ability to attract top technical talent in emerging technology fields, is constrained in spinning up new projects due to slow funding allocations and procurement processes, and has limits on how it can engage with the private sector and foreign entities. At a time when leadership in emerging technologies has never been more important, a NIST foundation can help fill these gaps, serving as a force multiplier for NIST’s work. Here, we present four concrete ways a NIST foundation could do this.

1. Strengthen the United States’ role in global standard-setting

The competition for emerging technology leadership relies in part on how well a country’s firms and experts influence the development of technical standards. Standards help shape which products are successful in global markets, and which value systems are embedded in technologies.

American success in shaping international standards comes from the fact that technical standard-setting in the international arena is led and conducted by private sector experts (often from competing firms) and academia in an open and consensus-based fashion, with governments playing an ancillary role. This inherently plays to the United States’ strengths as an innovation ecosystem.

Standards are also voluntary and nonbinding, meaning that if a bad faith actor manages to get a bad standard approved, they can’t force anyone to use it. This ensures that market forces can pick winners. For example, when international standards for shipping containers were first developed in the 1960s by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the Soviet Union pushed the ISO shipping container committee to adopt its alternative shipping container specification, instead of the version supported by U.S. firms.²³ Rather than holding up the standards process to reach a consensus on a single standard, the committee decided to simply release multiple standards, and let the market decide. After demand for the Soviets’ alternative shipping container was non-existent, their preferred variant was removed from the standard several years later.²⁴

However, this good faith approach to standards development is not impervious to challenges. In contrast to the U.S. industry-led system, China puts the state at the core of its standards development activities:

• China has begun to develop and use China-specific (rather than international) standards domestically as a protectionist measure.²⁵
• China also uses development initiatives to promote Chinese standards abroad. China’s 2021 national standards strategy openly calls for use of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to promote the use of Chinese standards outside China.²⁶ In June 2019, China announced it had signed 85 agreements on technical standardization with 49 countries and regions as part of the BRI.²⁷
• Several reports have emerged of Chinese initiatives to fix the outcome of votes on standards by forcing Chinese participants to vote on the government-preferred option, rather than the option with the strongest technical merit.²⁸ U.S. policymakers are also concerned about China embedding policy objectives (such as a lax approach to user privacy against surveillance) into technical standards for artificial intelligence and facial recognition.

Despite debate over the nature of new threats to the international standards system,²⁹ the solution to ensuring continued U.S. leadership is likely the same as it has always been: Give U.S. technical experts the time and resources to develop high-quality standards, and let the market decide. 

Within this scope, a foundation should focus on areas that are beyond NIST’s ability or remit to deliver. One promising focus area might be helping industry actors who face structural barriers to engaging in international standards development, such as startups and smaller firms.³⁰ One standards expert estimates it costs a firm about $300,000 a year for one engineer to engage fully in the standard-setting process, a price many startups and academic experts can’t afford.³¹ Hosting international standards meetings in the United States is also becoming rarer due to a lack of funding for meetings compared to other countries, increasing the cost of participation for U.S. companies and academic experts.³²

While it would be advantageous to incentivize engagement from startups and small businesses in the international standard-setting process, for NIST itself to preference smaller firms over others might compromise its position as a neutral arbiter for industry. NIST is also limited in the kinds of activities it can fund, especially when it comes to international travel. However, a foundation would not have these same restrictions, and could fund and/or manage a number of different programs aimed at removing structural barriers to standards engagement for smaller firms and academic experts.

Specifically, a foundation could:

1. Subsidize travel and salary costs for U.S. technical experts from startups and small businesses, to help them engage in both domestic and international standard-setting for emerging technologies. ³³
2. Provide funding, event hosting, and logistics services to enable more international standards meetings to be hosted in the U.S.
3. Provide support for public-private partnerships to help U.S. experts new to standards-setting processes learn how to be effective at a standards development organization (SDO).³⁴

2. Attract top scientists and engineers to NIST to work on key missions in the national interest

NIST employs around 3,400 personnel across the United States, and its workforce has included some of the world’s top scientists and engineers. David Wineland, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for developing new methods to measure and manipulate quantum systems, conducted his work during a 42-year tenure at NIST.³⁵ Unbeknownst to many, NIST also hosts approximately 2,700 “associates” — guest researchers from academia, industry, and other government agencies. Despite their much shorter tenure relative to the average NIST staffer, NIST associates also have an impressive history of scientific achievement. Dan Shechtman, a visiting researcher in 1982, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery at NIST of crystal structures previously unknown to science.³⁶

Dan Shechtman (middle) at NIST in the 1980s during the research sabbatical that led to his Nobel Prize-winning discovery of “quasicrystals.”’ The Nobel Committee stated that his discovery “forced scientists to reconsider their conception of the very nature of matter.” Image credit: NIST.

But in today’s most important emerging technology fields, private sector salaries far outpace what NIST and other R&D-focused agencies can offer. As a result, NIST’s legacy of attracting and retaining Nobel-level technical talent is at risk. A Government Accountability Office report found that NIST faces stiff competition and declining applications for highly specialized candidates.³⁷

In artificial intelligence, top industry AI labs offer compensation many multiples higher than top scientists and engineers can expect working for the federal government.³⁸ If NIST is to rapidly advance the scientific study of AI measurement, evaluation, and safety, it will need top AI science and engineering talent to keep up with the pace of AI progress.

Besides the field of artificial intelligence, many of NIST’s other laboratory programs work at the frontiers of measurement science in domains where top talent is sorely needed. For example, NIST’s quantum technology research and metrology programs need top physicists and mathematicians to help build standards for securing encryption techniques against attacks from powerful quantum computers, and to develop new measurement techniques that will allow quantum computers to operate in a much wider variety of temperature ranges than is currently possible.³⁹ As with AI, salaries for these roles in industry far exceed what top scientists can get at NIST.⁴⁰

Much like analogous programs at the Department of Agriculture’s Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research,⁴¹ the Department of Defense’s Henry M. Jackson Foundation,⁴² and the Foundation for the NIH,⁴³ a fellowship would focus on recruiting world-class scientists and engineers to work on specific challenge areas defined in coordination with the agency. Doing this through a foundation allows for compensation closer to what top talent can attract in industry. 

In addition to providing funding for fellowship salaries, a NIST foundation could provide branding and marketing to boost the program’s prestige, and services to help manage and place fellows. Fellows could be placed within NIST using the Intergovernmental Personnel Act, which allows the temporary assignment of personnel between nonprofits/academia and federal government agencies.⁴⁴

Compared to other privately funded technical fellowships in government agencies, housing a fellowship through an agency foundation comes with two key benefits:

1. Greater transparency and accountability. Agency foundations are established by an act of Congress, which determines their broad mission, selects the board, and provides funding for administration. This gives Congress greater oversight over how a fellowship program is run.
2. Close ties to the agency’s needs. Thanks to a close relationship with the agency (agency leadership typically has a non-voting position on their foundation’s board), an agency foundation is uniquely positioned to meet NIST’s talent needs, identifying useful skill sets and placing fellows in appropriate programs.

Another useful talent-related role a NIST foundation could take on is helping to make NIST a more attractive place to work, especially for associates. At present, NIST cannot provide many forms of benefits or compensation to its guest researchers, such as health insurance, payment for work-related travel, hosting events, or even recognizing their work through awards or ceremonies. A foundation could fill these gaps, and make NIST a more attractive place for all staff through benefits like events, training, and conference travel. In addition, a foundation could donate the best equipment and tooling to support work in key challenge areas, like compute access for artificial intelligence research.

3. Give NIST the broad ability to respond rapidly to new technological developments

Throughout its history, NIST has been called upon for assistance in times of need. In the closing months of World War II, the U.S. 86th Infantry Division captured a Nazi official in the town of Mattsee, Austria, and made an incredible discovery:⁴⁵ The official was in possession of the Crown Jewels of Hungary, treasures almost 1,000 years old.⁴⁶ Fearing the jewels could be captured by the Soviets, the Hungarian Crown Guard asked the United States to keep the delicate treasures safe. The agency tasked with covertly securing the delicate treasures? NIST’s precursor, the National Bureau of Standards. The Bureau had already proven its treasure-preserving skills in 1940, when it was commissioned to build state-of-the-art encasements for the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence. The Bureau was enlisted to design protective containers for the jewels and to secretly accompany them across the Atlantic for storage in the United States, to keep them safe until they could be returned to Hungary. 

The Hungarian Crown Jewels, consisting of the Crown, Sword, and Globuc Cruciger. Image credit: Qorilla Schopenhauer/Wikimedia Commons.

In subsequent decades, NIST has developed a track record of responding to less exciting, but just as important technology and standards-related emergencies. After NIST’s investigation of the World Trade Center collapse, the agency was authorized to establish similar teams to investigate the scientific lessons of building failures. The National Construction Safety Team (NCST) Act gives NIST the responsibility to dispatch teams of experts within 48 hours of major building disasters to understand their cause, and to recommend changes to relevant standards to help prevent future tragedies.⁴⁷ 

However, outside the domain of construction, NIST lacks a broad capability to rapidly respond across different scientific domains. This is not a unique gap. Due to slow funding velocity and constraints under the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), the principal set of rules governing procurement by federal agencies, many agencies also struggle with spinning up new projects quickly when urgency is required, like in health crises. Foundations can help fill such gaps in two ways: first, by leveraging their flexible funding and connections with the private sector to coordinate a large number of technical partners. Second, by providing project management services and rapid fundraising to scale up projects quickly when urgency is required. Examples of where this has been successful include:

• In January 2020, two months before the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the CDC Foundation activated its emergency response fund, soliciting nearly $600 million in donations to distribute more than 8.5 million pieces of PPE for frontline workers and hire more than 3,000 surge healthcare staff to support pandemic relief efforts.⁴⁸ The Foundation for the NIH also established and managed the Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines (ACTIV) project, coordinating across agencies, academia, and industry.⁴⁹
• NIH has historically struggled to work with a wide range of partners on broad projects to tackle ambitious research agendas at the frontier of health sciences. The Foundation for the NIH has been the home for a number of such projects, including the Biomarkers Consortium, the Accelerating Medicines Partnership, the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative, and the Grand Challenges in Global Health Initiative.⁵⁰
• The FDA operates the Sentinel Initiative, an active surveillance system that monitors the safety and effectiveness of drugs and other medical products by aggregating electronic healthcare data across the country. To make the system available outside of the FDA, the Reagan-Udall Foundation for the FDA launched the IMEDS project.⁵¹

Areas where this would be useful might include:

• Slowing the spread of new pathogens during a pandemic: When developing tests and protective equipment to slow the spread of new pathogens, manufacturers urgently need standardized reference materials to measure the effectiveness of their products. During the COVID-19 pandemic, NIST helped develop safe synthetic fragments of RNA that manufacturers can use to calibrate their instruments and develop quality controls,⁵² and designed tests to measure the filtration performance of mask fabrics against the virus.⁵³ However, it still took 6 months from the start of the pandemic for reference materials to be developed, after which they were freely distributed to laboratories across the globe.⁵⁴ With access to rapid funding to proactively develop reference materials for new pathogens as they emerge, this time could be shortened, potentially saving millions of lives.
• Stopping the spread of dangerous new street drugs: Of the roughly 107,000 drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2021, around 70,000 involved fentanyl.⁵⁵ Just a few years earlier, fentanyl deaths were almost non-existent. This reflects a growing problem: New drugs are emerging at a rapid pace, making it hard to track and combat them. NIST’s Rapid Drug Analysis and Research (RaDAR) conducted a trial with the Maryland Department of Health to analyze residues from illegally purchased drugs to investigate the prevalence of new substances. Much to its surprise, RaDAR found that the animal tranquilizer xylazine⁵⁶ had become widespread, showing up in over 60% of samples.⁵⁷ Like many dangerous drugs, fentanyl and xylazine are primarily manufactured in foreign labs and smuggled into the United States.⁵⁸ If rapid detection techniques such as those developed by RaDAR could be scaled up and used at key locations across the country, it could be possible to build an early warning system to combat new dangerous drugs as they emerge.
• Rapid capability evaluations for the risks and benefits of new AI systems: Over the last 10 years, AI has surpassed human baselines for performance in domains such as reading comprehension and grade school math, and is rapidly approaching human performance in programming.⁵⁹ The rate at which humans are being surpassed at new tasks also seems to be increasing. Due to the nature of deep learning, however, predicting these capabilities in advance is challenging. In June 2021, a panel of expert forecasters was asked to predict when AI systems would achieve 50% accuracy on a benchmark of challenging competition-level math problems.⁶⁰ The forecasters predicted AI systems would reach this capability level by 2025. In reality, the 50% target was hit just 11 months later (as of today, it sits at around 90%).⁶¹ In the future, new kinds of AI systems will likely emerge that require the rapid development of evaluation techniques in new domains. New evaluation techniques are important to develop early, both to understand the risks of wide deployment of a new system and also to understand where new systems can be leveraged to help solve important problems. While NIST’s AI Safety Institute has been set up to focus on developing new ways of measuring the capabilities of AI systems,⁶² its ability to rapidly deploy resources to test new kinds of AI systems is limited by the yearly appropriations process, which is in turn limited by Congress’ ability to predict AI capabilities over a year-long time horizon. A foundation could help support NIST’s work on evaluating AI capabilities by providing emergency funding for evaluating new AI breakthroughs at a pace more in keeping with the rapid pace of new AI advances, rather than the pace dictated by the appropriations process. 

Across these and other areas, a foundation would enable NIST to quickly respond to unexpected challenges on a timeline not suitable for the appropriations process, and in cases where rapid, proactive engagement of private sector and academic experts is crucial.

4. Accelerate the adoption of emerging technologies by supporting pre-standardization research

Before a standard for a new technology is possible, technical experts need good answers to research questions like:

1. What are the possible applications of the technology?
2. What are the potential downsides of the technology?
3. What are the design paradigms for the technology?
4. How can the technology’s performance be measured and tested?

The process of answering these questions is called “pre-standardization.” Timely and effective pre-standardization for a new technology helps experts in the field proactively address the technology’s potential downsides and speed up its adoption in the marketplace.

NIST is intimately involved in the measurement and testing part of the pre-standardization process. It also sometimes takes a more active role, convening technical experts and publishing guidelines. One such example is cloud computing. Initially, many firms and research groups were hesitant to adopt the technology due to concerns about vendor lock-in and security. Anticipating how such concerns could slow the growth of the U.S. cloud computing industry, in 2011, NIST released a standards roadmap for cloud computing, helping to plan out a set of required standards while the industry was in its infancy.⁶³ It then helped create a vendor-neutral reference architecture to increase interoperability and portability,⁶⁴ helping to address concerns about lock-in, as well as a security reference architecture to address security and privacy concerns.⁶⁵

However, pre-standardization is most useful when there is broad participation from experts in the field. By default, the kind of research done by industry and academia is typically focused on capabilities and applications. Research on areas like measurement, testing, interoperability, and risks is comparatively neglected, especially relative to its importance for technology adoption. 

Within this scope, a NIST foundation could lean on its ability to be forward-looking and to flexibly deploy funding to a wide range of actors. Specifically, a foundation could:

(i) Incubate new consortia in emerging technology areas

Public-private consortia such as QED-C (for quantum computing),⁶⁶ VAMAS (for materials science),⁶⁷ and the Standards Coordinating Body for Regenerative Medicine⁶⁸ have been incredibly useful for pre-standardization in their respective fields. A NIST foundation could take a forward-looking approach to anticipate which emerging technology fields might benefit from new consortia for pre-standardization, and provide funding to set them up and engage a wide range of technical experts.

(ii) Host ambitious prize competitions to incentivize pre-standardization research

NIST has a long history of issuing challenges to bring technical communities together to solve ambitious problems. In 1972, NIST’s precursor, the National Bureau of Standards, initiated a new project to improve computer security by developing a shared encryption standard, issuing two challenges to the public to develop new algorithms.⁶⁹ The winning algorithm (submitted by IBM) was enshrined as the first Data Encryption Standard in 1977 and quickly adopted internationally.⁷⁰ Over the last 15 years, we’ve seen an increased focus on a different kind of challenge to try to incentivize useful R&D: prize competitions. In a prize competition, a reward (usually cash) is offered to participants to achieve a specific goal. In principle, prize competitions have a range of benefits as a mechanism for promoting innovation:

1. They transfer the downside risk to participants, allowing the party offering the prize to set an ambitious goal without risking significant financial loss.
2. They can attract a wide range of participants taking different approaches; useful for building a technical community of interest around a problem.
3. More broadly, they can boost the prestige of working on the problem; useful for field-building in a new technical domain.

These properties make prize competitions a promising method for incentivizing broad participation in pre-standardization research. The America COMPETES Act of 2010, which gave agencies broad authority to carry out prize competitions, increased the total amount of money offered by federal prize competitions from around $250,000 in 2011 to over $37 million in 2018.⁷¹ With this authority, NIST can offer cash prizes and appoint judges from the private sector to evaluate submissions.⁷²

However, like many agencies, prize competitions form only a tiny part of NIST’s spending on R&D and innovation — about 0.1% of its total R&D budget since 2011.⁷³ Prizes are still seen as an unconventional way to fund R&D, and, compared to more conventional funding mechanisms such as grants, project leads may see prizes as too high-risk to take large bets on. Additionally, under the America COMPETES Act, the head of the agency must personally approve any prize competition offering greater than $1 million, and a competition greater than $50 million cannot be offered without written notice to Congress, with a 30-day waiting period. If we look at the distribution of prize amounts offered by the private sector compared to prizes offered by U.S. government agencies, larger prizes (>$1 million) form a much smaller proportion of government competitions, compared to private competitions. 

Distribution of prize pools in private vs. government prize competitions

Violin plots of the distribution of prize pools across private vs. U.S. government-sponsored prize competitions. All prizes above $100,000 USD are included, with monetary values inflation-adjusted using CPI data to reflect May 2024 values.⁷⁴

A foundation could work with emerging technology consortia and programs across NIST to identify unsolved technical problems for which a prize competition might be a promising path to a solution. The Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research (FFAR) has taken on a similar role for the Department of Agriculture, recently launching the $6 million Egg-Tech Prize to help develop technologies to determine an egg’s sex before it hatches.⁷⁵ Running prize competitions through an agency foundation comes with a number of potential benefits:

• The foundation could offer larger prizes with less administrative friction and risk for NIST, and could stand up large prizes more quickly when urgency is useful.
• The foundation could expand NIST’s effective bandwidth to manage prize competitions across multiple areas, by taking on the administrative work of marketing and running the competition.
• The foundation could coordinate with its industry partners to ensure that promising entries have a path toward rapid adoption, scaling, and commercialization, including by helping to manage IP agreements.

Specific research agendas where a prize competition (and pre-standardization research in general) could be effective include:

• Enabling materials science breakthroughs for semiconductors: Continuing to push the state of the art in semiconductor manufacturing will likely require new high-performance materials with which to build chips. However, it is common for materials scientists to report impressive results for proposed new materials without providing reproducible results.⁷⁶ NIST’s Multiscale Modeling and Validation of Semiconductor Materials and Devices program aims to address this by helping to build predictive tools that can take a description of a new material (e.g., its chemical formula or atomic structure) and predict its properties (e.g., the temperature at which a superconductor transitions from a normal conductive state to a superconductive state). ⁷⁷ To do this accurately, benchmarks are needed to evaluate the validity of the predictions. To this end, in February 2023 NIST released the JARVIS-Leaderboard: an open-source collection of community-submitted benchmarks against which predictive tools for materials science can be evaluated.⁷⁸ To incentivize the development of high-quality benchmarks and predictive models, a NIST foundation could offer public prizes for top contributors to the leaderboard.
• Developing new high-accuracy techniques for DNA sequencing: DNA sequencers take long strings of a person’s DNA, and analyze them to determine their genetic code (represented as a sequence of letters). The code can then be compared to a well-defined “reference” sequence to identify differences in the two codes. Doing this process efficiently and accurately is highly useful for diagnosing genetic disorders, tailoring personalized medicines based on an individual’s genetic makeup, and advancing basic genetic research. However, many DNA sequencers have biases or blind spots for certain sequences (usually those of non-European descent, due to a lack of representation in genetic databases) that contribute to uncertainties or errors — this can lead to hundreds of thousands of disagreements between different sequencing results for the same individual. To address this, NIST’s Genome in a Bottle Consortium is developing reference DNA material for a broader range of genetic backgrounds.⁷⁹ Additionally, NIST’s Genome Editing Consortium seeks to build reference materials and benchmarks to measure the effectiveness of gene editing techniques.⁸⁰ A NIST foundation could leverage this work by launching a prize competition to incentivize the development of breakthrough new gene sequencing and editing technologies. Submissions to the competition could then be evaluated using NIST’s suite of benchmarks and measurement tools. 
• Complex capabilities benchmarks for artificial intelligence: In the context of AI, a “benchmark” is a standardized, systematic evaluation of a system against a particular set of questions or tasks. For example, SWE-bench contains a set of tasks that would normally be given to software engineers, to evaluate AI systems’ programming capabilities in a real-world-analogous context.⁸¹ While benchmarks are extremely useful, they are time-consuming to create, and most of today’s widely used benchmarks are lists of multiple-choice questions. To complement the NIST AI Safety Institute’s work on AI evaluation and measurement, a NIST foundation could launch a public competition to develop new benchmarks (or tasks within a broader benchmark) that are more useful for tracking and predicting AI capabilities with real-world consequence, like the ability to autonomously perform scientific research in different fields.

Challenges & next steps for a NIST Foundation

Recently, the bipartisan Expanding Partnerships for Innovation and Competitiveness (EPIC) Act passed the House Science Committee, gaining endorsements from more than forty science and innovation organizations and leading voices, including four former NIST directors.⁸² The bill provides the basic framework for a NIST foundation, consisting of measures that:

• Establish the foundation, called the “Foundation for Standards and Metrology.”
• Lay out a broad mission (supporting NIST’s mission to advance measurement science and technical standards) and an indicative set of activities (international engagement, public-private partnerships, facility expansion/improvement, commercialization, education/outreach, NIST associate support).
• Set out the structure of the board. This consists of eleven voting members chosen by NIST’s Director from a list of candidates provided by the National Academies,⁸³ and four non-voting members: NIST’s Director and the Associate Directors of each of NIST’s main divisions. 
• Direct the NIST Director to designate a set of NIST employees to serve as liaisons to the foundation. 
• Establish the position of a board-appointed Executive Director to run the foundation.
• Stipulate that foundation policies must hold all employees and board members in the foundation to conflict of interest standards, and prohibit employees or board members from participating in decision-making in an area where they have financial interests.
• Commit the foundation to submit a document to Congress describing its operational and financial goals, transparency processes, and plan for ensuring “maximum complementarity and minimum redundancy” with investments made by NIST.
• Commit the foundation to annual audits and yearly public reports, including full information on persons and organizations from which financial support is received.
• Authorize annual appropriations of $1.5 million for the foundation’s administration for five years (fiscal years 2025 through 2029), after which the foundation is intended to become financially self-sustaining.

These are sensible measures, and the House and Senate should prioritize the full passage of the bill. When doing so, we recommend they (together with NIST and other relevant stakeholders) keep in mind potential challenges and lessons learned from existing agency foundations: 

(i) Conflicts of interest can manifest in subtle ways, and a NIST foundation’s policies and culture should be designed with this risk in mind

A large part of a foundation’s job is to build relationships with potential donors. These relationships must be coupled with clear rules and communication about the decision-making process, how donated funds will be used, and what kinds of engagement in the process the donor is entitled to. In practice, establishing clear firewalls between donors and the agency can be difficult for foundations to achieve:

• In 2015, the NFL backed out of a $16 million commitment to NIH research on traumatic brain injury after the NIH selected a grantee that wasn’t preferred by the NFL.⁸⁴ While an investigation found that the integrity of the process was preserved, it also highlighted that FNIH (the NIH’s foundation) staff who managed the relationship with the NFL were too hesitant to chastise the NFL for inappropriate behavior and remind the league of the terms of their agreement.
• In 2018, the NIH canceled a $100 million study on the effects of moderate alcohol use, after finding that NIH personnel were engaged in inappropriate collusion with industry, while deliberately keeping FNIH in the dark about what was going on.⁸⁵ While the FNIH was cleared of any explicit wrongdoing in an investigation, a report from NIH suggested that, with better screening, FNIH staff may have been able to uncover evidence of an ongoing conflict of interest.⁸⁶

A foundation for NIST should learn from these examples, and ensure that effective conflict-of-interest policies are developed and regularly revisited.⁸⁷ In addition to written policies, it’s important that a NIST foundation creates a strong culture of integrity that sets clear boundaries with donors. This will require, at minimum, thoughtful hiring of its staff.

(ii) Delays are likely, but can to some extent be anticipated and mitigated 

The coming months and years seem likely to be a critical period in emerging technology development. Firms are making massive investments in artificial intelligence and biotechnology, fields that seem likely to shape the global landscape of commercial competitiveness and national power in the 21st century. Many governments are pushing forward with new governance frameworks for these same technologies. At the same time, standards for these technologies are mostly either high-level or not yet conceived. This means that the fast establishment of a NIST foundation could give NIST a high amount of flexibility and support during a period where success in its mission is particularly important. 

Despite the benefits of moving quickly, delays are likely. The foundation for the Department of Energy (the Foundation for Energy and Security Innovation, or FESI) was authorized in the CHIPS and Science Act (passed in August 2022), which appropriated $1.5 million for its establishment in fiscal year 2023, and designated $30 million for its activities in fiscal year 2024.⁸⁸ Last month, the Department of Energy announced the selection of FESI’s board, suggesting FESI is around a year behind schedule.⁸⁹ Once a foundation has been established, it will also take time to reach its potential. In some cases, this can take years. The Foundation for the NIH was established in 1990, but it wasn’t launched until 1996, and it took another seven years for it to arrive at its current focus on public-private research partnerships.⁹⁰. 

Some potential challenges for establishing a NIST foundation can likely be anticipated and mitigated ahead of time. We suggest that:

1. NIST should contact the National Academies early to establish a strategy and timeline for board selection, conditional on the passage of the EPIC Act.
2. NIST should ensure it has a realistic plan (again, conditional on the passage of the Act) for allocating person-hours to move quickly to meet its part of the responsibilities in establishing the foundation, including funding to properly vet potential board members.
3. Interested donors should proactively communicate to Congress, NIST, and the National Academies about the kinds of programs they would be excited to fund through a foundation.

Congress, NIST, and the National Academies are well-equipped to address these challenges. When doing so, it will be important to keep in mind the considerable benefits that an effective foundation would yield. With scalable and flexible support from a foundation, NIST will be much better positioned to support continued U.S. leadership in emerging technologies.

Acknowledgments

We thank Phil Singerman, Courtney Silverthorn, Nigel Cory, Walter Copan, David Hart, and Jason Matusow for their valuable feedback and input on this piece. Please note that participation does not necessarily imply endorsement of our conclusions.