Letter: US cannot afford to shortchange innovation

In an earlier life I spent more than 33 years managing a program of grants and contracts to support research that had implications for Army technology.

Dwight Eisenhower was president when this period began, and it saw a string of major innovations that resulted directly from federal support: lasers, the internet, transistors, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, satellite technology and more.

That makes it especially distressing to view the budget currently issuing from the Trump administration, a document that slashes support for research and development, along with Meals on Wheels, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and other programs most of us embrace as important commitments that define us as a nation.

All this is in keeping with the composition of an administration whose head of the Environmental Protection Agency questions whether human activity has any connection with the warming of the planet, and whose budget director is skeptical of any connection between the Zika virus and birth defects.

Both scientific and social advance are neglected in the interest of reducing taxes for the wealthiest, and thereby manicuring a clear field for billionaires to compete to see who can become the first trillionaire.

This story was originally published April 3, 2017 at 4:34 PM with the headline "Letter: US cannot afford to shortchange innovation."