Understanding Government Decision-Making and the Importance of Asking the Right Questions

By day, Erica Fuchs is a professor of engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. However, for the past year she’s also been running a pilot project—the National Network for Critical Technology Assessment—to give the federal government the ability to anticipate problems in supply chains and respond to them. 

The trip from germ of a policy idea to pilot project in the National Science Foundation’s new Technology Implementation and Partnerships directorate has been a wild ride. And it all started when she developed her thoughts on the need for a national technology strategy into a 2021 Issues essay. Two years later, the network she called for, coordinating dozens of academics, industry, and government contributors to uniquely understand how different supply chains work, was a real, NSF-funded pilot project. In this episode of The Ongoing Transformation, Erica talks with Lisa Margonelli about how she took her idea from a white paper to the White House, and the bipartisan political support that was necessary to bring it to fruition.

Resources

• Erica Fuchs for Issues in Science and Technology: What a National Technology Strategy Is—and Why the United States Needs One.
• National Network for Critical Technology Assessment: Securing America’s Future report on the pilot project.
• The National Science Foundation’s press release on the pilot project report.
• Erica Fuch’s white paper for the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution: Building the Analytic Capacity to Support Critical Technology Assessment.