The Endless Frontiers Act passed the Senate Tuesday in a bipartisan 68-32 vote. What was originally a $100 Billion bill to reform and enhance US research in ways lauded by innovation policy experts went through 616 amendments. The bill that emerged has fewer ambitious reforms, more local pork-barrel spending, and some totally unrelated additions like “shark fin sales elimination”. But it does still represent a major increase in US government spending on research and technology- and other than pork, the main theme of this spending is to protect US technological dominance from a rising China. One section of the bill is actually called “Limitation on cooperation with the People’s Republic of China“, and one successful amendment was “To prohibit any Federal funding for the Wuhan Institute of Virology“

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