Why Trimming NASA To Focus On The Lunar Space Race Is The Right Move
NASA has long suffered from shifting political winds, its mission rewritten every few years. This move gives NASA the right goals.NASA has long suffered from shifting political winds, its mission rewritten every few years. This move gives NASA the right goals.American innovation is dying — and Congress is the culprit
The United States once led the world in manufacturing, producing more than 25% of global industrial output. Today, China holds that title, controlling over 30%, while the U.S. struggles to maintain even half that share.
Plenty of factors drove this decline — decades of offshoring, the collapse of industrial job bases, and an obsession with short-term profits over long-term strength. But if America wants to reclaim its industrial leadership and restore economic self-reliance, we need more than reshoring slogans and infrastructure bills.
Innovation isn’t an expense. It’s an investment — in national security, in American workers, and the future of US leadership.
We must fix and expand the research and development tax credit.
A recent Wall Street Journal analysis focused on our loss of industrial capacity. But capacity starts with innovation. Every new factory, process, and product begins with research — and that remains our greatest untapped advantage.
Yet Congress has punished companies for investing in R&D. Since 2022, the tax code has forced businesses to amortize R&D expenses over five years instead of deducting them immediately. That change has choked innovation, especially among small and midsized manufacturers that depend on near-term tax relief to fund future growth.
The result? Reduced domestic innovation, fewer advanced manufacturing breakthroughs, and an economy less equipped to compete with subsidized foreign rivals.
R&D incentives work
The research and development tax credit was meant to drive economic growth. It helps businesses offset the steep costs of developing new technologies, improving production, and staying competitive.
But today’s credit falls short. It’s too small, too complicated, and — after the amortization change — actively harmful.
Now compare that to China. Beijing offers “super deductions,” direct subsidies, and aggressive industrial policies tailored to national priorities. The results speak for themselves: China leads in semiconductors, solar, electric vehicles, and other strategic industries.
Four immediate fixes
To reverse course and restore American competitiveness, Congress must act.
- Restore full expensing of R&D investments so businesses can deduct costs in the year they’re made — not years later.
- Expand the R&D credit to reach startups, family-owned manufacturers, and small tech firms that often drive innovation but struggle to access support.
- Streamline eligibility rules and reduce audit risks that discourage many companies from claiming the credit at all.
- Create bonus credits for R&D tied to domestic manufacturing in key sectors like semiconductors, energy, defense, and infrastructure.
R&D as economic infrastructure
American manufacturing won’t come back without innovation. You can’t revive the auto industry, reshore chip production, or scale clean energy without continuous investment in research and development. And without smart tax policy to back it, capital won’t go where it’s needed.
Lawmakers in both parties love to talk about supporting U.S. industry. But support doesn’t come from speeches — it comes from policy. If Congress is serious about restoring American manufacturing, it should start by fixing the one tax tool designed to keep us competitive.
The auto industry didn’t boom just because someone built a car. It took Ford’s innovation of the assembly line and the machines to make it work. Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb — he made it viable. Steve Wozniak didn’t invent the microchip, but he made the personal computer scalable.
Inventors didn’t build the modern economy. Innovators did.
Innovation isn’t an expense. It’s an investment — in national security, in American workers, and in the future of U.S. leadership.
Trump’s UK tariff deal exposes the global free trade lie
President Trump on Thursday announced a new tariff deal with the United Kingdom — the first major agreement to follow the “Liberation Day” tariffs that forced 90 countries to come crawling back to the negotiating table.
Earlier in the week, India offered a zero-for-zero tariff deal — free trade on pharmaceuticals, steel, and auto parts. Trump declined.
America doesn’t just need tariffs to protect jobs and industries. It needs them to defend its sovereignty.
Predictably, the free-trade faithful slammed the U.S.-U.K. deal as “managed trade” that would harm consumers. They rushed to embrace India’s offer instead. They’ve got it backward.
Trump’s “managed trade” with the U.K. will do more to strengthen America’s economy — and serve American workers — than any so-called “free trade” agreement with India. Why? Because developed and developing nations operate in fundamentally different economic worlds. One-size-fits-all trade policy doesn’t work.
Free trade is a myth
This may offend professional economists who worship the rational-consumer model, but it must be said: Different countries are different. These aren’t surface-level quirks. They reshape the entire trade equation and make real free trade — not just difficult — but impossible.
Start with wages. In 2024, the median American worker earned $61,984. The median Briton earned $47,162 — both figures in U.S. dollars for easy comparison. The U.K. lags behind but not by much. If the U.K. were a U.S. state, it would rank somewhere in the middle. Free trade with the U.K. won’t trigger mass offshoring because our labor markets are comparable.
India is a different story. The median Indian worker earned just $3,925 last year. For the price of one American, a company could hire 16 Indians. That wage gap makes offshoring to India almost inevitable in labor-intensive industries. Cheap labor wins.
But wages aren’t the only issue. Legal systems, tax regimes, geography, infrastructure, language, climate, cultural norms, business ethics, and demographics all create market asymmetries that domestic policy can’t overcome.
Take China. American companies operating there face rampant intellectual property theft. Westerners assume legal systems deter crimes like fraud and theft. In reality, cultural norms prevent most bad behavior long before the courts get involved.
China doesn’t share America’s cultural regard for property rights — especially when it comes to outsiders. Since 2001, China has stolen an estimated $5 trillion in American intellectual property. Chinese courts have refused to hold anyone accountable. This isn’t an exception. It’s standard practice.
Doing business in China isn’t like doing business in America, Canada, Australia, or Europe — where common values and legal recourse create a relatively level playing field.
Free-trade advocates can slash tariffs and harmonize regulations all they want, but they can’t fix these deeper, structural imbalances. They can’t rewrite culture or eliminate corruption. These asymmetries make truly free trade impossible.
Spot the differences
In my book “Reshore: How Tariffs Will Bring Our Jobs Home and Revive the American Dream,” I argue that American workers are among the most productive in the world — more productive than their counterparts in Germany, Mexico, or almost anywhere else.
That’s why the U.S. typically runs trade surpluses — or small deficits — with developed countries like the Netherlands, Australia, and the U.K.
So why do highly productive American factories shut down and relocate to China, Mexico, or India — where it takes more labor to produce the same output?
Because productivity doesn’t equal price.
The price of a good reflects more than just labor. If a Chinese manufacturer steals its technology instead of inventing it, it can undercut American competitors who spent years funding research and development.
That’s not a free market. It’s rigged.
Tariffs defend more than jobs
Global free trade is a myth. Nations can’t trade freely while market asymmetries persist. The only way to achieve true parity would be to unify the world’s economies, legal systems, cultures, and political structures. That’s the goal of the European Union, World Trade Organization, and World Economic Forum. Coincidence? Hardly.
America doesn’t just need tariffs to protect jobs and industries. It needs them to defend its sovereignty. Globalism doesn’t level the playing field — it sells it to the lowest bidder.
Vindictive researcher at high-security NIH lab risked deadly outbreak over petty dispute with coworker: Bhattacharya
A contractor working at one of the highest-security infectious disease research labs in North America recently risked an outbreak of deadly disease in order to exact retribution over a "personal dispute," National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya claims.
According to a Health and Human Services official who spoke with Fox News, the contracting researcher poked holes in a colleague's personal protective equipment following a lovers' quarrel. The incident occurred at the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick Army base in Frederick, Maryland, in early March, though Bhattacharya said he did not learn of it until weeks later.
At 5 p.m. on April 29, all experimental work at the facility was suspended indefinitely.
"NIH has implemented a research pause—referred to as a safety stand-down—at the Integrated Research Facility at Fort Detrick," Bradley Moss, communication director for the office of research services at NIH, wrote to WIRED in an email. "This decision follows identification and documentation of personnel issues involving contract staff that compromised the facility’s safety culture, prompting this research pause. During the stand-down, no research will be conducted, and access will be limited to essential personnel only, to safeguard the facility and its resources."
The investigation into the PPE incident 'revealed a pattern — going back to the Biden administration — of safety not taken as seriously as it ought.'
The suspension of experiments, authorized by Bhattacharya in coordination with HHS Sec. Robert Kennedy, was a wise decision. The Integrated Research Facility conducts some of the highest-risk research on some of the deadliest pathogens in the world, including Lassa fever, SARS-Cov-2, and Eastern equine encephalitis. It is one of only a handful of facilities conducting such research involving "high consequence" infectious diseases in North America.
The Integrated Research Facility employs 168 workers, including contractors. The contractor who, according to Bhattacharya, "deliberately" sabotaged the coworker's PPE has since been fired.
Connie Schmaljohn, the director of the facility, has also been placed on administrative leave. The HHS official told Fox News Schmaljohn failed to report the incident up the chain of command immediately, thereby delaying the remediation process.
Schmaljohn did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED.
In a tweet thread on Wednesday, Bhattacharya characterized the incident as "serious," adding that "this is how lab leaks can happen!"
No timeline has been given for when research at the facility will resume. "I won't reopen the lab until I am satisfied that it can be done with zero risk to public safety," Bhattacharya pledged. "No more lab generated pandemics!"
"The sacrifice to research is immense," said Gigi Kwik Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. "If things are unused for a period of time, it will cost more money to get them ready to be used again."
The HHS official indicated to Fox News that breaches in safety protocol occurred repeatedly at the facility during the Biden administration, including as recently as November. Bhattacharya likewise claimed that the investigation into the PPE incident "revealed a pattern — going back to the Biden administration — of safety not taken as seriously as it ought."
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Dogs shouldn’t have to die for new medications
Modern medications have transformed health care, turning once-fatal diseases into manageable conditions. Statins have significantly reduced heart disease deaths. GLP-1 drugs are revolutionizing obesity treatment.
But the path to these breakthroughs has come at a callous cost — thanks to outdated, unnecessary regulations from the Food and Drug Administration.
Images of week-old puppies convulsing from drug overdoses may finally become a thing of the past.
Each year, U.S. labs use roughly 50 million animals in drug testing, including rodents, monkeys, dogs, and cats. Much of this often cruel experimentation stems from FDA mandates that require animal testing for drug approval.
At last, that’s beginning to change.
Thanks to the bipartisan efforts of Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Congress passed the FDA Modernization Act 3.0 in December. The bill allows sponsors to use alternative testing methods that don’t harm living things. The FDA has proven remarkably receptive to these efforts, recently announcing measures to phase out animal testing requirements. With continued momentum, animal testing may soon be gone for good.
Recent reforms have reignited a fierce and emotional debate over the role of animal testing in medical innovation. Many researchers still defend the practice. Jim Newman, communications director for Americans for Medical Progress, argues that alternatives remain in their infancy and won’t become fully reliable “for many, many years.”
While some animal testing may still serve a purpose, the FDA has long abused the practice, imposing requirements that are often cruel, costly, and slow-moving.
Take the case of Vanda Pharmaceuticals. The company pushed back when the FDA ordered it to euthanize dogs after testing its gastroparesis drug, Tradipitant. Vanda had already run extensive tests on rats and dogs, including prolonged exposure at doses up to 300 times higher than those intended for humans. No safety concerns emerged. The FDA had even approved human trials.
But when Vanda sought to extend treatment beyond three months, regulators demanded yet another round of dog testing — this time with mandatory euthanasia. The agency offered no scientific rationale, no public justification — only a bureaucratic decree.
The real cost wasn’t just animal lives. An estimated 1.5 million Americans suffer from gastroparesis and face delayed access to treatment. Yet the FDA prevailed in court, thanks to its unchecked power to require animal testing with no meaningful oversight.
Paul and Booker aim to disrupt the FDA’s outdated, inhumane testing regime. Their bipartisan reform would give companies like Vanda the power to reject animal testing when safer, more advanced alternatives exist.
One such alternative uses microchips that simulate the human body’s biological systems. These “organ-on-a-chip” technologies allow researchers to see how drugs affect human tissue — without harming a single animal.
Wider adoption of chip-based testing could cut research and development costs between 10% and 26%, while sparing countless animals from needless pain and death. Images of week-old puppies convulsing from drug overdoses may finally become a thing of the past.
These alternatives may also produce better science. A report from the National Institutes of Health found that animal models often fail to accurately replicate human disease or predict drug responses — delaying breakthroughs and wasting money while patients wait.
With the right pressure from Congress, the FDA can move away from a system rooted in cruelty and toward one grounded in modern science. The status quo is not just outdated. It’s indefensible.
Survey: Homeschooled Adults Are More Religious And Less Anxious
'Long-term homeschoolers exhibited the highest levels of optimism, gratitude, and life satisfaction.'Biden spy chiefs sidelined FBI, researchers who suspected COVID-19 lab leak: Report
According to a new report in the Wall Street Journal, spy chiefs prevented the FBI and Pentagon scientists from providing a counterpoint to their preferred COVID-19 origin theory at an important intelligence briefing in 2021.
There was a concerted effort by elements of the Biden administration and the scientific establishment during the pandemic to downplay the possibility that the COVID-19 virus originated in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where dangerous gain-of-function experiments were conducted on coronaviruses, sometimes with American funding.
While characterizing what was all along the most likely explanation as a conspiracy theory and in some cases censoring discussion of it online, the powers that be also did their best to suggest that a cross-species leap to humans was ultimately to blame. Official acceptance of this narrative would help shift blame for millions of deaths away from the communist Chinese regime, Peter Daszak's debarred EcoHealth Alliance, and the numerous American federal agencies that were involved with radical experimentation at the epicenter of the pandemic.
According to the Journal, when it came time for the intelligence community to present its findings to President Joe Biden, spy chiefs excluded the FBI — which had concluded with "moderate confidence" that a lab leak was the likely cause — from its Aug. 24, 2021, briefing along with damning genomic analysis from Pentagon scientists, which again pointed to human error.
Jason Bannan, a microbiologist who worked as a scientist at the FBI for nearly 20 years, told the Journal that his superiors primed him for the August intelligence community briefing with Biden but that he was never given the opportunity to offer what would have apparently been a contrasting view to the zoonotic origins narrative ultimately pushed by the director of national intelligence, former CIA Deputy Director Avril Haines.
A report earlier this year from Michael Shellenberger's investigative outfit, Public, indicated that the bureau possibly knew about a lab leak at the WIV as early as March 2020.
"The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan," FBI Director Christopher Wray said in a February 2023 interview. "I will just make the observation that the Chinese government ... has been doing its best to try to thwart and obfuscate the work here, the work that we're doing, the work that our U.S. government and close foreign partners are doing. And that's unfortunate for everybody."
"Being the only agency that assessed that a laboratory origin was more likely, and the agency that expressed the highest level of confidence in its analysis of the source of the pandemic, we anticipated the FBI would be asked to attend the briefing," said Bannan. "I find it surprising that the White House didn't ask."
The champions of the zoonotic origin theory may have wanted to limit the bureau's presence at the briefing in order to maintain the credibility of their preferred narrative. After all, experts at the FBI apparently weren't playing ball.
'The scientists who had the subject matter expertise were silenced.'
The Journal indicated, for instance, that the National Intelligence Council prepared a chart for inclusion in its report to Biden that insinuated commonalities between the COVID-19 pandemic and past zoonotic outbreaks. However, FBI experts allegedly suggested that the chart betrayed a proper understanding of striking and critical differences between the new virus and past viruses, especially regarding their contagiousness.
Experts at the FBI also apparently ruffled feathers — particularly those of Adrienne Keen, a State Department official who served as a consultant to WHO but now works at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — by highlighting the thesis of a WIV scientist, Yu Ping, which indicated that the virus responsible for the pandemic was indigenous to the mountainous Yunnan province in the west of China. The trouble for proponents of the zoonotic origins theory was that the initial spread was not in Yunnan but nearly 1,000 miles away, in the neighborhood of the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Hubei province.
The insights of scientists at the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency were similarly poorly received and ultimately glossed over.
The Journal noted that John Hardham, Robert Cutlip, and Jean-Paul Chretien, whose 2020 paper challenging the zoonotic origin claim was quarantined, conduced a genomic analysis that showed that the virus had undergone meddling in a lab.
The trio, working at the DIA's National Center for Medical Intelligence, determined that the virus' spike protein was not a product of evolution but of human engineering, made using techniques developed at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and described in a 2008 paper — a telltale sign of gain-of-function experimentation.
Although the trio reportedly briefed their counterparts, including one of Bannan's partners at the FBI, Hardham, Cutlip and Chretien were ordered by a superior at the Center for Medical Intelligence Center in July 2021 to cut the FBI off from further disclosures about their work.
In addition to having their work siloed, the National Intelligence Council's briefing to the president reportedly excluded a number of the Pentagon scientists' proposed edits.
While it appears there was a desire for narrative conformity, a spokeswoman for the director of national intelligence's office suggested to the Journal that divergent viewpoints were fairly represented.
A source familiar with the investigation told the New York Post, "The scientists who had the subject matter expertise were silenced."
The NIC report that Haines and two of her senior analysts presented to Biden in August ultimately concluded with "low confidence" that the virus was the result of a cross-species leap and "was probably not genetically engineered."
"What ended up on the intelligence community's cutting-room floor needs to be re-examined," said Bannan.
The Journal suggested that politics was a factor in the approach taken to the competing theories both in Washingon, D.C., and in the scientific community. Then-President Donald Trump suggested in May 2020 that he had seen evidence that gave him a "high degree of confidence" that the virus originated in a Chinese lab.
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Survey: Homeschool And Christian School Graduates Far More Likely To Keep Their Faith
Public education is erasing America's future by killing the Christian beliefs that inspire parenthood.The Left Misrepresents Stats To Deceptively Claim Illegals Are ‘Less Likely To Commit Crimes’
The media and Democrat officials continue to parrot the claim that illegals commit violent crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans.Today's top stories
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