The Challenges of Policy in an Era of Fulcrum Technologies

Last month, Alliant Energy announced it will delay converting its Wisconsin coal plant by three years. This delay underscores an important tension: While the United States has strong economic and strategic motivations to stay at the forefront of AI, the mounting electricity demands needed to power this emerging industry are increasingly clashing with the country’s decarbonization targets.

The slowing phaseout of coal is only the latest example of national security and economic imperatives running up against sustainability concerns. Why? Today, the United States faces the unprecedented challenge of simultaneously navigating three escalating factors: a denser international economic landscape, a more fiercely disputed geostrategic environment, and increasing sustainability concerns.

From this trifecta a new category of technologies — which we call fulcrum technologies — has emerged. These technologies are simultaneously critical to American security, prosperity, and environmental sustainability. This emerging policy environment presents many challenges and opportunities and is common to such disparate technologies as AI, biotechnology, semiconductors, and solar photovoltaics. Worryingly, existing U.S. policy approaches are not well adapted to dynamically balancing three critical imperatives at once.

We can think of this like children playing on a three-way seesaw. The typical seesaw only has two sides, which simply requires balancing two opposing forces across a pivot point, or fulcrum. For a three-sided seesaw, the task becomes more complex. If they don’t position themselves well collectively, the seesaw will begin to tumble off its fulcrum, ejecting children onto the sand. While the consequences of playground misadventures are limited to tantrums and scraped knees, the national stakes for getting fulcrum technology policy wrong are far higher.

Effective policy in this space will require unprecedented creative coordination between domestic and international stakeholders, from government to private industry. This includes breaking down silos, streamlining policy processes, adequately staffing policy bodies, and proactively identifying nascent fulcrum technologies as early as possible.

The country that gets this right first will have major advantages, both in shaping global economic, strategic, and resource systems and in husbanding its own assets effectively. If the United States lags behind, it risks ceding the initiative, potentially to adversaries, and creating policies that make it less secure, prosperous, and well-resourced.

Below, we explore the three escalating challenges facing the United States, explain what we mean by “fulcrum technologies,” and suggest policy approaches the United States should take to better manage them.

Navigating an Increasingly Constrained Policy Space

The emergence of fulcrum technologies is driven by the fact that the United States is on the precipice of a far more constrained and less forgiving policy space than it has faced in the past. Across a critical triad of economic, security, and sustainability imperatives, the United States can look forward to a world where it has far less maneuverability and margin for error than it has enjoyed historically.

A More Crowded Global Economy

After World War II, the United States broadly benefited from economic and technical hegemony. It had the largest single economy; controlled the world’s primary reserve currency; and led in both international organizations and research, innovation, and technology.

Increasingly, however, American economic hegemony is shrinking, and along with it, the benefits. America’s sheer economic size is rivaled by China and the European Union. Technological innovation is increasingly international, due both to market forces and to government policies. And the rise of multinational corporations and intensely globalized supply chains means that even where the United States maintains leadership, it is constrained by the need to work through and around critical linkages with overseas policy environments. While the era of increasing hyper-globalization may have ended, the global economy is still highly interconnected, offering countries the chance to sever or threaten to sever ties in trade, finance, and technology for geopolitical leverage.

As a result, the global economic system is less and less likely to align around the priorities of the United States, creating an economic policy environment that will be far less malleable to U.S. interests.

A More Contested World

Similarly, the vast room to maneuver the United States experienced in the post–Cold War era is growing narrower over time, both in a relative sense with the rise of other states’ militaries and ambitions but also due to the particular strategic, operational, and tactical dynamics at play across a variety of emerging and emergent threat environments.

With the end of the Cold War, the United States emerged as the preeminent global military power. While it would be needlessly sensationalist to claim that the United States no longer maintains military superiority by many measures, that historical dominance has been slowly eroding. And we are currently experiencing the fiercest era of major power rivalry since the conclusion of the Cold War, with Russia and China both pushing to establish or expand regional hegemony. The United States may very well face a future world where Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is less a notable exception and more the rule. At the same time, threats like irregular warfare, terrorism, and cyber operations by state and non-state actors create novel stresses that diverge from existing national defense postures.

Increasingly Constrained Global Resources

While the trends above have an established history in the discussion of modern strategic priorities, the rise of sustainability as a comparably important and constraining aspect of the policy space is a newer development. For most of its history, the expansive landmass, global hegemony, and economic openness of the United States has allowed it to function as if the pool of necessary resources were functionally limitless — constrained, if at all, more by geostrategic circumstance than by fundamental boundaries. Sustainability was rarely a critical dimension for strategic technology policy.

However, three things are now happening in concert. First, the United States is starting to run up against real availability limitations in multiple resources, from fresh water to atmospheric capacity to absorb pollutants to domestic production of key minerals. Second, developing countries are less willing to allow the United States to offshore negative impacts of resource extraction and waste disposal to them without extracting higher prices. Third, climate change is putting pressure on the ecosystem as a whole, lowering its absorptive and productive capacity. America’s margin for error in terms of resource management and ecosystem sustainability is shrinking at both ends; sustainability challenges are rising while capacity to address them is decreasing.

The Rise of Fulcrum Technologies

As room for maneuver narrows in all three dimensions, we see the emergence of a distinct and growing suite of critical technologies defined by the uniquely challenging policy problem of managing constraints and tradeoffs in all three domains simultaneously. While many existing frameworks for thinking about important, policy-relevant technologies exist — strategic, general-purpose, emerging, frontier, etc. — none captures this dynamic. Fulcrum technologies are not merely old wine in a new bottle.

While some strategically important technologies are fulcrum technologies, not all are; fulcrum technologies are a narrower and more demanding subset. For example, while 5G networks and future generations of telecommunicationsmatter significantly for national security and economic prosperity, they are less directly relevant to sustainability. That does not make telecommunications inherently less important. It does, however, make navigating policy related to 5G less complex and difficult (though not necessarily easy).

In contrast, while all general-purpose technologies are fulcrum technologies, not all fulcrum technologies are general-purpose. General-purpose technologies — including AI — were not historically defined by the triad of strategic, economic, and sustainability policy objectives that they face today. Economic and security concerns — from job displacement and productivity gains to safe, reliable, and secure applications — have dominated American AI policy debates. But AI is also critical to sustainability outcomes (making it easier to meet environmental targets) and acts as a critical stressor (it is common knowledge that, as a sector, AI is an energy hog [and incredibly thirsty]). “General-purpose” captures the pervasive impact of AI across many sectors. “Fulcrum” captures the policy challenge AI now represents.

Finally, fulcrum technologies are not a synonym for emerging or frontier. They appear across the broad span of technology development, from nascent to mature. CRISPR — a new powerful biotechnology tool for editing genetic code with unprecedented precision and efficiency — is an emerging fulcrum technology. In addition to public health benefits, potential use cases include agriculture (engineering crops that are far more robust to changing, and extreme, climates); bioremediation (engineering microorganisms capable of breaking down pollutants and toxins in soil, water, and air); and biological warfare (engineering pathogens with enhanced virulence, drug resistance, or novel characteristics that evade detection and treatment). Good policy for CRISPR, like other fulcrum technologies, will need to holistically consider the economic, strategic, and sustainability implications of its use.

The fulcrum technology challenge may be new, but many fulcrum technologies are mature. Indeed, it is in two “mature” technologies — semiconductors and solar photovoltaics — that the growing importance of fulcrum technologies was first clear to us. It is easy to see how the policy challenge within each has expanded from balancing two to three domains.

Semiconductors, for example, have long been understood to implicate both security and economic priorities. Their origins are steeped in American national security imperatives, but they now underpin much of 21st-century industry and innovation — from artificial intelligence to automobiles, satellites to F-35 fighter jets. They are the very definition of critical, general-purpose technology.

Now, however, the industry is also bumping up against resource and sustainability constraints. They currently have a significant carbon footprint, and without good industry practices, semiconductor manufacturing can consume a lot of water and generate significant waste. Meanwhile, semiconductors play a fundamental role in the development and deployment of green technologies (e.g., electric vehicles and renewable energy); and they underpin the potential sustainability benefits and dangers of AI discussed above.

This makes semiconductors a fulcrum technology with all the policy complexity that implies. As long as semiconductors remain foundational, the United States will face an increasingly challenging policy paradox: a world where: a) affordably priced chips and technical innovation are critical to American economic prosperity and competitiveness; b) semiconductors underpin, and will be decisive for, how states project power and defend their citizenry; c) meeting global climate goals will, in part, rely on semiconductors; but d) chip manufacturing and the use cases they support also pose unique challenges to meeting sustainability goals. The success or failure of current and future semiconductor policies will depend on America’s ability to effectively and creatively juggle these economic, national security, and sustainability concerns for one of the most complex and globalized supply chains in the world.

By contrast, solar energy has historically traded off between economic and sustainability imperatives, but it is now becoming strategically important.

Policy around the role of solar in domestic electrical generation was initially dominated by economic drivers (solar’s high costs and/or possible role in mitigating the 1970s’ energy crisis), but by the 1990s solar began to play a more central role in decarbonizing electricity. Since then, solar energy policy has largely been a balancing act between solar’s potential sustainability benefits and its high (though declining) costs. The practical result of this balancing act was the creation of a thriving market for solar installation within the developed world — and a thriving solar equipment export industry in China, where manufacturing market share now ranges from 83 percent to 95 percent across key components of solar photovoltaics equipment.

As long as solar was a niche power source, this supply chain configuration was not strategically alarming. However, as America faces a near-future energy system where solar photovoltaics are a core source of the electricity generation that underpins its economy, this is changing. Ensuring solar supply chain security will be as mission-critical for security and economic competitiveness in the future as oil has been in the past. The United States now has to understand solar photovoltaics as a technology at the intersection of economics, sustainability, and security. How does America make energy policy in a world where: a) affordably priced solar is critical to electricity systems, energy security, and a low-carbon future; b) solar is a major industry and nexus of economic competitiveness; but c) supply chains for solar photovoltaic equipment are concentrated in China, and the owners of core innovation and intellectual property in this space are increasingly global?

In short, the fulcrum technology concept captures something new: a critical common policy dynamic found between semiconductors (a mature general-purpose technology), solar photovoltaics (a maturing application-specific technology), AI (an emerging general-purpose technology), and CRISPR (an emerging, application-specific technology that might someday become more general-purpose).

If policymaking misses this critical dynamic, it will make bad policy. Here’s how to avoid that.

Seizing the Moment: Lessons for Policymakers and Industry Alike

U.S. policy tools and institutions are worryingly maladapted to the current moment. The United States has historically been more hands-off than most countries when it comes to industrial policies, preferring to intervene primarily when security imperatives require it (as with export controls for strategic technology) or at the level of fundamental research (as with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — commonly known as DARPA — and other similar organizations). The CHIPS Act (part of the CHIPS and Science Act) is an impressive and notable exception — a bipartisan package of measures intended to improve the security and economic competitiveness of the U.S. semiconductor industry. Even CHIPS, however, is still primarily focused on the traditional two-dimensional framework of economic and security concerns.

With the rise of fulcrum technologies, the United States must successfully navigate the shift from traditional two-sided policy seesaws to the three-sided one. The former has proven difficult enough. The United States is currently even less well equipped to succeed at the latter. That does not mean, however, that success lies beyond its reach. Below are five policy lessons that are practical and achievable for the United States given its governance structure and the challenges it faces.

Mind the Gaps

Fulcrum technologies require fulcrum technology policymaking — that is, paradigms and standard operating procedures that break down traditional silos. This requires stronger mechanisms for more rapid cooperation across relevant agencies — including Defense, Commerce, and Energy. Silos are not solely a within-government concern, however. They can be equally as damaging internationally (critical gaps between allies) and between the public and private sectors (poor coordination with industry).

Increasing constraints in the policy space across economic, security and sustainability concerns will continue to create more frequent and more obvious direct tradeoffs across all three dimensions for an increasing number of critical fulcrum technologies. And in a world where the United States has less and less margin for error in general, mistakes or even instances of poor or slow coordination will get ever more costly — but early successes will pay dividends.

Streamline Policy Processes

The more distinct veto points a policy process has, the less nimble the United States will be at using it to react to a shifting domestic and international landscape. The United States has often integrated new policy imperatives by adding separate layers of bureaucracy to handle the task. This is especially true in areas like energy policy, where traditionally both federal and state/local levels have been important in policymaking, and addressing new concerns around environmental or community impact has often resulted in introducing additional rounds of regulatory or judicial review around infrastructure assets.

We emphasize that our point here is not that the United States shouldn’t address the additional concerns these new layers and authorities are often established to address. On the contrary: being able to effectively address the multivalent nature of these problems is exactly the necessity we are highlighting. Creating longer chains of serial review, however, will only exacerbate the dynamics the United States must now overcome. The imperative the United States faces today is to integrate, rather than layer, so that the interactions between them can be effectively managed.

Build off Momentum

The United States can, and should, build off the momentum of efforts that are already under way. America has not been idle. Among other things, the groundbreaking Oct. 30, 2023 “Executive Order on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence” tasks the Secretary of Energy, in coordination with other agencies, to “support the goal of strengthening our Nation’s resilience against climate change impacts and building an equitable clean energy economy for the future.” Similarly, the recent Inflation Reduction Act clearly takes economic competitiveness, security, and sustainability imperatives seriously in the areas of renewable and emerging energy technology. Action is demonstrably possible in these areas, but the United States cannot afford to rest on its laurels. It must move from ambitious rhetoric and ad hoc efforts to a holistic fulcrum technology policy vision and an operational fulcrum technology policy apparatus.

Staff for the Task

Success in this space will hinge in large part off the ability to staff for the task ahead. The United States simultaneously needs to increase the number of people working on these problems and the expertise (including industry and technical experience) they embody. These are big, complex problems, and the United States must be able to address them fast; simply increasing staff available will help make responses nimbler. But it also needs to include people with expertise in areas that address the interactions between these drivers — for example, specialized knowledge around the impacts of semiconductor manufacturing on energy and water resources, or the security vulnerabilities of the global supply chains for solar generation equipment and batteries.

Get it Right from the Start

Some fulcrum technologies will be found amongst the pool of emerging technologies. These offer a unique window of opportunity. Less historical entrenchment in these technology policy spaces provides the chance to address them as fulcrum technologies from the start, deliberately designing and building policy apparatus with the needs of the future in mind, rather than attempting to pivot after policymaking patterns are already embedded. But this window will not remain open forever. Outright mistakes or suboptimal policy coordination today will only become more costly in the future, both at home and abroad.

In sum, for the United States to ensure a secure, prosperous, and sustainable future, it needs to build technology policy frameworks that are robust to this evolving environment. The task before the United States has rarely been harder. But one silver lining is that for an array of nascent and/or emerging fulcrum technologies, America has the unique opportunity to build in fulcrum policy approaches early in the policy process rather than attempting to pivot after years of robust lines of effort. This requires proactively identifying fulcrum technologies as they emerge — putting the United States in the position of being able to catch the horse before it leaves the barn rather than chasing it down after the fact.

Melissa K. Griffith is a lecturer in technology and national security at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the Alperovitch Institute.

Nina Kelsey is an associate professor of public policy and international affairs at the George Washington Elliott School of International Affairs and the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy.

Image: Francisco de Goya, Wikimedia