Investing in research, which drives industrial development and innovation, is essential to ensuring America's economic prosperity, national security, and leadership in a global economy. Although U.S. commitment to research and development (R&D) has traditionally been strong and sustained, federal funding of R&D as a share of U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) fell from 1.25 percent to 0.78 percent between 1985 and 2003. At the same time, many other nations have increased R&D expenditures as a percentage of GDP. The worldwide increase in R&D expenditures has shrunk the U.S. share of patents and publications in scientific journals, and adversely affected the nation's trade balance in high technology products. In February 2006, President Bush introduced the American Competitiveness Initiative (ACI) to re-establish American dominance in the global marketplace. At the Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF) 2006 summer meeting, Dr. John Marburger, Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy of the Executive Office of the President, discussed the imperative to increase American commitment to basic research, particularly in the physical sciences. He also explained the ACI plan to double funding over the next ten years for the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy's (DOE) Office of Science, and the Department of Commerce's National Institutes for Standards and Technology (NIST), and plans to make permanent the Research and Experimentation (R&E) federal tax credit. (Contains 1 box, 3 figures and 1 table.)