The Problem

The Mission for America needs inventions that do not yet exist, and it needs them from a country that has spent 40 years pulling back from the kind of research that once produced them.

Most of what the MFA will deploy is proven technology, like electric vehicles, heat pumps, solar panels, and wind turbines. The RFC exists to finance their deployment at scale. But some of the hardest problems in the Mission require breakthroughs that are still in laboratories or that cost so much today that no amount of financing will make them viable. Better batteries. Clean cement. Carbon-free steel at commodity prices. Hydrogen aircraft engines. Long-duration energy storage. The speed of these inventions will determine whether the Mission succeeds or stalls.

The private market is not going to deliver them. Venture capital chases returns on 7-to-10-year timelines. The hardest energy problems take longer and cost more than any fund will bear. Early-stage climate tech funding has been declining since 2022. Capital fled to safer bets.

The United States used to lead the world in this kind of research. It does not anymore. By most measures China now outspends America on public energy R&D, and it has captured majority global market share in solar panels, batteries, wind turbines, and electric vehicles. In recent years the federal government has made it worse. It has proposed deep cuts to research agencies of all kinds and canceled billions of dollars in energy research and demonstration awards. For most of the four decades before the 2022 infrastructure and climate laws briefly reversed it, the United States spent less on energy R&D in real terms than it did in 1978.

The Mission

The Mission for America will build a generation-defining research institution that solves the hardest technological problems of the clean energy transition, creates thousands of high-wage research and manufacturing jobs, and returns the profits of its labor and innovation to the American taxpayer. The Division will bridge the gaps that keep breakthroughs from becoming industries and fund moonshot technologies with the speed and risk tolerance that only government can provide. Its labs, its government-owned facilities, and the manufacturing that graduates from them will be sited deliberately in the regions that need the work, outside the existing coastal research hubs, and the jobs will pay prevailing or union wages.

The RFC Advanced Research Division will operate as the nation's central climate innovation engine, and it will be disciplined about what it takes on. The Division works only on the breakthroughs the rest of the Mission for America genuinely cannot succeed without, the handful of hard problems where a whole sector's plan stalls until the science lands. Every program has to answer one question before it begins. Which mission fails if this is not solved? When the honest answer is none, the work belongs somewhere else. Within that portfolio, the Division will hire brilliant scientists and engineers into in-house laboratories, contract with private teams to race competing approaches, and sponsor grand prize competitions for ideas it never thought to fund. Every problem will have multiple teams in parallel, the approaches that underperform will be retired, and the ones that work will scale. When a program track ends, its people move to the next one.

The Division will own what it creates. When a Division-funded battery chemistry powers the next generation of electric vehicles, the RFC will capture equity stakes or royalty revenue. When a Division-funded grid-storage or clean-cement breakthrough reaches commercial scale, the public will get a return, so the profits come back to the taxpayer.

America has built institutions like this before, and they built the modern world. The Manhattan Project, Bell Labs, DARPA, and later ARPA-E gave the country the atomic age, the transistor and the solar cell, the internet, and much of its best clean-energy research. What made them work was institutional design. They had patient money, a tolerance for failure, the authority to move fast, and a time horizon long enough for basic research to pay off. What none of them did was capture the winnings for the public. The government paid for the atomic program and the internet, then handed both to private industry. Bell Labs' transistor, though privately funded, was pried open by antitrust regulators and built a whole semiconductor industry in which the public that benefited held no stake. This Division keeps the design and fixes that flaw. It also refuses the darker bargain the original Manhattan Project struck, the one that left the Trinity downwinders and the uranium miners to carry its costs without its benefits. Here the risks and the rewards both belong to the communities that host the work.

The organizational model is built for speed and public return. Program managers operate with real authority and flat hierarchy, running small teams with rapid pivots. Teams are selected on technical merit, rewarded for milestones, and free to fail fast. Promising technologies graduate to the sector chapters and the RFC's deployment machinery, which finances factories and places bulk orders.

ARPA-E, DOE, and the other federal R&D programs will continue their work, and their budgets should be restored. The Division will add to them, operating in territory that existing agencies cannot reach, with higher risk tolerance, larger bets, longer time horizons, and an equity model that no federal grant program is designed to use.

Congress will establish the RFC Advanced Research Division as a permanent institution with delegated authority over research strategy, hiring, and investment decisions, funded by a direct annual appropriation on the order of several billion dollars, an order of magnitude above ARPA-E and, in real terms, a sustained commitment on the scale of the original Manhattan Project. It will work through three funding modes at once. It will run in-house research in its own government-owned labs and in contractor-operated (GOCO) facilities, award milestone-based contracts to private teams, and hold large prize competitions organized by problem type.

The public's share is built into the Division by default, sized to who did the work. Where the Division bankrolls a company's core commercial product, it will take an equity stake or production rights. Where it funds a university or an independent inventor, it will take a lighter royalty or a non-exclusive license. And where it pays for pure public-good research with nothing to sell, like the shared materials and measurement science every team relies on, it will ask for nothing back. Two changes in law make this work. A current law, the Bayh-Dole Act, lets contractors and universities keep the patents on inventions the government paid for, so the Division's charter will give it clear authority to hold the patents, take equity, and collect royalties on the research it funds. And a revolving fund will let the Division keep and reinvest what it earns, which is how it can grow over time to cover part of its own costs.

Speed will come with transparency. Program managers will be free to move without endless rounds of paperwork and sign-offs to release each dollar, but they will work under strict conflict-of-interest and recusal rules, independent inspector-general and GAO oversight, and a public dashboard that posts every award, equity stake, and result in close to real time. Racing several teams against each problem is itself a guard against favoritism, because no single manager gets to hand-pick the winner. And the rules for graduating a finished technology out to the sector chapters will be set in advance and enforced, so a moonshot program cannot quietly harden into a permanent bureaucracy.

The Core Portfolio

The Division's core portfolio is the short list of breakthroughs that are critical to the success of the larger Mission for America, each one a place where a sector Mission will run into a wall that only research can clear.

Carbon-free cement. Making cement releases enormous amounts of carbon dioxide, and most of it comes from the core reaction itself, baking limestone into cement, which gives off CO2 no matter how clean the heat is. That is why cleaner energy alone can never fix cement. The Concrete Mission will build its first plants with the cleaner methods that already work, but the plants that come later will need new cement recipes that still have to be proven and made as cheap as ordinary cement. It will run that crash research program jointly with the Division.

A fossil-free feedstock for the chemical industry, and a clean source of aromatics. The Industry Mission can change how a chemical plant is powered, but around 60 percent of the fossil fuel entering the plant goes into the product itself as raw material, the carbon in the plastic and the hydrogen in the fertilizer. Replacing that feedstock is the single hardest industrial decarbonization problem there is, and its toughest piece is a clean, high-volume source of aromatics, the benzene-family molecules behind polyester, nylon, and most solvents and pigments. No such source exists at commercial scale today. Until it does, the chemical industry stays tied to oil and gas extraction.

Clean ways to make the metals that carbon makes today. Some materials, like silicon metal and the ferroalloys that go into steel, are made by using carbon to pull the oxygen out of their ore. The carbon dioxide comes from that chemical reaction, so running the furnace on clean electricity changes nothing. The clean alternatives, using hydrogen to do the job, or pulling the metal out with electricity in a process called molten-oxide electrolysis, work in the lab but still have to be proven at full commercial scale. The Industry Mission is counting on the Division to get them there.

Clean heat for the very hottest processes. A handful of industries need heat above about 1,800 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt specialty ceramics and fuse the minerals that line furnaces. Clean electric options like arc and plasma heating can physically reach those temperatures, but none is yet mature and cost-competitive at the round-the-clock throughput these processes demand. This is the top end of the industrial-heat problem, and the barrier for the clean options that work lower down is cost. The Division will fund the research to close that last gap.

Long-duration energy storage. A grid built on sun and wind needs to store power for days, well beyond the few hours today's batteries are built for, to carry the country through a still, cloudy stretch when generation drops. Cheap storage that lasts days is what lets a clean grid run around the clock, and it is one of the missing pieces the Clean Power Mission depends on. The Division will fund the competing approaches, from new battery chemistries to storing energy as heat or compressed air, and race them to commercial cost.

Batteries with far more power in far less weight. The second storage frontier is energy density, packing more energy into a lighter cell. This is what will carry a battery-electric truck through a full long-haul route, the hardest job in the Trucking Mission, and what could eventually push electric flight past short hops and give the Aircraft Mission its hedge if hydrogen stalls. It is the most crowded research field the Division funds and the one where the American lead has slipped furthest toward China, which is a reason to push harder.

Zero-carbon fuel for long-haul aviation. The long-haul flights that burn the most fuel need more power than current batteries can feasibly provide, and the leading answer is hydrogen, burned in an engine or run through a fuel cell. The propulsion, the cryogenic tanks, and the fuel systems all still have to be proven and certified to fly. The Aircraft Mission will build the aircraft and stand up the industry, and the hardest propulsion science will come from here.

Across all of it, the Division's job is to make the clean version work and to drive it to the cost of the dirty version it replaces. A breakthrough that only the wealthy can afford does not decarbonize a global commodity like steel or cement or plastic.

Strategic Frontier Hedges

A second, smaller set of programs will also be researched within the Manhattan Projects. These are strategic hedges, funded because the payoff would be enormous, but the Mission's success does not ride on any of them.

Fusion. Fusion power would remake the energy system, but it will almost certainly arrive too late for the Mission's 10-year and mid-century targets, which are built to be met with the solar, wind, nuclear fission, and storage the country can deploy now. The Division will fund fusion as a long-horizon bet on the generation of energy after this one, and it will say so plainly. The plan's targets do not depend on it.

Ultra-high-speed flight. Supersonic and hypersonic passenger flight is closer than it has been in a generation, but it burns far more energy per passenger, and a clean version is a much harder problem than clean subsonic flight. The Mission's commercial aviation stays subsonic and zero-emission, where the engineering and the climate math actually close, and ultra-high-speed flight stays here as a frontier line so the country keeps a hand in the technology without betting the clean-aviation mission on it.

The Division also lends its labs and its research base to a few frontier lines that other missions own and that are too speculative for commercial financing:

• Novel carbon-capture chemistries and enhanced weathering, owned by the Cooldown Mission.
• Heat-tolerant coral, owned by the Oceans Mission.

It supports this work as a lower priority, because the Mission for America does not depend on these breakthroughs.

Presidential Leadership

During the campaign, the president will make the case for public research directly. The breakthroughs the clean economy needs, better batteries, clean cement, carbon-free steel, hydrogen aircraft, are too important and too slow to leave to venture capital, and the country that invents them will own the industries that follow.

During the transition, the president-elect's team will draft the Division's charter for the first 100 days, name its leadership, and define the first moonshot tracks from the sector chapters' technology gaps. The charter will be written to sit inside the RFC's own chartering, so the two stand up together.

On Day One, the president will act within existing authority, directing the RFC and the Department of Energy to begin standing up the research effort under the tools they already have and naming its leadership. What the Division cannot do yet will wait for Congress. Its permanent charter, the appropriation that funds it, the equity-and-royalty authority that displaces the Bayh-Dole default, and the revolving fund that lets it reinvest its earnings all require legislation.

In the first 100 days, that legislation will go to Congress, carrying the RFC Advanced Research Division charter, its multi-year appropriation, and the statutory authorities for public return and reinvestment. From there the Division will begin recruiting program managers and launching its first tracks.

What the Ten-Year Mission Delivers

The Institution Is Stood Up by Year 1 (2030)

• RFC Advanced Research Division chartered, leadership named, first program managers appointed, and first research teams recruited
• First moonshot program tracks launched based on sector chapter needs, with initial capital deployed to the highest-priority targets
• Contracting framework established with equity/royalty terms, ready for the first awards

First Technologies Graduate by Year 5 (2034)

• First Division-funded technologies reaching commercial viability and graduating to sector chapters for RFC deployment
• Equity positions and royalty agreements generating initial revenue from successful commercializations
• Portfolio rebalanced: underperforming programs cut, new programs spun up based on emerging sector needs

The Institution Begins Returning Value by Year 10 (2039)

• Multiple Division-funded technologies deployed at commercial scale across the MFA, drawn mostly from the nearer-term programs like advanced batteries and grid storage. The longest-horizon critical-path bets, such as hydrogen aircraft engines, clean cement, and clean chemical feedstock, are pushed toward readiness and justified by paying off beyond 2039, while the frontier hedges like fusion are carried as insurance outside the plan the targets depend on
• Royalty and licensing revenue from successful technologies partially offsetting Division operating costs, with aggregate public return measured across the whole portfolio, the way DARPA is judged
• The Division's multi-year appropriation, its reinvested royalty income, and labs and prime contracts spread across many states make it far harder for a hostile Congress to zero out than a single annual line item
• The Division is a permanent institution with a proven track record, operating as the R&D engine for whatever challenges come next
• The Division has absorbed new moonshot programs that were not foreseeable in 2029