Congress Urged to Reauthorize the National Quantum Initiative Amid Budget Battle

“The real plan here is to kind of co-develop with industry,” James Kushmerick, director of the Physical Measurement Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), told the House Science and Technology Committee, per NextGov/FCW. “NIST and other government laboratories have the expertise and the technology. Industry is capable of commercializing it and pushing it out the door and creating that economic and quantum advantage and dominance that we’re looking for.”

The National Quantum Initiative was established by Congress in 2018 to accelerate quantum research and development for the economic and national security benefit of the U.S. But its funding and authorization lapsed in 2023. At last week’s hearing, the government technology leaders warned that the U.S. risks falling behind China and other competitors if Congress fails to reauthorize the NQI.

“The last six years have seen the birth and rapid development of the U.S. quantum ecosystem and a world-leading emergent U.S. quantum industry,” Kushmerick said. But, he added, the U.S. “is facing a challenging and highly competitive landscape,” with China reportedly investing over $15 billion in quantum development and other countries “making significant advancements” in areas like quantum communications, according to Bank Info Security.

In early January, Sens. Todd Young (R-IN) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA), introduced the National Quantum Initiative Reauthorization Act to provide new funding for the effort, but the House has just begun to take up the measure.

According to Tanner Crowder, the quantum information science lead at the Department of Energy, identified quantum networking as a critical area of research. “We want to be able to connect systems together, and we need quantum networks to do that,” he told the committee. “It is impractical to send quantum information over classical networks, and so we need to continue to push that forefront and look to interconnect heterogeneous systems at the data scale level so that we can actually extract this information and compute upon it.”

Related: Trump Administration May Soon Roll Out Action Plan for Quantum Computing, Sources Say

While progress has been made, both government and industry experts say work is still needed to advance key quantum capabilities. In a statement, Allison Schwarz, Global Public Affairs and Government Relations Leader for D-Wave, a quantum computing company working on annealing systems, said language in the NQI Reauthorization Act needed to be strengthened to bolster commercial applications.

“This language is needed given that annealing quantum computing is already addressing some of the nation’s most complex challenges in logistics, emergency response, defense, and national security,” she said.

“Annealing” refers to a process used in metallurgy to increase the pliability and conductivity of certain materials, such as steel, copper, brass, and aluminum.

Whether the NQI reauthorization will get included in the next federal budget in unclear. Several of the labs involved in the initiative are housed in agencies whose budgets are yet to be approved by Congress, including the Department of Home Security (DHS) and the Defense Department.

Senate Democrats are currently threatening to hold off approving a so-called minibus budget bill to fund the agencies unless significant reforms are made to DHS in response to the killing of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis by federal immigration enforcement agents. The current funding expires at the end of the week, and if the new budget is not approved by then those agencies will be shut down.