Quantum Commission Calls for National Foundry Program to Hold Off China

A bipartisan commission wants a National Quantum Foundry Access Program and sustained federal funding, warning that China's supply-chain and manufacturing advantages could let it scale quantum technology faster than the United States. The preliminary report, released Tuesday and titled "Defining the American Quantum Era," carries no dollar figure on any of its ten asks. A final version with an implementation strategy is due in spring 2027.

The Commission on U.S. Quantum Primacy, convened by the Special Competitive Studies Project, counts fourteen members. It is co-chaired by SCSP president Ylli Bajraktari, Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Sen. Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.). The roster includes IonQ CEO Niccolo de Masi, IBM research director Jay Gambetta, Google Quantum AI founder Hartmut Neven, Playground Global's Pat Gelsinger, and the directors of Los Alamos and Sandia national laboratories. That is a boardroom, not a study group.

What does the report actually propose?

The ten near-term priorities sit under four headings: discovery, development, deployment and scale.

• Discovery: sustained investment across agencies, universities and national labs, plus dedicated funding for new quantum algorithms and applications.
• Development: a national program to co-develop software alongside hardware, which the commission says could be modeled on the Energy Department's Exascale Computing Project, and a NIST-led public-private effort on shared benchmarks and interoperability.
• Deployment: more mission-relevant use cases with early adopters, repeatable paths for hybrid quantum-classical workflows, and faster adoption of post-quantum cryptography across critical infrastructure and state and local governments.
• Scale: the foundry access program for shared manufacturing, a workforce plan spanning technicians to Ph.D.s that also attracts international talent, and an allied quantum market built on aligned testing, procurement and risk-based export controls.

The foundry proposal is the structural ask. Shared manufacturing access would give smaller quantum hardware firms a path to scale that does not run through their own capital budgets.

Why the commission thinks the U.S. could lose

The report's core argument is blunt. The United States leads in research, software, deployed quantum computers and private investment, yet none of that converts automatically into leadership in deployment or industrial scale. China, by contrast, "has made quantum a strategic priority, backing it with significant public investment," and is moving from demonstrations to infrastructure such as quantum networking.

In other words, the country that builds the factories may matter more than the country that writes the papers. "Leadership in quantum will not be decided by who publishes the most papers or reaches a single milestone first," Bajraktari said.

What is already sitting in Congress?

The report lands while bills to reauthorize the National Quantum Initiative, created by a 2018 law, still await floor votes. Young and Sen. Maria Cantwell lead the Senate bill, S.3597, which the Senate Commerce Committee approved unanimously in April. It would extend the program through December 2034 and add up to three new NIST quantum centers, three NSF centers and a Manufacturing USA institute for quantum.

The House Science Committee advanced its version, H.R. 8462, at an April 29 markup. Both chambers have done the committee work; neither has held a floor vote.

The politics, at least on paper, favor movement. "Preparing for the future of quantum technology should not be a partisan issue," Luján said. A Republican senator from Indiana and a Democrat from New Mexico share a chairmanship, which is more harmony than most technology policy achieves.

The open question is money. The report requests programs without pricing them, and the implementation strategy arrives only in spring 2027. By then, the reauthorization fight will already be settled or stalled, and China's quantum infrastructure build will be two years further along.