US Government Advisors Advocate for Increased International Quantum Technology Cooperation

Building on its Budget 2021 commitment to launch a seven year $360 million National Quantum Strategy, the Government of Canada recently stood up a public survey website to gather insights on how to implement the plan. The survey covers a comprehensive set of issues including best practices on academic, government and private sector partnerships, talent and workforce challenges and opportunities, mechanisms to ensure equity, diversity, and inclusion, adoption of quantum technologies by Canadian entities, and identification of any significant gaps, barriers, or challenges that could hinder Canadian efforts to become a global leader in quantum technologies.

The US Office of Science and Technology Policy recently released its second annual National Quantum Initiative (NQI) report, a supplement to the President's FY22 Budget Request that outlines the major US government quantum information science (QIS) research activities and related funding levels out to FY 2022. As seen in Figure 1, the proposed FY2022 budget, which is targeted for about $880 million, calls for an increase of nearly 11% from the previous year. Roughly half of the funding is to come from the NQI and the other half from base agency-specific QIS R&D budgets. The figure represents the sum of Federal budgets for U.S. QIS R&D efforts in over a dozen agencies including NIST, NSF, DOE, NASA, DOD, and DHS, and it also aggregates several QIS subtopics such as computing, networking, sensing, fundamental science, and end quantum-related use cases