Prizes aren’t popular with Congress - CP links to politics
Johnson ’22, (Steven Johnson, Author of 13 books, including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From, and most recently, Extra Life. Host and co-creator of the PBS/BBC TV series Extra Life and How We Got to Now, and host of the American Innovations podcast., 9-22-2022, “EYES ON THE PRIZE”, Adjacent Possible, https://adjacentpossible.substack.com/p/eyes-on-the-prize, accessed 6-25-2024, AJ)
Sanders has proposed these bills multiple times, most recently, I believe, in 2017. But for some reason they have not gotten any traction in Congress. Perhaps there is something about the idea of the government handing out billion-dollar prizes—potentially to Big Pharma—that rubs people the wrong way when they first hear it. But of course the government already gives out billions of dollars a year supporting early stage research; the beauty of the prize approach is that the taxpayer only has to pay out when the solution in question has in fact been discovered.