Introduction
On a crisp autumn day in 1962, President John F. Kennedy stood before a crowd at Rice University and delivered a speech that would define a generation. Declaring that the United States would land on the Moon by the end of the decade, he framed the mission not just as a technological challenge but as a measure of national ambition: “That goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”[i] Just seven years later, Apollo 11 fulfilled this promise, cementing “moonshot” as a metaphor for bold, transformative endeavors—those that redefine the limits of possibility, demand groundbreaking innovation, and require massive investments of both capital and vision. Looking back, the Moon landing symbolized a unique era in which government, industry, and human progress converged in a singular, ambitious effort.
Fast forward half a century: in January 2025, President Trump announced Project Stargate – an audacious initiative aimed at securing America’s leadership in artificial intelligence through close collaboration with the private sector.[ii] The ambition is unmistakable, yet the structure and strategic intent of this initiative offer a different model than Kennedy’s vision.
Today, the term moonshot is most commonly associated with the tech ecosystem, where Big Tech has assumed the role of global innovation leadership. This raises a fundamental question: Is the trajectory of human progress now dictated solely by private-sector interests? If innovation were to be driven primarily by profit-driven corporations, what values and priorities shape the future of technological development?
As we witness a growing entanglement between government and industry, it is crucial to examine the role of the public sector in shaping humanity’s grand challenges. Can public institutions still marshal the vision and resources needed for moonshot-scale projects? In an era of rising democratic instability and political polarization, can governments even secure the public support necessary to define long-term goals for the collective future? In short, is Kennedy’s moonshot approach still viable today, or have new models and players emerged as the true architects of innovation?
To explore these urgent questions, we spoke with Tom Kalil, who served for 16 years in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Economic Council, leading scientific initiatives under the Clinton and Obama administrations. He has also served as Chief Innovation Officer at Schmidt Futures, the philanthropic initiative founded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Most recently, he launched Renaissance Philanthropy, an initiative designed to catalyze a 21st-century renaissance by elevating the ambitions of philanthropists, scientists, and innovators.
“Just as wealthy Italian families like the Medicis funded artists and thinkers such as Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, today’s billionaires have the potential to seed a similar renaissance in public-spirited innovation,” Kalil argues.
Defining a Moonshot
To distinguish a moonshot from any other research and development investment, Kalil outlines certain defining characteristics – but the real challenge lies in identifying their intersection, the moment when the stars align for a bold, revolutionary mission.
Kalil is in the perpetual pursuit of the world’s most pressing challenges, those that demand breakthrough solutions. “When I worked at the White House, one of the questions I constantly asked was: What is the 21st-century equivalent of Kennedy’s Moonshot? When I find a really good idea, I try to use my position, resources, coalitions, and relationships to increase the chances of its success,” he says. But a grand challenge alone is not enough: “It doesn’t make sense to have a goal if you have no idea how to achieve it. Teleportation is cool but not within reach.” For example, he explained that combating illegal deforestation has become more feasible due to technological advances, such as small, cost-effective satellites that provide daily planetary imagery and machine learning algorithms that enable automatic change detection. In addition, financial incentives such as Norway’s payments to Brazil under the REDD+ program create an economic incentive to prevent deforestation, making it a more solvable problem than before.
A moonshot also requires both a compelling reason for urgency – ‘Why now?’ – and a credible pathway to innovation that has the potential to rewrite the rules of the game. Beyond the breakthrough itself, we must ask: What is the scale of impact? How many people will be affected by the solution we propose? The broader the reach, the more a project earns the title of a moonshot. Kalil describes this as a “positive self-fulfilling prophecy” – a vision so ambitious and compelling that it attracts top talent, shapes our collective future, and justifies the resources required to pursue it.
But for all of this to materialize, a moonshot must have a clear, inspiring, and accessible narrative—one that resonates widely and mobilizes support. Kalil shares an example from his time in the Obama administration when a group of top neuroscientists approached him with a proposal “to do for neuroscience what the Human Genome Project had done for genetics.” The idea was scientifically complex and technically daunting, making it difficult to rally a broad coalition behind it. Working closely with Obama’s speechwriters, Kalil and his team distilled the vision into a simple yet compelling phrase: “Mapping the human brain.” From that moment, the initiative gained traction. In 2013, President Obama announced the project in his State of the Union address. Congress then something that they almost never do, which was to provide 10 years of dedicated funding for the National Institutes of Health component of the BRAIN Initiative, as part of the 21st Century Cures Act.
Alongside these fixed criteria, dynamic policy considerations, as well as business and political interests, inevitably shape the problem-solving process and must always be assessed. Kalil, understands that these external factors often carry considerable weight and can significantly influence the broader constellation of forces at play. “They must be an integral part of the strategic analysis for anyone seeking to change the world,” he emphasizes. The role one plays – and the sector in which they operate – matters, shaping both the feasibility and impact of any ambitious initiative.
Reinventing Public-Private Partnerships and the New Role of Philanthropy
After years of navigating all sectors, Kalil has now turned his focus to advancing moonshots within the philanthropic space. He finds particular energy in philanthropy’s unique potential – viewing it as a truly transformative force. “I think a potential superpower that philanthropy has – if they choose to exercise it – is its flexibility,” he explains. “If philanthropists want to experiment with something new, they don’t need to secure 60 votes in the U.S. Senate or demonstrate the potential for short-term profits. They can simply go for it.”Take for example, Frontier Climate, a corporate social responsibility initiative which helped jumpstart the carbon removal industry by securing early market demand, with companies like Stripe, Meta, Alphabet, and McKinsey committing to purchase $1 billion worth of permanent carbon removal. This guaranteed buyer model provided startups with a viable customer base, encouraging investment and innovation in carbon capture technologies that might not have otherwise attracted venture capital. Similarly, through Renaissance, Kalil explores new approaches to tackling global challenges with a multidisciplinary perspective. He and his colleagues are working to double the rate of student learning in middle-school math and transform the way mathematicians make new fundamental discoveries with AI. expand access to social benefits for low-income families and encourage high-skill immigration.
Despite his new focus on philanthropy, Kalil bristles at the suggestion that government can no longer lead in innovation. “Absolutely! Look at DARPA, ARPA-H, ARPA-E, and IARPA,” he explained, noting the federal government’s high-risk high-reward innovation agencies for defense, health, energy, and intelligence. The Defense Advanced Projects Agency, founded in 1958 in response to the Soviet Sputnik launch, has a storied history as the incubator for technologies that are now the foundation of modern life, such as the Internet, GPS, and self-driving cars. The “ARPA” model is replicable in areas far beyond defense. “And consider the sheer ambition of the science and technology program managers setting bold, transformative goals,” Kalil continued. “Imagine how different the future would be if even a fraction of those goals were realized.”
Take, for instance, the ambitions at ARPA-H, the newest innovation agency, launched by the Biden Administration in 2022. Its projects are breathtaking in scope: One aims to use AI to match every FDA-approved drug against every known human disease. Another aims to bio-print organs on demand. Not every project succeeds, but the ones that do, are big leaps forward for humankind.[iii]
When pressed on whether security disproportionately dominates government innovation funding or whether major breakthroughs are confined to global superpowers, he remains firm. NASA’s space exploration initiatives, for instance, are not purely security-driven, and smaller nations like Israel and Denmark have demonstrated that size is no barrier to global leadership in innovation. Beyond defending the role of government, Kalil is deeply invested in expanding policy entrepreneurship—the ability to identify, refine, and advance breakthrough policy ideas.[iv] Often scientific or technological innovation might be unleashed by changing a regulation, creating a prize competition, hosting a hackathon, or writing a request for proposals. Policy entrepreneurs – those with a nose for solving such issues – can be found in government, private industry, labs, NGOs, think tanks, or activist organizations. The most successful ones tend to have a knack for rallying stakeholders across a range of domain areas. To that end, the White House’s convening power for all of society makes it an ideal policy hub, and therefore a kind of policy innovation laboratory.
The Right Person, the Right Place, the Right Time
Drawing from his time in the Obama administration, he reflects on the challenge of scale: “At any given time, I could only have 20 people working for me – because that was literally all the desk space we had. Those who did work with me gained a hands-on apprenticeship in vetting and shaping policy ideas. But that’s a very small number of people to pass on that experience.”
This constraint has led Kalil to think about how those who have tackled not just one, but dozens or even hundreds of policy challenges accumulate a unique form of tacit knowledge. The question, he argues, is how to codify and share that expertise with a broader community. To that end, he has written on policy entrepreneurship,[v] and a Harvard Business School professor even wrote a case study on his team’s approach.[vi] “There’s a lot of institutional knowledge that never gets written down,” he notes, “and I’m interested in how we capture and share it more effectively.”
Instead of being limited to 20 bright, idealistic staffers huddled in a cramped office space, these policy entrepreneurship teaching tools could empower tens of thousands of practitioners to level up their efforts. Regardless of their sector, they would need to uncover, and flex, their own unique superpowers for a given situation.
For Kalil, understanding the power of individuals and small teams is key to unlocking transformative change. “I want people to recognize what the right person, with the right skills, in the right position, can accomplish,” he says. As an example, he recounts a conversation he had with Dan Wattendorf, a DARPA program manager, before the Ebola outbreak. Wattendorf had been working on a bold idea: what happens if we face an emerging infectious disease without a vaccine or treatment? He sought to create a framework to rapidly develop therapies in real time—a concept that, at the time, seemed theoretical. Then Ebola struck. Kalil immediately called Wattendorf and asked if additional funding would help move his research from preclinical stages to clinical trials.
Over the active opposition of the NIH, BARDA, and FDA, they managed to secure emergency funding under President Obama’s West Africa Ebola response package. Wattendorf’s program ultimately played a critical role in funding early mRNA vaccine research at Moderna – de-risking the technology years before COVID-19 emerged. “When the pandemic hit, we had a running start because a lot of that technology had already been validated,” Kalil explains. This example, he argues, is exactly why people should not underestimate the impact of an individual who combines expertise, vision, and the ability to push forward in the face of resistance. He points to another figure who shaped global health – a former head of UNICEF, who almost single-handedly catalyzed the first child survival revolution. By identifying low-cost interventions that could drastically reduce child mortality and relentlessly advocating for their implementation, he traveled the world pressing heads of state into action.
Kalil rejects cynicism – the notion that the world is too broken for meaningful change. “It’s too easy to say, ‘the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and there’s nothing we can do.’ I just don’t think that’s right,” he insists. For him, big change doesn’t always require big institutions – sometimes, it just takes the right person, in the right place, with the right idea, at the right time.
Being that right person is a skill – policy entrepreneurship – that can be taught.
And government innovation isn’t a thing of the past, because creative leadership can be exercised from nearly any position.
“As impact-driven leaders, it’s not about choosing between sectors, it’s about where you have a comparative advantage,” he says. “People should know more about what the right person with the right skills in the right position can accomplish.”
[i] Kennedy, John. F. “Address at Rice University.” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/jfkwha-127-002
[ii] Duffy, Clare. “Trump announces a $500 billion AI infrastructure investment in the US.” CNN. January 21, 2025.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/21/tech/openai-oracle-softbank-trump-ai-investment/index.html
[iii] ARPA-H. “ARPA-H Awardees.” https://arpa-h.gov/explore-funding/awardees
[iv] Kalil, Tom. “Assessing the Policy Readiness of Ideas.” Federation of American Scientists. July 12, 2024. https://fas.org/publication/increasing-policy-readiness-of-ideas/
[v] Kalil, Tom. “Policy Entrepreneurship at the White House: Getting Things Done in Large Organizations.” Innovations: Technology, Governance, & Globalization. Volume 11. Issue 3-4. https://direct.mit.edu/itgg/article/11/3-4/4/9825/Policy-Entrepreneurship-at-the-White-HouseGetting
[vi] Hill, Linda A. “Tom Kalil: Leading Technology & Innovation at the White House.” Harvard Business School Case Study. August 2016. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=51561