President-elect Trump is calling for major reinvestment in public infrastructure—and any American can understand why. We all know from direct experience that much U.S. infrastructure is in rough condition, and most agree that renewing and advancing our infrastructure, from bridges and airports to the electrical grid, would support economic improvement and supply new jobs.

But for the nation’s long-term security, prosperity, competitiveness and health, and for generations of lasting new jobs, we must also rebuild another kind of infrastructure now eroding—by renewing our national commitment to fundamental science.

For 70 years, federal support for basic scientific research has been the invisible infrastructure paving the way to innovation and economic growth. Every American can be proud of the U.S. system for producing new scientific knowledge. And every American has benefited from the resulting innovations: The development of ultraprecise atomic clocks opened the door to GPS. Work on nuclear magnetic resonance led to the MRI scanner. Number theory enabled encryption, which enables e-commerce—and so on.

The U.S. remains a powerhouse of research and development. As the National Science Foundation reported in September, total national R&D funding from all sources reached nearly $500 billion in 2015, more than any nation has ever spent on it in one year. The share supplied by industry also reached a record-high 69%. This is excellent news.

With industry already investing so much, the question sometimes arises: Why can’t our entire national research investment be privatized? Because the qualities that make industry good at applied research and development—an appetite for immediate commercialization, a laser focus on consumer demand, an obligation to maximize short-term returns, and a proprietary attitude about information—make industry a bad fit for supporting basic scientific research.