Federal spending on science should first benefit Americans and American scientists, says a new strategic plan by President Donald Trump’s top science advisor.
“Beyond strengthening science, we also have a duty to ensure that its downstream benefits accrue to the American people first,” said the report by Michael Kratsios, who is the director of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The report — titled Science: A New Golden Age — declares:
For decades, the United States has funded large cohorts of foreign students and tolerated technology transfer abroad under lax security standards. As of 2024, temporary visa holders accounted for around half of U.S. doctoral graduates in computer science and mathematics with confirmed postgraduation plans.
This reliance on foreign talent sidelines American students, a deep domestic talent pool that remains under-supported by its own government. At the same time, we train extraordinary global talent at enormous expense, only to lose this effort when foreign governments recruit them to build up their own technological enterprises. The interest of vast scores of Americans in using taxpayer dollars to invest in our STEM pipeline has, consequently, eroded. [Emphasis added.]
Nearly all of the $60 billion in fundamental scientific research that enables a myriad wonderful commercial products is funded by taxpayers and conducted at U.S. universities and federal agencies.
But the universities’ taxpayer-funded scientists accelerate their patentable and profitable research by filling their laboratories with foreign students, typically Chinese or Indian. Those foreign students will work long hours at low wages for many years — often into their early 30s — partly because most are desperate to build a science career in the United States.
Understandably, U.S. science managers continuously lobby for easier hiring of cheap foreign scientists, usually in close cooperation with the lobbyists who try to maximize the inflow of cheap, mixed-skill H-1B foreign workers into corporate sweatshops that once employed well-paid and outspoken American professionals.
Nationwide, at least 1.5 million white-collar jobs are held by non-immigrant foreign contract workers, most of whom arrived via the H-1B program. The universities’ foreign scientists get their work permits via the controversial H-1B, J-1, and Optional Practical Training programs.
The science sweatshops financially exclude roughly 50 percent of young American technology and science graduates. The Americans, unlike most foreign students from poor countries, need to get well-paid 9-to-5 jobs to pay off their college debt, live a normal life, get married, and have kids.
One side result is large-scale discrimination against non-white Americans in favor of Asian migrants.
Amid this replacement migration, foreigners on visas now comprise more than 40 percent of the PhD students in the hard sciences, and roughly 25 percent of students in “applied life sciences,” the Kratsios report says. This critical population includes many students from China and India who bring their own national loyalties and home-country economic ties with them.
Some U.S. science leaders have tried to reverse this continued replacement of American scientists by Asian migrants. But the trend was reinforced by President Joe Biden’s officials who worked with the universities to expand the migration into science laboratories.
The massive replacement of Americans generates a massive economic windfall for U.S. universities and their top scientists — including many foreign-born scientists — via extra tuition fees, cheap labor, and patent revenues.
The White House report notes that this globalized business model is gutting American science and boosting foreign countries via widespread technological theft and the return of U.S.-trained scientists to their home countries:
America’s over-reliance on foreign students also creates a security challenge our institutions are ill-equipped to address… Our competitors have learned to exploit a deep asymmetry between open and closed scientific systems, using our education system as an entry point into our innovation base while building domestic programs that undermine global scientific norms.
…The United States pioneered many key enabling technologies for Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, yet the only company capable of manufacturing EUV lithography machines today is headquartered in Europe. We pioneered lithium-ion batteries, yet Asian firms dominate global supply chains, and by extension, battery chemistry research.
The report said the science sector needs fundamental reforms that would shift funding away from the universities’ science sweatshops:
First, the U.S. research system should prioritize the individual scientist over legacy institutions… Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, the government should fund more flexible types of grants… set clear scientific goals and build the industrial muscle to translate scientific discovery into technological strength… we must reengineer it for the AI age.
Unsurprisingly, the Kratsios report has prompted much opposition from Democrats and university leaders.
“You can’t ignore the universities where scientists work,” Rep. April McClain Delaney (D–MD) said at a July 22 hearing.
“This administration is systematically destroying U.S. science, while our allies and adversaries alike look on astonished,” claimed Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), the California immigration lawyer who is the senior Democrat on the House’s science committee.
“You don’t get more apple pie by cutting down the apple trees,” Keivan Stassun, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University, told Science.org, a news site run by the establishment American Association for the Advancement of Science.
The strategy would speed “technology development and commercialization while underinvesting in the [universities’] fundamental research, expert peer review, and scientific workforce that make those advances possible,” he objected.
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