A new strategic plan from President Donald Trump’s top science adviser says federal spending on science should come before the benefits to Americans and American scientists.
“In addition to strengthening science, we also have a duty to ensure that its downstream benefits go to the American people first,” Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said in the report.
Report – Title Science: A New Golden Age – declares:
For decades, the United States has funded large groups of foreign students and tolerated technology transfers abroad under lax security standards. By 2024, temporary visa holders will account for nearly half of U.S. doctoral graduates in computer science and mathematics who have confirmed postgraduate plans.
This reliance on foreign talent marginalizes American students, a deep domestic talent pool that receives little support from its own government. At the same time, we train exceptional global talent at great expense, but this effort is lost when foreign governments recruit them to set up their own tech ventures. As a result, a large number of Americans have lost interest in using taxpayer dollars to invest in our STEM pipeline. [Emphasis added.]
Almost all of the $60 billion in fundamental scientific research enabling countless wonderful commercial products is funded by taxpayers and conducted at American universities and federal agencies.
But taxpayer-funded scientists at universities accelerate their patentable and profitable research by filling their laboratories with foreign students, especially Chinese or Indian. Those foreign students will work long hours at low pay for many years – often well into their early 30s – partly because most are desperate to pursue science careers in the United States.
Apparently, American science managers lobby constantly to make cheap foreign scientists easier to hire, usually in close cooperation with lobbyists who seek to maximize the influx of cheap, mixed-skill H-1B foreign workers into the corporate sweatshops that once employed well-paid and articulate American professionals.
Nationwide, at least 1.5 million white-collar jobs are held by nonimmigrant foreign contract workers, the majority of whom came through the H-1B program. Foreign scientists at universities receive their work permits through the controversial H-1B, J-1, and alternative practical training programs.
Science sweatshops are economically excluded Nearly 50 percent of young Americans are technology and science graduates. Unlike most foreign students from poor countries, Americans need to get a good-paying 9 to 5 job to pay off their college loans, live a normal life, get married, and have children.
One side effect of this is rampant discrimination against non-white Americans in favor of Asian immigrants.
Amid this replacement migration, Kratsios reports that more than 40 percent of PhD students in the hard sciences now include foreigners on visas, and about 25 percent of students in “applied life sciences.” This significant population includes many students from China and India who bring with them their national loyalties and domestic economic ties.
Some American science leaders have tried to reverse this continuing replacement of American scientists by Asian immigrants. But the trend was reinforced by President Joe Biden’s officials who worked with universities to expand migration into science labs.
The mass replacement of Americans generates massive economic windfalls for American universities and their top scientists – including many foreign-born scientists – through additional tuition fees, cheap labor, and patent revenue.
The White House report states that this globalized business model is destroying American science and promoting it to foreign countries through widespread technology theft and the return of American-trained scientists to their home countries:
America’s overdependence on foreign students also creates a security challenge that our institutions are inadequately equipped to address… Our adversaries have learned to exploit the deep asymmetry between open and closed scientific systems, using our education system as an entry point into our innovation base to create domestic programs that undermine global scientific norms.
…The United States has pioneered many of the 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 companies dominate global supply chains and, by extension, battery chemistry research.
The report says the science sector needs fundamental reforms that will divert funding away from the science sweatshop of universities:
First, the American research system must prioritize the individual scientist over legacy institutions… Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, the government should provide more flexible types of grants… Set clear scientific goals and build the industrial strength to transform scientific discovery into technological power… We must remodel it for the AI age.
Not surprisingly, the Kratsios report has inspired much opposition from Democrats and university leaders.
“You can’t ignore the universities where scientists work,” Rep. April McClain Delaney (D-MD) said at the July 22 hearing.
“This administration is systematically destroying American science, while our allies and adversaries alike look on in amazement,” claimed Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), a California immigration attorney who is the senior Democrat on the House Science Committee.
“Chopping down apple trees doesn’t get you more apple pie,” astronomer Kevan Stassen of Vanderbilt University told Science.org, a news site run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
This strategy will “accelerate technology development and commercialization while investing less.” [universities’] The fundamental research, expert peer review, and scientific workforce that make those advances possible,” he opined.
