U.S. researchers face new restrictions on publishing with foreign collaborators
science.org144 points by ceejayoz 3 hours ago
144 points by ceejayoz 3 hours ago
This could be understandable if some rationale was provided, but it's worse than that:
> Neither agency has publicly issued new formal guidance describing these requirements. Instead, officials are informing grantees individually, leaving researchers confused and concerned.
They've not even made it official. They're just randomly flagging.
This is a very common thing for corrupt governments. No rules are clear, so that those at the top can dictate whatever they want whenever they want. Which means that the only safe route is to always be on very very good terms with leadership.
Very sad to see the US fall away from the rule of law, into kleptocracy.
See also the way that grants are now being distributed at NCI and NSF. Only very large grants for many many years, to reward those who are in the favored status, and kill those who are disfavored. Decision making is random and capricious, just be sure to bribe those at the top with whatever favors you can.
> always be on very very good terms with leadership
Not a guarantee either.. just a hope
To be fair, this has been a long time coming, and a lot of forces have been committed over decades to finally make this kind of thing possible. You're just seeing the next phase of the plan unfolding.
The US is trending towards a Russian style oligarchy and these latest moves are just one of a wider pattern of trying to suppress academia, freedom of speech, personal freedoms.
This is also very foreseeable for an administrative state, and this slippery slope has been predicted for over a century. Rule by administrators (or bureaucrats) is just as opaque/unaccountable/corrupt, and as the extent of their power grew, it was inevitable that the political leadership would exploit the power (as has already happened many times before). It seems like nobody (at least on the liberal end of the spectrum) really cared about the arbitrary use of power when it was mostly left-liberals making the choices.
The way to fix this is to reduce the power of the administrative state, not to just complain about Trump, but I have little hope of a real solution.
Where do you imagine the power goes when you've taken it away from "the administrative state"?
I can totally understand an argument that says a certain administrative function was not working well and needed to be fixed. But if you're just suggesting destroying these institutions, what fills that power vacuum other than the far worse situation we're seeing unfolding now?
> Rule by administrators (or bureaucrats) is just as opaque/unaccountable/corrupt
I don't agree. The division of power is most likely preferable. Otherwise the politician also become the beurocrat but way more arbitrary.
When the administrators/bureaucrats (whatever your preferred terms are) have very limited and defined powers, I agree they are different. When the administrative powers become wide-sweeping and ill-defined, the powers are difficult to differentiate from those of the politicians.
Going for whataboutism in the same week trump establishes a $2B find to pay off his cronies and tries to permanently exempt himself from taxes is laughable.
My points are not whataboutism; I’m saying this was predictable, forecast, and inevitable. Whataboutism focuses on tangential (or unrelated) things.
NCI and NSF recipients getting a taste of what EPA, DEA and ATF was doing to the plebs all along with random "interpretations" and bad-faith presentations of them to judge and jury. Maybe that whole "the academics and bureaucrats are so smart we totally need to cede power from congress to the executive" wasn't such a bright idea after all.
Of course, it's totally lost on the academic-bureaucratic class that the anti-intellectuals wouldn't hesitate to cut off their nose to spite their face by electing a president that would turn around and surprise pikachu the academics with the very machine they had helped build. Now that academics are losing their grips within the bureaucratic apparatus, suddenly they are deciding to rethink their strategy -- but it's not a coming to Jesus moment, but rather just a reactionary response.
Right! Naturally, our Congress is full of technical and administrative expertise and totally has the time, patience, and will to cleanly and carefully craft the wide body of regulation we've grown to require for a smooth and healthy and productive society. No reason for those awful technocrats to usurp such authority when we've got a capable and knowledgable legislative branch capable of doing the work just as well.
> the wide body of regulation we've grown to require for a smooth and healthy and productive society.
If you actually believe this is true, I have some sad news for you. Does the term "regulatory capture" mean anything to you?
> those awful technocrats
If you actually believe the "technocrats" have the knowledge required to craft regulations that actually are a net benefit, again, I have some sad news for you.
Your solution is?
There is no magic solution to the "problem" of "how to dictate rules to a large society that will keep things smooth and productive". The problem is fundamentally intractable if you insist on looking at it that way.
There is another option, which is to not dictate rules at all, unless you absolutely have to in order to have a civil society in the first place. For example, we have laws against things like murder and theft and fraud, because you can't have a civil society if those things aren't deterred and punished.
But the vast majority of the laws and regulations we have in place now are not doing that. They're attempts to micromanage from the top something that fundamentally cannot be micromanaged from the top. Nobody has enough knowledge to do that. So we should stop doing it.
Giving up is not a strategy. Regulations are painful in that they obviously reduce economic productivity, but not having any at all is pretty much guaranteed to be a disaster.
For example, allowing poisonous chemicals in your food supply or drinking water is insane. Unless you are OK with the free market sorting all that out (after your family dies horribly).
> Naturally, our Congress is full of technical and administrative expertise…
Congress knew of that issue; for decades, Congress has delegated the nitty gritty to regulatory agencies, who employ said experts.
SCOTUS, on the other hand, are the idiots you seek. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loper_Bright_Enterprises_v._Ra...
Don't worry, we're going to enjoy the fruits of your thought process real well and good -- the very last guy left in the House with any constitutional focus just got blasted out with the most expensive outside funding campaign against a rep in the entire history of the USA. It looks like the bureaucratic state is just getting on its next level roll, so enjoy the ride. A few of you may even realize in the coming years why the 10th amendment wasn't meant to just be an inconvenience to ignore.
But I'm not dumb enough to think you'll believe my words, you'll only learn by experience.
I've been where you are. In your coming years you will realize that the bureaucracy had at least brought us stability, prosperity, and a modicum of protection against abuse from big business, the rough edges for small businesses and individuals near the edge of the law notwithstanding. Characterizing Massie's loss as an aspect of that bureaucracy is a mistake - Trumpism is a repudiation of the bureaucracy, but merely in favor of autocracy, while the all of the authoritarianism sticks around (or even grows!). Expect those rough edges to become much more arbitrary and capricious. And no, accelerationism or "I told you so" won't save you.
The article mentions, oddly enough at literally the very bottom, that one of the main laws being used is the 'Wolf Amendment' [1], passed in 2011. It's what prevented Chinese from working on the ISS and arguably is why China now has its own space station. It's an extremely dumb law that's been passed and reauthorized repeatedly by every single administration and Congress since Obama who it was passed under.
Just quoting Wiki since it's quite succinct and accurate on this: "[The Wolf Amendment] prohibits the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from using government funds to engage in direct, bilateral cooperation with the Chinese government and China-affiliated organizations from its activities without explicit authorization from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Congress."
For another consequence of this law, when China relatively recently carried out a sample return from the Moon, they sought to share the resultant rocks/material with countries worldwide, much like NASA did in the 60s. Except Americans couldn't accept them, at least not without jumping through a million hoops first, due to this law. It's one of the ever more frequent 'I'm going to punch myself in the face because I don't like you' acts by governments.
Unclear arbitrary rules are the best way to rapidly induce a chilling effect.
If the enemy is the science happening then a lack of clarity is a highly effective tactic.
I genuinely don't understand how the titans of industry who support the Republican party don't understand that science is the foundation on which their entire fortunes are built.
Their fortunes are already built. They have shifted into defensive posture. They don't care about enabling more people to do discovery, that actually puts their position at great risk of disruption. What they want is to have very little innovation, and be able to capture the innovation that squeaks through.
I don't think it's true that they want little innovation. This is a political move. It's a setup for an environment where only politically approved research can happen. So the innovation machine eventually restarts, but without all the side effects of things like unbiased public policy research and social justice movements that are politically misaligned with the ultimate goal of corporate autocracy presiding over techno-serfdom.
But eventually, this always fails as history has shown over and over again. It might take 40-50 years, but it will fail with devastating effects.
Agreed, that's a better way to phrase my own thoughts than I was able to express.
I imagine some of them think that the industrial sector could replace academic sector for foundational scientific researcher ("the free market solves all known problems"). I imagine others believe we are headed for a huge crash that affects the whole world, in a way that having a large academic scientific establishment will not help. Just go live in a bunker in NZ until society rebuilds itself, or whatever (Altman). I suspect a few of the folks are just looney, and don't think rationally (Thiel).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Step 1. Exploit the commons.
Step 2. Shut the door.
That's just the political division. Scientists and academic types tend to lean left, the republicans are a right leaning party so they oppose them. It's not even a Trump thing, it's been like this for decades, though Trump is obviously more aggressive than previous Republican leaders.
It benefited them in the past, that allowed them to build up their fortunes. Bill Gates, for example, is now a big holder of farmland. Science allows others to build up fortunes that challenge theirs, and hurts the stasis in which they become gilded aristocracy.
Lowering their taxes while burning everything to the ground benefits them now.
I'd argue that it doesn't actually benefit them now since they have more access to comfort than they could ever conceivably consume in their lifetime but I do absolutely agree that they think it benefits them because people who have accumulated wealth to that degree are highly fixated on making the number go up.
A less just, less stable society is far more likely to demonize and destroy billionaires. If you have such a high level of wealth the most rational action is charitability to insure the wealth of people who surround you to prevent instability and lower the chances you'll be the victim of a crime carried out due to desperation.
In my opinion, it’s been a problem for a long time. Sure, the titans of industry are very interested in the profitable applications of science, but they are generally less interested in investing in science, let alone the science itself. Science is seen as a cost center, and research is inherently risky. Even in the glory days of Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, both were backed by monopolies (the Bell System was the phone monopoly, and Xerox had patents in xerography). The former was subject to special government rules due to AT&T’s constant anti-trust troubles, and the latter’s culture was heavily influenced by ARPA due to ex-ARPA people like Bob Taylor.
I am reminded by this quote from an email exchange between Bret Taylor and Alan Kay, published in 2017:
“As I pointed out in a previous email, Engelbart couldn't get funding from the very people who made fortunes from his inventions.
“It strikes me that many of the tech billionaires have already gotten their "upside" many times over from people like Engelbart and other researchers who were supported by ARPA, Parc, ONR, etc. Why would they insist on more upside, and that their money should be an "investment"? That isn't how the great inventions and fundamental technologies were created that eventually gave rise to the wealth that they tapped into after the fact.
“It would be really worth the while of people who do want to make money -- they think in terms of millions and billions -- to understand how the trillions -- those 3 and 4 extra zeros came about that they have tapped into. And to support that process.”
https://worrydream.com/2017-12-30-alan/
The titans of industry not understanding the importance of science beyond its profitable applications doesn’t surprise me at all.
Because science is an abstraction for ann incredibly wide range of human activity some of which benefits industrial applications and some that doesn’t.
if you "genuinely" want to understand, start considering the opposite - what is the easiest way to defend policy like this?
"science with outside helps the other side" - done.
Current administration sees US as losing its positions, so the main answer is to close the leaks that feed its opponents with US effort
I am genuinely unable to understand because even if the United States is descending into fascism or whatever, research is the last thing that an effective state wants to disrupt and scientists are one of the last groups that an effective state wants to alienate.
I'm not just referring to restrictions on collaborations with foreign researchers, although I frankly do not see how that meaningfully reduces the ability of opponents to benefit from US research unless we kill open publishing as well. I'm talking about the last year and a half of destroying the ability of every basic researcher I know to work in a stable and predictable environment.
They are concerned with their first objective which is consolidate power. Running an "effective state" is not their goal at this point in time. Infact it helps them as thingn get worse, because every bad thing that happens they spin into being their oppositions fault, which helps with objective no 1
1. Much of US policy toward science is backlash to Covid vaccinations. Being anti-Science is a way of preventing Science from inflicting itself on the populace again in the future.
2. Science trends toward meritocracy, which is bad if your goal is to promote a particular social hierarchy.
It's been there so much longer, even Carl Sagan talked about it, and its inherently tied to religion.
heres a bit of a fringe view, from me, and others.
governments need influence, and yellow the truth,so as to manage the overall situation, thats a first assumption.
now we see a lot of actions that in the end seemlike footgunning, basically derailing the foundations of civilization.
perhaps this is not megalomania, greed, or sickness.
perhaps, as is often portrayed in popular scifi, we are all doomed to face a terrible challange, there are only few very closed mouth individuals that absolutely know. [remember this is a fringe conspiracy hypothesis]
we are being distracted and kept on the dark about impending catastrophe,so as to stave off absolute chaos,little hope of influencing anyone except by overwhelming show of force. perhaps "they" know its a matter of years, not decades until we experience that thing that suddenly, seemingly cyclically clears the board and the whole assembly begins again from square 2,or 3,not quite square one. [Re fringe;conspiracy]
"they" are behaving in an all bets are off manner, keeping thier hand hidden, playing an endgame rather than making a benign effort.
They already have that fortune. So, they dont care and dont have to care. Moreover, someone else using science to create fortune is just another competitor and a threat to said fortune.
I can't help but think that there is a deliberate effort to remove the US from it's position in the global geopolitical arena. And not merely as a by-product of policy decisions but specifically to damage the American reputation.
There is. You can read it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics
Dumpty's loyalty is with whoever will give him the most money and power as a person. Always has been.
"In response to Inside Higher Ed’s questions about Science’s reporting, an NIH spokesperson emailed a statement Thursday that referenced just one set of grant programs: the Institutional Development Award (IDeA). NIH’s website says the awards go to Puerto Rico and 23 states that “historically have had low levels of NIH funding."
"The recent update to IDeA grantees was a clarification of longstanding policy, not a new directive,” the spokesperson said. “IDeA program funding has always been restricted to U.S.-based institutions and entities, with foreign institutions, non-domestic components of U.S. organizations, and all foreign components explicitly prohibited. This reflects Congress’s intent that IDeA funds be used exclusively for research capacity building within the United States—and specifically within eligible IDeA states and territories. NIH’s statement didn’t mention any other grant programs or answer multiple written questions.” [1]
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/05/22/r...
I do not know yet if this was NIH tricky wording to insidehighered.com, or if it is really restricted to this one small program.
edit: that said, from my experience, and some reporting, foreign contracts (e.g. a foreign collaborating researcher) have been regularly denied in the new NIH.
The article says that these restrictions on research with a "foreign component" have been in place since at least 2003 but have only recently been clarified to include the researchers themselves.
It's actually more surprising to me that NIH and NASA research co-authored by non-Americans was supposedly not requiring scrutiny under the "foreign component" rules before this.
Many graduate students, faculty and post-docs are foreign citizens. So banning them from conducting research could potentially shut down big research projects. It is not surprising to me that the NIH and other funding agencies didn't want to do this. (It is also unsurprising to me that the current administration would have few qualms about disrupting research: we know they don't care, ask the cancer studies that had to be saved with private Foundation funding last year.)
Before you start throwing disruptive rules at projects, you generally want to know that there is a critical security concern for that specific work. Most research just gets published a few months later, so foreign interests can just read it in a journal and download the dataset.
I don't have great sources on hand, this is just coming from a career situated in or adjacent to protecting research and IP from espionage. As the national labs and prime defense contractors got exceptional at defending their networks, this pushed state actors into attempting espionage at the university level.
It's a lot easier to get access to underpaid graduate students, fresh post-docs, etc who are doing the heavy researching lift day-to-day work. You have way more tools in your HUMINT arsenal with this population. Sometimes research has natsec implications even though it is not in pre-class or classified status.
A famous example of this is how the US created it's stealth technology initially.
"The foundation for a science-based approach to the development of stealth aircraft was laid by Petr Ufimtsev, a Soviet physicist. In 1962, Sovietskoye Radio publishing house issued his book Method of Edge Waves in the Physical Theory of Diffraction that described the mathematical rationale for the development of stealth vehicles.
In the USSR, these ideas did not go any further, however, the Americans were very enthusiastic about them. Ufimtsev’s physical theory of diffraction has become, they say, the cornerstone of a breakthrough in the stealth technology. In the 1970s, the work was started in the USA on the basis of this knowledge as a result of which breakthrough stealth aircraft − Lockheed F-117 fighter and Northrop B-2 strategic bomber – have been produced."
https://rostec.ru/en/media/news/visible-invisible-stealth-te...
I heard NIH grantees had to always jump through extra hoops when hiring foreign companies or purchasing foreign products
If it was their actual goal to destroy the US leadership role in research worldwide, they couldn't do more than they are.
Unfortunately, we are seeing the decline of the USA. The rest of the world is going to move on without us.
It's interesting after reading briefly about this, but I think previously NIH funding was more permissive to directly awarding funds to foreign nationals/groups. But interestingly enough, China doesn't do the same for say foreign researchers trying to collaborate with chinese researchers. (Unless you already live there etc etc). So it was indeed asymmetrical.
Do you have a reference for that? At least based on this, it seems like China's trying to increase collaboration and funding for joint research projects with non-Chinese researchers:
* https://www.nsfc.gov.cn/english/site_1/international/D2/2018...
* https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260107-overseas-scho...
I wonder when the trump administration will ever decide if it wants to Be isolationist or global imperialist.
He changes his mind all the time. No decision will ever be final. It will change depending on what satisfies his whims at that very moment.
Being isolationist or global imperialist implies articulating different strategies and values.
This is an administration that has neither of those.
They're not mutually exclusive
This.
The question is what serves their interests at the time? Whatever serves their interests at a given time, well, that’s what they believe at that time. That will have no bearing on what they believe in the future.
It's a decent bet that they are truly foolish. I've said this before. If the administration isn't acting as agents of a hostile nation trying to destroy America from within and scuttle its global leadership, they're doing a great job acting like it.
Short of them just turning a nuke on a large city, I can't think of better ways to harm America without fomenting an actual uprising than what they're doing to us today.
Autarky requires imperialism to grab the resources needed to be fully isolationist. So it's really both, until they hit the tipping point to become fully isolated. But this is something else. This is just the anti-science ignorentsia coming together with the xenophobic white supremacists to screw America. They say Trump can't bring people together, but he's done a great job of uniting all the worst people in the country.
The country elects an autocrat who fires experts and puts stooges in positions of power. Surprise-surprise that leads to idiotic policies, some of them mimicking the best hits of Soviet Union.
Oh, absolutely. For instance I never thought Lysenkoism would happen again, but the conditions are ripe for it.
I knew that most research had ties to government funding but it was only recently that I realized the scale of it. Along with the pullback of any government funding remotely resembling DEI, policies like the one described in the article wouldn't decimate research from my previous understanding. In terms of influence, it's now clear to me that the government controls anywhere between 75 to 99% of academic research. I feel foolish for believing all the details in subsequent papers from the research about why their work is necessary or important. It turns out, all of it is because the government requested it and really nothing else.
that's not entirely true, it is to some degree. by convention there have been a few buffer layers between actual grant allocation and naked politics. funding gets allocated to someplace like NSF, NIH, ONR or DARPA. Those organizations have directorates or area concentrations. Each directorate has a program manager (the terms vary based on org) who puts out request for proposals (grant applications).
The PMs are generally chosen from the sciences, and are responsible for authoring RFPs that meet strategic goals, and negotiate with the PIs (grant recipients) about terms and sizes and such.
So there are really two political realms, above the funding agency, and underneath, and its entire function is reconcile those worlds in a pretty vague way with a certain amount of autonomy given to the PM.
This isn't 100% great, but if you have good PM, some good science does get funding. While this seems like a lot of machinery, if you short circuit all of it, and have the presidents direct flunkies make funding decisions, that basically means that almost no real science gets done.
Xenophobia makes for poor science.
Well, we can't have have the non indoctrinated taking away our freedom. USA USA USA.
Can we take a step back and review the article and the underlying information? I am very much against any arbitrary and often unnecessary government interference. I also publish.
Lot's of weasel words.
This is not unprecedented. Restrictions tied to foreign collaboration are not new, NIH has done this as far back as 2018 if I recall. Yes, foreign research restrictions have escalated recently.
We have no official statement for either agencies. Collaborating on sensitive or classified material with identified FOCI coauthors is and always have been highly scrutinized activity. Title 32 CFR 117.11 is old. It goes back as far as DoD 5220.22-M in the '90s.
NISPM-33 Office of Science and Technology Policy efforts have been around since 2018 too or so (i am sooo old :/).
This appears to be a continuation of escalation of research-security, rather than a wholly unprecedented break from prior policy.
This happens when a country is preparing to go to war. It's what happened with nuclear research around the start of the Manhattan project.
So, medical research (NIH grants) is in preparation for going to war? Is the US planning on using biological agents?