As China picks up speed in the race for scientific and technological advancement, the United States is taking history’s most ill-timed smoke break
A year into our current administration, the evidence mounts weekly that United States is neck-and-neck with China in the race to maintain global leadership in scientific and military dominance – but U.S. leaders seem to want to take a wildly untimely pause by impeding the most gifted athletes on the track.
Chinese scientists recently surpassed their American counterparts in the number of papers published in high-quality scientific journals. The United States’ overall domestic research investments relative to GDP have leveled off in the last five years, while China’s have continued to grow. And the one area of U.S. scientific dominance where we thought we were well ahead of China – artificial intelligence – got a huge wake-up call last year, when DeepSeek took U.S. tech leaders by surprise. Indeed, Zhejiang University (which, according to The Economist, models itself on Stanford University) produced the startup that created DeepSeek – one of several examples of how Chinese universities are challenging American institutions in AI research and innovation.
Meanwhile, policymakers here in Washington are currently taking multiple actions that imperil continued U.S. dominance in scientific advancement.
The first category of actions that are halting U.S. scientific advancement involves research funding reductions and disruptions. President Trump’s FY26 budget proposal, for instance, attempted to cut the National Science Foundation’s $9 billion annual budget by more than half – with some areas of research like climate science targeted for elimination entirely. This is problematic because NSF has been one of the main engines of American scientific advancement (and the economic growth that comes from it) since the 1950s. NSF grants have led to breakthroughs that helped give us everything from the semiconductors that power our electronic devices to the MRI technology that saves countless lives.
Likewise, President Trump proposed a devastating 40% cut to the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) budget. Slashing funds for the world’s premier biomedical research agency like this would immediately displace the United States as global leader in medical innovation and slow or prevent the development of new treatments and cures for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other debilitating diseases.
While the extended FY26 budget negotiations ultimately resulted in Congress choosing not to accept the dramatic cuts to both agencies that the president had proposed, there has already been significant disruption to NIH- and NSF-supported research. Starting shortly after the president’s inauguration last year, administration officials began canceling or rescinding (sometimes mid-grant) research awards as not aligned with new administration priorities (without specifying how each canceled grant supposedly ran counter to those priorities). According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, this amounted to nearly $4 billion worth of NIH grants canceled alone. NSF grant cancellations reportedly amounted to $1 billion. At the same time, other grants have been disrupted by the administration withholding research funding from certain universities due to non-research-related disagreements.
Research funding is also under threat in another way – by federal agencies unilaterally deciding to slash the rate at which they reimburse universities for essential institutional costs associated with the research they conduct on behalf of the American people (full disclosure: AAU is currently engaged in lawsuits against these actions at several different federal agencies).
Finally, the administration’s actions to slash staff at the NIH, NSF, and other grant-funding agencies and centralize grant-funding decisions caused major disruptions in grant pipelines. While NIH managed to nearly catch up by the end of the fiscal year in terms of sheer dollar amounts of grants awarded, the delays meant those awards went to fewer researchers – and NSF awarded 25% fewer grants than in FY24.
If these kinds of cuts at NSF, NIH, and other agencies continue, a study by American University economists recently concluded, then the negative economic effects for the United States would be at least as bad as a major recession.
The second significant way that federal actions are threatening our lead in the global science race is by seriously compromising our ability to recruit, retain, and develop the world’s top scientific talent. These actions are happening on multiple fronts – including visa revocations for some foreign scholars, cancellations of grants sustaining the work of others, and cutting overall funding for the research that draws so many of them to the United States.
This is a serious problem for two reasons.
For starters, the United States benefits immeasurably from the fact that, for the last eight decades, our universities have been the most desirable destination for the globe’s best and brightest scientific talent. Since World War II, successive generations of foreign-born scholars have come here to study. A significant share of them have stayed here after graduation and used the knowledge they gained at America’s leading research universities to innovate and to grow businesses, helping power the U.S. economy as well.
For instance, immigrants are responsible for founding 55% of billion-dollar startup companies in the United States, and more than a third of all the Americans who have won Nobel prizes first came here as foreign scholars. In key emerging fields of scientific discovery and innovation, immigrant contributions are even more crucial; a recent National Foundation for American Policy analysis found that nearly two-thirds (65%) of the top AI companies in the United States had foreign-born founders.
But the country is at risk of losing that now. A poll last year by Nature magazine showed that 75% of scientists were considering leaving the United States – and Europe, Canada, and other lands are looking to benefit from the potential brain drain. Additionally, there are indicators that young domestic STEM talent is increasingly looking to pursue graduate studies abroad – or, worse yet, not to pursue graduate studies at all – given the increasingly tenuous nature of graduate funding at U.S. universities (which relies upon government research grants).
Cutting off (or discouraging) the flow of domestic and international STEM talent also hurts the United States’ ability to continue educating our own scientific and technological labor base. We already lack enough domestic talent to fill the jobs in multiple high-tech fields – and discouraging what talent we do have while simultaneously sending a signal that international talent is no longer welcome makes that problem even worse. In addition, it is PhD graduate students – many of whom came here as international students – who train the next generation of high-level STEM workers in this country to fill high-tech positions in areas such as computer science and artificial intelligence.
Cutting ourselves off from international sources of technological talent, therefore, creates a vicious cycle where our nation is the loser. For instance, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, more than half of all doctorate-level U.S. workers in computer and mathematical science are foreign-born – with many of them having come to the country as graduate students and many who not only become citizens, but spend the rest of their careers teaching and sharing their knowledge with future generations of Americans.
In short, the unnecessary damage being imposed on America’s scientific innovation ecosystem is a disaster for our country and a boon to competitor nations – and especially to China. If the president and his supporters (particularly those in the tech industry) really want America to be great, then I hope they’ll stop taking actions that force the United States to step off the track in this race and watch as our global competitors like China run by on their way to the winner’s circle.