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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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]
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."
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:
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.
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.
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 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.
15 replies →
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.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Amendment
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.
19 replies →
US seems to be learning from China very quick. Congrats.
The USA isn’t learning from China. The USA is learning from Russia…
See my top-level comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48238900
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.
It’s called ZOG.
"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.
> a clarification of longstanding policy, not a new directive
I call BS.
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.
The US is currently at war by all definitions except a declaration of war.
So, medical research (NIH grants) is in preparation for going to war? Is the US planning on using biological agents?