Congress Should Protect America’s Intellectual Property Without Sacrificing An Open Research Environment

The United States’ research environment is deliberately dedicated to transparency. However, sustaining this open research atmosphere also necessitates proactive, targeted measures to prevent other governments from taking advantage of that openness.

Our current apparatus to protect sensitive research from falling into the hands of unfriendly actors is both inadequate and clumsy. In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party has sought to steal US technology through academic exchange programs, bringing increasing scrutiny of Chinese students and researchers at US universities and national labs. Per the American Institute of Physics, nearly 50 bills were introduced in the last Congress which either directly addressed research security or had research security components, and six have already been introduced in the 118th Congress. The bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act passed last year had 18 provisions related to research security.

While intellectual and technological theft—particularly by the CCP—is one of the few issues that brings Republicans and Democrats together, some are often too quick to assume malicious intent by people who want to help the country succeed and advocate for extreme action on the issue. George Varghese, a former China Initiative prosec­utor, openly pondered, that given the increased economic threat China posed today, “Should we allow for foreign academic collaboration?” Some lawmakers have gone so far as to push for an outright ban on Chinese STEM students (that President Trump came close to enacting) or polygraphing every Chinese student and researcher before they could work in a national lab. Such proposals, though seeking to address a well-founded problem, cast too wide a net, leading to serious unintended consequences. They would dissuade talented individuals from pursuing educational and employment opportunities in America, fearful that their intellects and talents would always be unfairly surrounded by clouds of suspicion due to their nationality or cultural background.

We’ve seen the dangers of an unbalanced approach to security before when we forced Caltech professor Qian Xuesen to go back to China where he subsequently built the Chinese rocketry program. Secretary of the Navy Dan Kimball said, “it was the stupidest thing this country ever did.” This is obviously counterproductive to our country’s objectives if it sends talented people to work for our geo-political adversaries.

A balanced approach would include stronger measures to reduce clandestine acquisition of knowledge while also recruiting top Chinese talent. Given the right security precautions, foreign talent is an important asset in staying ahead. While we actively investigated for spies, we simultaneously recruited the top German scientists before and during World War II and attracted top Soviet scientists during the Cold War. Winston Churchill’s military assistant secretary, Ian Jacob, is even said to have remarked that the Allies won World War II “because our German scientists were better than their German scientists.”

Fortunately, such balanced strategies are also being explored, and deserve much more attention. The Trump administration issued the NSPM-33, a comprehensive strategy aimed at developing standardized policies and practices for disclosing information to assess conflicts of interest and conflicts of commitment among researchers and research organizations applying for Federal R&D awards. President Trump also issued an executive order to suspend entry of post-graduate students and postdoctoral researchers with ties to entities supporting China’s military-civil fusion strategy. This is a good start and the Biden administration has prudently implemented NSPM-33 and kept this executive order in place. Across the northern border, the Canadian government announced last week all research grant applications involving research in sensitive areas will require close consulting with Canada’s national security agencies and the research community before receiving funding if any of the researchers working on the project are connected to foreign state actors that present a risk to their national security. These policies reflect how governments could approach this issue with the nuance it deserves, advancing security without counterproductively handicapping R&D.

Last year, the National Academies challenged the assumption that the management of technology-related risks can be achieved primarily by protecting specific “critical technologies” from unauthorized use, possession, or production: “The United States’ greatest advantage over its competitors is rooted in an ability to be the first to develop and deploy new technologies, in cooperation with its allies, not in an ability to restrict access to technologies. Essential strategies for maximizing this advantage include promoting the scale and speed of the domestic research and technology innovation ecosystem; fostering a risk-taking environment to aid researchers and innovators; and attracting, retaining, and supporting the most talented science, engineering, and innovation workforce in the world.”

This is an ambitious challenge that leaders in the public and private sector must take on together.

As the United States and the CCP continue to compete for technological supremacy and economic power, it is ever more important for us to remember that America’s true advantage lies in our recognition that science flourishes in a free society—not one controlled by censorship or stifled by paranoia. Our ability as a nation to foster an open environment for ideas has resulted in countless breakthroughs, and contributed immensely towards our intellectual capital and technological endeavors around the world; such advantages will be a source of strength as tension mounts between us and other countries and adversarial actors.

As Congress continues to debate the best path to protect America’s technological advantage, it should strike the right balance between the need to nurture and protect our nation’s open research environment and the goal of keeping our intellectual property secure.