You Can’t Build Golden Science Without Global Talent

At a gilded ceremony at the Institute of Peace last week, President Trump announced a $6 billion investment in a new “golden age” of American science. The project promises resources for “high-potential” American STEM students and early-career researchers, investments in scientific instruments and computing power, and a nuclear-powered spacecraft set to take off for Mars in 2028.

After nearly two years of shifts and cuts to federal research funding, new investments in science and tech fields offer reasons to be optimistic. But the same administration is throttling the flow of foreign talent needed to maintain the country’s leading position in the global tech race.

Consider a recent report from the Hoover Institution and the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Researchers argue that in a world of increasing tech competition, talent is “a strategic vulnerability that is easy to miss.” Strategic fields such as AI and biotechnology “rely critically on one input that cannot be stockpiled, export-controlled, or manufactured on demand,” the report says. “That input is people.” The battle fought in classrooms, laboratories and immigration queues “will have as much to do with who leads the technologies of the next half-century as any arsenal.”

The report’s authors analyzed the current supply of STEM talent in the U.S., from high school graduates to postdocs. The study notes that even before American students leave high school, their math proficiency lags behind their peers in other countries. Across all global assessments, American K–12 math scores have plummeted over the past 20 years and now sit below global averages. Not only is the country’s STEM foundation weak, but researchers also identified a “wide but leaky” talent pipeline filled with domestic STEM students at the bachelor’s level that turns increasingly foreign the higher you climb on the credential ladder.

According to the National Science Foundation, nearly 300,000 temporary visa holders were enrolled in science and engineering master’s and Ph.D. programs in 2025. For decades, the U.S. has successfully retained foreign graduate students, many of whom go on to contribute to American innovation through entrepreneurship and careers in STEM industries. SanDisk, Instagram, OpenAI and Grammarly are among the billion-dollar companies whose founders included former international students.

But international educators worry that the administration’s clampdown on international students will make keeping their talent in the country more difficult. Last week, the Department of Homeland Security released a plan to charge institutions $70,000 for each foreign student participating in the work program optional practical training. The two-year extension for STEM students will cost an additional $30,000. DHS said the fee is a matter of national security and an effort to root out fraud in OPT. The agency expects to see a smaller pool of participants as a result of the policy.

In the global race to dominate tech innovation, losing American-educated foreign STEM talent is also a national security threat of its own. Nearly 100,000 STEM graduates were authorized to work through OPT last year. If a portion of them attend institutions that can’t or won’t pay tens of thousands of dollars for them to participate in the program, their lost workforce contributions won’t be readily filled by domestic STEM graduates.

The Hoover/HAI report also found that domestic STEM students often don’t launch careers in STEM industries, while foreign STEM graduates, who are required to work in industries related to their field of study, do. “You cannot replace an international Ph.D. with a domestic Ph.D. one-for-one, because domestic Ph.D.s are substantially less likely to work in STEM,” researchers wrote. Their numbers show a 19-percentage-point gap in STEM education-to-employment conversion rates between domestic and foreign graduates. “Every international Ph.D. who leaves takes a fraction of a position with them that no domestic replacement fills.”

Not only do domestic graduates enter STEM careers at a lower rate, Americans who start STEM degrees don’t tend to finish them. The millions of dollars Trump says he will invest in American science education and STEM Ph.D.s is unlikely to result in a surge of American scientists. From 2003 to 2011, only about one in four American students who started a STEM degree actually graduated with one, according to the report. That share held steady despite massive investments in science over that period. “Across nearly a decade in which STEM enrollment grew, federal science funding rose and public policy debates recognized the importance of technical education, the share of entrants converted into STEM graduates did not budge,” the report notes. “Whatever filters students out has been operating at the same rate for years, unchanged by the growth in funding or enrollment.”

Our greatest global competitor, China, is also dumping billions of dollars into science as a strategic priority. China already dominates research in crucial fields such as nuclear energy and outperforms the U.S. in key research metrics—notably citations and spending. China’s labs are stocked with American-educated scientists who were pulled back home by lucrative jobs or pushed out of this country under Trump’s anti-China policies. And while the U.S. is closing its doors to foreign talent, China is sending a different message: After the Trump administration announced a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas (a federal judge vacated the plan in June, but the administration announced another $100,000 fee in August), China rolled out its K-Visa for foreign STEM graduates from “well-known” universities. During his visit last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping stood at the White House and invited 100,000 American students to China for educational exchanges.

Boosting American innovation through investments in government, universities and industry partnerships makes strategic sense. And the resources are sorely needed after the government slashed research funding and continues to upset the normal order of awarding grants. But it’s not enough. The government will find it near impossible to regain America’s leading role in global innovation without the world’s best minds working in our universities and labs. The anti-immigrant priorities of the America First agenda stand to tarnish the golden age of science before it even begins.