Assessing the Threat to U.S. Funded Research
House Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight
2025-03-05
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Source: Congress.gov
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Transcript
Investigations and oversight will come to order. Without objection, the chair is authorized to declare recess in the subcommittee at any time. I'd like to now recognize myself for five minutes for opening remarks. And first of all, I'd like to thank you all, my guests, for coming here today. I'm my first chair. It's exciting to have here some delightful experts in our oversight, and it's also an honor to have my ranking member, Sykes, here with me today. I want to lay out our objectives and how we're going to run our committees from here on out in reference to former Chair Gallagher in a subcommittee I was a part of. We'll start on time, we'll stay on time, and we'll not use acronyms to the best of our abilities because most people don't understand acronyms, even the people that use them I found in the military. I even practiced this too, so this is great. All right. Our country's in a unique position to collect talent from all over the world. I think this is one of our greatest strengths for the last several decades. It's made us this amazing hodgepodge of talent, and it's really accelerated our country in technologies and our ability to lead the rest of the world, to collect ideas from all over the world, and to accelerate that process through our educational system. It has also made us a target. When you look at the people who are immigrating here to do education, we have about a million students here every year. A large portion of them are from countries that are our peers and our rivals, and that take that technology back to their countries, and we have to be careful of that or we'll lose our position. In case you haven't been keeping up with our educational system, it's ranked, I think, 40th in the world right now.
It's not a good position to be, even when you're in the lead. You can't just steal talent and stay in front of everybody else. And when you're giving your information to other countries willingly, and I think there's something to be gained from collaboration. I think that's a good thing. But you have to be careful. You have to be smart if you're running a business or a country. I think when we have the unique and changing ways, especially in advanced technologies, AI, quantum, and everything else that we're teaching our children in schools now, we have to be very, very quick to put guardrails on that to make sure that we stay in the leading edge of technologies and that we continue to be competitive and actually lead the rest of the world. One of the things I realized that the CCP has done is they refer to our fruits as their honey. They literally say they're coming up and suckling at that nectar, if you will, absorbing that. pretty much at cost. They don't have to invest in it. They just get to take it back to their country and benefit from it. That doesn't necessarily benefit the United States, though. When you have foreign companies and professors and other people coming here to pick the flowers in foreign lands to make honey in China, that doesn't bode well for us. And we need to make sure that this is not only a quote, but realize that this is the mantra of the CCP right now. I think we need to continue to slow the leaks, make sure we protect our technologies, and provide opportunities for our homegrown students who will remain in America and be the future of our technologies when we talk about developing our oversight for these technologies. Starting with what is firmly within our control, we should review federal regulations that are seen both as too burdensome and also those that are too lenient.
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