Speeches

As prepared for delivery on December 10, 2025.

I am grateful for this opportunity to talk about the ways the Trump administration’s war on universities is going to hurt the United States in its competition with China.

Last year, at a national science and technology conference, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that the high-tech sector had become “the frontline and main battlefield of international competition, profoundly reshaping the global order and the pattern of development.” He is, of course, absolutely right. The United States and China compete for economic, military, and diplomatic dominance through the development of new technologies, including those with both military and civilian applications.

China is a formidable rival on this frontline.

Since first announcing in 2015 its “Made in China 2025” plan, Beijing has invested in a whole of government focus on advancing critical emerging technologies. As a result, it is now definitely giving the U.S. a run for its money. Chinese automaker BYD has surpassed Tesla in sales of battery electric vehicles. BYD is not just bigger but also arguably more inventive than Tesla, with chargers that can recharge for up to 250 miles of range in a mere five minutes. In March, Beijing sent quantum encrypted images to South Africa using a small, inexpensive satellite—a significant advance in quantum communications. And, as you know, the energy demands of artificial intelligence are making fusion power—a potentially massive source of carbon free electricity—even more desirable. While the pioneering advances in fusion energy that MIT and Commonwealth Fusion Systems have made are thrilling—China reportedly has more new fusion projects, fusion patents, and fusion Ph.Ds. than any other country. 

Much of the U.S. government response to this increasing competition in recent years has been protectionist, including export controls on the most advanced GPU chips and chipmaking equipment for AI. But the success of Chinese AI company DeepSeek has made it clear that this approach is ineffective. Sooner or later, China is going to invent its way around whatever roadblocks Washington imposes.

That’s why it is so important that the United States not let up on its own strengths in innovation. Americans are accustomed to U.S. companies delivering astonishing innovations with regularity, such as the iPhone, cloud computing, gene therapies that can cure sickle cell disease, and ChatGPT. And there are certain aspects of U.S. history and culture that have encouraged inventiveness and risk taking. 

But the United States did not become the world’s leading scientific and technological superpower because its people are somehow inherently smarter and more creative than those in the rest of the world. It became a leader because it has had the world’s best system for science and innovation. Since World War II, the federal government has awarded funds to universities for basic research projects inspired by curiosity and not by profit. These projects train brilliant students, draw scientific talent from around the world, and produce discoveries. Existing companies and startups develop those discoveries and find practical applications for them. 

Many of the most significant technologies of our day—including the artificial neural networks that enable generative AI, quantum computing, DNA amplification, CRISPR genome editing, mRNA vaccines and therapeutics, 3D printing, and checkpoint inhibitors for cancer treatment—arose from pioneering explorations in U.S. university laboratories. 

According to the National Science Foundation, the United States still invests more than any other nation in the conduct of basic scientific research. The spillover effects for the U.S. economy have been remarkable. An analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas found that U.S. government support for non-defense research and development has accounted for, at least, one fifth of total factor productivity growth in the U.S. business sector since World War II. This is a far greater return than that yielded by federal investments in infrastructure, or by private R&D. 

Because leading research universities are also hotbeds of entrepreneurship, the economic impact of even a single university can be stunning. An MIT study released in 2015 determined that our living alumni had founded companies that employed nearly 5 million people, with nearly $2 trillion dollars in annual revenue. This made MIT equivalent, at that time, to the world’s 10th largest economy. 

Yet despite the centrality of university-based research to the United States’ high-tech economy, in recent decades government support has become increasingly lackluster. The 2022 CHIPS and Science Act was designed to correct some of this underinvestment by authorizing $200 billion dollars for R&D and for workforce and economic development. The budget of the National Science Foundation was supposed to double by 2027. Instead, Congress never fully appropriated the funds. 

And now, the Trump administration is allowing scientific discovery and technological innovation to become collateral damage amid a culture war on universities. The Administration has been quite frank about the political motivation for upending universities. In the words of Vice President JD Vance, “We should be really aggressively reforming them in a way to where they’re much more open to conservative ideas.” 

In other words, universities are being punished for their perceived liberal bent. 

In its first year in office, this Trump administration has hollowed out research agency staffs and terminated billions in already awarded grants. Though it has been temporarily stopped by the courts, the Trump administration has tried to cap reimbursement for the indirect costs of research. These include the costs of maintaining and operating buildings used for research and providing information infrastructure for research laboratories. The administration’s 15 percent cap does not reflect the real costs shouldered by leading universities. Most recently, an executive order suggests that preference in research funding be given to institutions with lower indirect costs.

 President Trump’s 2026 budget proposal would starve U.S. science—cutting the budget of the National Institutes of Health by about 40% and NSF by almost 60%. While it’s unlikely that the Senate or the House will go along with something so draconian—it is more than likely that U.S. government investment in science will decline—right when competition with China suggests it should be increasing.

Moreover, by increasing the tax on endowment income as much as six-fold, the “One Big Beautiful Bill” is hobbling some of the country’s best private universities as they try to make up for the loss of federal support with their own funds. At MIT, the annual tax bill will be equivalent to our entire undergraduate financial aid budget. 

The Trump administration is not just costing universities dollars, but also brilliant people. The United States has long benefited from a vast brain gain, with the most talented people from around the world coming here—because here is where the best science has been done. But with its funding cuts, academic censorship, and hostile immigration policies, the Trump administration is now provoking a brain drain. 

Three quarters of respondents to a Nature poll of U.S. researchers said that they were considering leaving the United States because of the Trump administration disruptions to science. Universities around the world are now gladly recruiting U.S. scientific talent. My fellow panelist this evening, Dr. Nina Srinivasan Rathbun, is part of a wave of scholars finding refuge at the University of Toronto. The Government of Canada has just pledged up to $1.7 billion dollars over 12 years to attract 1,000 researchers from the U.S. and elsewhere. Researchers of Chinese origin in fields essential to U.S. competitiveness—such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and nuclear fusion—are leaving leading U.S. research universities to return to China. 

Freezes and cuts in research funding have also had an immediate impact on the next generation of talent. Universities have had to limit the number of graduate students they admit and postdoctoral researchers they hire and even rescind offers they already made. Some of these young people may be driven out of science entirely.

The United States is also turning itself into a much less desirable destination for the world’s best students by making the process of obtaining a student visa much less predictable. In fact, new international enrollments fell 17% this fall. This will weaken American leadership in emerging technologies. International students earn more than half of all U.S. doctorates in computer science, engineering, and mathematics. These students make immense contributions in research. While the U.S. certainly needs to do a better job of recruiting its homegrown talent to these fields, it is important to recognize how much we gain by attracting brilliant people from around the world.

In addition, the overwhelming majority of international doctoral students educated in the United States intend to stay in the United States. Eighty three percent of doctoral recipients from China are still in the U.S. five years after earning their degrees. The long-term economic contributions made by international students are enormous. Twenty five percent of U.S. billion-dollar startup companies have a founder who first came to the country as an international student. But increasingly, the best students around the world have other choices. Bloomberg recently reported that Tsinghua University, for example, now earns more AI patents than MIT, Stanford, Princeton, and Harvard… combined.

Ultimately, if the United States no longer conducts the productive research enabled by government investment, it will lose the technological race to China. It will generate fewer high-tech entrepreneurs. And its military will suffer, because the military relies on technologically advanced commercial products that the defense market alone cannot support. 

U.S. universities are not perfect. But many of them are extremely successful institutions by global standards, and the country depends on them. To defund universities because of faults that have nothing to do with research is to recklessly shut off the spigot to innovation.

China, in contrast, this year announced a 10% percent increase to its central government science and technology spending and an increased focus on basic research. China is not merely increasing the scale of its inputs to innovation but also their quality. In the 2016 Nature Index, which tracks scientific output, five of the world’s top ten academic institutions generating high quality research were American and just one was Chinese. In this year’s index, nine of the world’s top ten were Chinese and just one was American—Harvard University, which the Trump administration seems intent on destroying.

A course correction is urgently needed.

Just as the center of gravity in science and technology moved away from Europe to the United States during the twentieth century, it can also move to Asia in the twenty first. The United States, once solidly on the front lines of technology, is now on its way to becoming a much weaker player. And so far, we are responding by trying to weaken ourselves further. 

There has never been anything inevitable about U.S. leadership in science and technology. What is inevitable is that, if the U.S. does not work to maintain its lead on this battlefield, those who do will take its place.