White House S&T strategy calls for new approaches to safeguard US research

The Trump administration says the nation’s science and technology research ecosystem needs to embrace “novel security solutions” to ensure the U.S. maintains its global edge, according to a new document publicly released on Monday. 

The National Security Science and Technology Strategy published by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy outlines how the U.S. innovation sector should be leveraged and guarded to defend the country. The new document builds off last year’s National Security Strategy, which called, in part, for “protecting the competitiveness of the U.S. economy and bolstering the resilience of the American technology sector.”

To help safeguard the nation’s innovation sector from threats “that could impair U.S. economic and military strength and competitiveness,” the strategy calls for “approaches that protect without inhibiting the productivity and agility of the national security S&T enterprise.”

President Donald Trump previously moved to curtail illicit foreign interference in the nation’s research institutions, most notably through a January 2021 memo that sought to keep adversarial governments from exploiting U.S. science and technology research.

Lawmakers from both parties have also pushed legislation to limit Chinese involvement in federally-funded research projects, and the Pentagon similarly announced on Monday that it called for 30 U.S. academic institutions to review their ties with foreign entities.

But the strategy says research institutions need to take further steps to enhance their threat awareness, including conducting “automated research security vetting” of agency-funded research proposals and performing continuous monitoring of federally-supported projects. 

It also calls for “bolstering counter-intelligence support to governmental and non-governmental research centers” — which would give researchers more immediate and timely insights into potential threats — and creating “risk-based review criteria and a repository of sharable information to enhance the efficiency of information collection and sharing among agencies.”

It noted, for instance, that the FBI-led Quantum Information Science and Technology Counterintelligence Protection Team “brings an interagency team of quantum experts and security professionals to fine-tune technology protection and security outreach activities for the quickly evolving quantum R&D community.”

Another section calls for “establishing cybersecurity guidelines for researchers and research institutions,” although it is sparse on the details of what this would look like. The National Science Foundation, for its part, has a research security policy framework that includes some cyber-specific guidance as part of its broader blueprint. 

“Given the evolving nature of research security threats, security experts should embrace comprehensive, new, and novel security solutions, particularly where they can be crafted to address unique or nuanced requirements of specific technology fields,” the document said. 

The strategy’s implementation section highlights the need to enhance K-12 and higher education training opportunities and bring more skilled talent into the federal workforce — an effort the Trump administration has been undertaking, in part, by prioritizing skills-based hiring over degree requirements. 

Notably, however, the strategy references the need to attract more nonimmigrant tech workers to the U.S., which differs from the Trump administration’s prior stance that called for a more restrictive approach.

“The United States will further strengthen its workforce by attracting and retaining top-tier global talent in critical national security S&T fields,” the strategy says. “Agencies will collaborate on using existing authorities to recruit the exquisite talent necessary to ensure the national security S&T Enterprise leads the world in developing and applying these technologies.”

OSTP did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the strategy’s inclusion of the need to attract and retain global talent. 

Last year’s National Security Strategy said, in part, that the U.S. “cannot allow meritocracy to be used as a justification to open America’s labor market to the world in the name of finding ‘global talent’ that undercuts American workers.”

Trump issued a proclamation in September 2025 that moved to restrict the number of H-1B visas, saying that the program has harmed American workers. The visas allow U.S. firms to temporarily hire foreign workers, with the tech industry notably using the program to attract nonimmigrant talent. The proclamation attempted to institute a $100,000 H-1B visa fee, although a district court has overturned that mandate.

In addition to calling for the nation’s innovation sector to embrace new security solutions, the strategy said the U.S. needs to speed up its pace of innovation, build up its domestic “technological resilience” and focus its science and technology ecosystem on “maintaining battlefield advantage, countering strategic threats to the homeland, and shaping the competition toward areas of U.S. strength.”

Nextgov/FCW Cyber Reporter David DiMolfetta contributed to this story.