US Agencies Grappling With Export Control Issues Involving Fundamental Research
PHILADELPHIA -- The U.S. government is working through a range of challenges when delivering export control guidance to university researchers, government officials said, including to some colleges that opt out of certain projects rather than risk violating controls. The government is also still running into challenging questions about whether its controls should apply to fundamental research, one official said.
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Rebecca Keiser, a senior official with the National Science Foundation, said the agency is specifically grappling with whether the U.S. should allow fundamental research to be shared with companies on the Entity List. She said the NSF is indirectly funding research involving an entity on the Entity List because that entity is a “company partner” of the Industry–University Cooperative Research Centers program -- an NSF-funded program meant to foster research collaboration between academia and government.
Keiser, speaking May 3 during the annual University Export Controls Conference hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, said the U.S. “awardee” told NSF that the grant was legal because “this is fundamental research and so the Entity list doesn't apply here.”
“So technically, yes, they're exempt. But should ethically they really be part of the IUCRC? And should federal funding be going to an entity with a partner such as this?” Keiser said. She said the entity was added to the Entity List because it helps develop visual recognition technology used to identify Muslim minorities, including Uyghurs, in China, Keiser said.
“It's something that we are dealing with in policy to try to figure out what to do. We don't have a good answer yet,” Keiser said. “These are really hard questions, and hard questions that I think we're going to have to deal with our export control colleagues and with agency colleagues [on].”
Kaiser said the government needs a “better way of addressing risks in fundamental research,” but it doesn't yet have a “good way of doing that.” U.S. universities have asked the Bureau of Industry and Security to be careful not to restrict fundamental research through stringent export restrictions, which could inadvertently hinder U.S. research and innovation (see 2012020044).
But the government also “can't put blinders on” and completely ignore fundamental research, Kaiser said. She cited a recent report that said a Chinese academic and science institute -- which works with NSF-funded researchers -- uses some of that research in “very concerning ways that represent dual-use, that represent unethical use.”
“And that's the kind of thing that we need to figure out how to address and we don't know how,” Kaiser said. The government needs to “make sure that we maintain openness and the freedom to publish, and also think about the risks that exist today in today's geopolitical climate that are amplified and go beyond what we might have dealt with in the 1980s.”
Bindu Nair, director of basic research at the Defense Department, said the agency is worried about too many restrictions on fundamental research, or unclear guidance that may scare away researchers from permissible work. She said, for example, that even if a research project involves an export-controlled unmanned aerial vehicle, that doesn’t mean the entire research project is subject to the same export controls. “It’s very hard for most of the folks that are doing this work to appreciate that it is the item that is export controlled and not the project,” NNair said during the conference. “And so we get into a lot of challenges there.”
She also said she recently met a researcher who purposely turned away from research collaboration opportunities because of potentially burdensome disclosure requirements and other hurdles. “You feel constrained. You know it’s a good idea, but it's just like, 'that activation barrier is too high and I don't want to deal with that,'” Nair said. “He's got so many things that he could do, but he’s picking the ones that he thinks he can do, so he's self-censoring.”
Nair said the agency doesn’t want to hurt research by imposing too many requirements. She said the White House’s Joint Committee on the Research Environment is looking to “really think about the research environment and think about what we need to do to preserve it while also protecting it.”