Holdren at odds with lawmaker over science policy contacts with China

Contrary to a recently enacted law barring his office from interacting with China on science and technology matters, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy director John Holdren met Chinese S&T officials on two occasions this month. The author of the legislative prohibition, Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA), called Holdren’s meetings a ‘blatant disregard for the law.’ The lawmaker, who is chairman of the appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over OSTP, said his panel is ‘reviewing its options’ for how to respond.

Holdren said that he and Chinese minister of science and technology Wan Gang cochaired a meeting on 6 May in Washington to discuss their nations’ innovation policies. The meeting took place under the framework of a bilateral ‘innovation dialogue’ that was initiated in Beijing in October 2010. Holdren met his Chinese counterparts again on 9–10 May, as part of a much larger bilateral forum known as the US–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue.

In a brief interview on 19 May, Holdren said the Obama administration will abide by the Wolf prohibition, except in cases where it impinges on the president’s exclusive constitutional right to conduct diplomacy. Holdren said both occasions were determined by White House lawyers to fall within the foreign policy realm. He declined to provide an example of a bilateral S&T activity at OSTP that could be barred by the law, saying that interactions with China will be reviewed ‘on a case-by-case basis as they come up.’

Three-hour grilling

Holdren’s meetings with Chinese counterparts occurred just days after he was grilled for nearly three hours by the Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies, which Wolf chairs. Such hearings are ordinarily perfunctory appearances for OSTP directors, given the office’s puny budget—the White House has requested $6.7 million for OSTP in fiscal year 2012. Much of the questioning at the 4 May hearing focused on the interpretation of the language on China.

Wolf tucked the China provision into the 175-page spending bill that funds the government through the current fiscal year and was signed into law in April. The seemingly comprehensive language bars OSTP, as well as NASA, from any activity to

The subcommittee has jurisdiction over NASA, as well as NSF and the Department of Commerce. It’s not clear why Wolf did not extend the ban to include NSF, DOC, and the Department of Energy.

Wolf has long been a vocal critic of China’s suppression of human rights and religious freedom, and he is suspicious of the motives behind China’s manned spaceflight program. Wolf berated Holdren, who also holds the title of science adviser to the president, in a speech the lawmaker delivered on 11 May. Citing several examples of human rights abuses in China, Wolf then remarked, ‘Rather than being a voice for the voiceless, we see US government officials—like the president’s science advisor—who spent three weeks in China last year kowtowing to the Chinese regime.’

Wolf suspects that China’s plans to send humans to the Moon and to build its own space station aren’t entirely peaceful, and he contends that China’s space program is run by the People’s Liberation Army. ‘There is no reason to believe that the PLA’s space program will be any more benign than the PLA’s recent military posture,’ he said in the speech to the US–China Economic and Security Review Commission.

Wolf also added language to the spending bill to prohibit use of federal funds to host ‘official Chinese visitors’ at NASA facilities.

Those upcoming restrictions on NASA and OSTP will make it harder for US scientists to collaborate with international partners, said physicist Stefan Schael of RWTH Aachen University in Germany. ‘This will hurt the US’s ability to do good science.’

David Kramer