Government Accountability Office recommends improvements to protect tech from foreign acquisition
The report was released with little fanfare in late May. It contains six recommendations.
With little fanfare, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report in late May some three years after the Department of Energy (DOE) changed its policy on the licensing of technologies developed with DOE research funding to expand the scope of the U.S. manufacturing requirements for DOE-funded inventions.
According to the report titled “Actions Needed to Assess U.S. Manufacturing Policy and Protect Technology from Foreign Acquisition,” GAO found that DOE does not have a strategy or approach to assess the effects of this policy. In particular, DOE does not have metrics to measure whether this policy is likely to increase U.S. manufacturing of DOE-funded inventions or the willingness of companies to develop these inventions. National lab contractors, universities, and stakeholders raised concerns that the 2021 policy could make DOE-funded inventions less attractive to prospective licensees because of the new requirements. As a result, national labs and universities may be less likely to patent these inventions, although stakeholders noted that it is still too soon to tell.
Frequently referred to as the Congressional watchdog, the GAO talked with representatives of DOE’s 17 national labs and 19 universities. The latter were Arizona State University, California Institute of Technology, Case Western Reserve University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Michigan State University, Missouri University of Science and Technology, State University of New York, University of California Berkeley, University of Colorado Boulder, University of Florida, University of Minnesota, University of Pittsburgh, University of Southern California, University of Texas at Austin, University of Washington, University of Wisconsin Madison, Vanderbilt University, and Yale University.
The report, available here, contained six recommendations including that DOE evaluate its U.S. manufacturing policy, review university licensing practices, and provide guidance about managing the risk of licensee foreign ownership. DOE concurred with the recommendations.
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