Will decreasing international students and new H1B1 visas rule cause issues at the NNSA labs. This could cripple the high tech job market and STEM research so no matter what this will directly or indirectly cause big issues at NNSA labs.
Kaku sums this up.
The fact is that the U.S. might be a dynamo for capital but not when it comes to what economists crudely call “human capital.” The point applies not only to immigrant workers who do jobs Americans won’t, but also those who do jobs Americans can’t, because, as physicist Michio Kaku argues above, “the United States has the worst educational system known to science.” Were it solely up to U.S. graduates, the scientific establishment and tech economy would collapse, he says, “forget about Google, forget about Silicon Valley. There would be no Silicon Valley.” Instead, U.S. science and tech thrive because of immigrants who come on H‑1B visas.
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However, restricting the H1B visa mill could have the knock off effect of opening up more tech jobs for Americans in the private sector, which could make it even harder to hire acceptable IT people at the labs. But regardless, NNSA labs were never big employers of Indian or Iranian foreign nationals, if you didn't know that already.
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.