Early in her career, Arati Prabhakar led the development of a self-piloting ship for a secretive U.S. military research agency. Now she\u2019s the White House\u2019s top technology official \u2014 the first to hail from a defense background since the Cold War and a representative of Washington\u2019s new hard-line consensus on China.<\/p>\n
For three decades, the United States threw itself headlong into globalization, backed by the confidence that while a rising tide lifts all boats, America\u2019s vessel would rise the highest. China\u2019s technological ascent has shaken that self-assurance and prompted a broad policy reversal.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had an oversimplified model for a long time, for a number of decades,\u201d Prabhakar said in an interview with The Washington Post. \u201cThat oversimplified model was that markets and globalization would solve all the problems.\u201d<\/p>\n
Prabhakar\u2019s early specialty was semiconductor research, a rare background among senior policymakers. That technical knowledge has come into use, as she has helped the Biden administration craft the largest industrial policy push in decades, in an effort to help the United States retain its technological lead over China. Semiconductors \u2014 the brains of computers \u2014 are the program\u2019s centerpiece.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s the biggest industrial policy initiative in the U.S. since the Second World War,\u201d said Gary Hufbauer, a former Treasury deputy assistant secretary and now a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. \u201cThe only thing that the U.S. did which was comparable was the interstate highway system back in the 1950s.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kevin Wolf, a former assistant commerce secretary for export administration, says the Biden administration has enacted the strictest technology export controls against China in recent memory, adopting the policy position that China having the capability to produce advanced computing systems indigenously is a \u201cper se national security threat\u201d to the United States.<\/p>\n
The hard-line shift is reflected in the appointment of Prabhakar, 65, as the president\u2019s science and technology adviser in 2022. Her recent predecessors were all scholars from civilian fields like biology and meteorology.<\/p>\n
In contrast, Prabhakar previously oversaw the Pentagon\u2019s futuristic technologies research agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Her team at the White House\u2019s Office of Science and Technology Policy now is tasked with thorny questions of how to accelerate U.S. innovation in technologies with military applications \u2014 semiconductors, telecommunications and quantum computing \u2014 at the same time curbing U.S. research connections to China without veering into racial profiling.<\/p>\n
Many of these projects will take far longer than a four-year presidential term to accomplish, a recognition that the technological rivalry with China may last decades, as the Cold War did.<\/p>\n
Her team is already maneuvering to wrangle commitments from allied nations to support U.S. wireless technologies over China\u2019s for the 6G generation, which won\u2019t deploy until around 2030. U.S. officials had been caught flat-footed with 5G, with China getting a jump-start on 5G research and development as well as and rolling out its networks faster.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is the right time to start lining everyone up,\u201d Prabhakar said about building a 6G coalition around the U.S. position.<\/p>\n
Her office sits in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House grounds, down a hallway checkered black-and-white like a chess board. The Bruce Springsteen lyric \u201cMeet me in a land of hope and dreams\u201d is emblazoned across the wall.<\/p>\n
After immigrating to the United States from India with her parents as a child, Prabhakar earned a PhD in applied physics from Caltech, then strayed from the academic career path. She was working at DARPA in 1986 at the tail end of the Cold War.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Soviet Union ended while I was at DARPA, and so I saw what an enormous shift started in how we thought about national security,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Following the Soviet Union\u2019s dissolution in 1991, one of her colleagues went to brief Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about submarines, only for Powell to remark that they didn\u2019t care about submarines anymore. Washington downsized its military and embraced globalization, secure in its position as the unquestioned world leader.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were riding high,\u201d said Rob Atkinson, founder of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. \u201cWe were the center of the internet and the IT economy. China was nothing. \u2026 We assumed that would continue in perpetuity.\u201d<\/p>\n
China\u2019s unexpected emergence as a serious technological rival has prompted a return to a Cold War-like chill. President Donald Trump began the pivot, launching a trade war against China. Since arriving in the Oval Office, President Biden \u2014 who criticized those policies at first \u2014 has surprised many by doubling down on Trump\u2019s tariffs and export controls, though with more measured rhetoric and a focus on multilateral cooperation.<\/p>\n
National security adviser Jake Sullivan announced in September 2022 that the United States could no longer just maintain a \u201crelative\u201d technological lead over rivals and \u201cmust maintain as large of a lead as possible.\u201d Soon after, the Commerce Department, led by Gina Raimondo, fired a fusillade of technology export controls at China.<\/p>\n
Prabhakar\u2019s team has been working on a longer-term research and development strategy, including directing research projects in quantum computing and cancer treatment, and trying to wrangle multiple agencies to cooperate to squeeze out more radio spectrum for emerging technologies in an effort to get a jump on 6G in competition against China.<\/p>\n
The Biden administration also has leaned hard into industrial policy in key technological sectors like chips and telecommunications gear, with the help of $52 billion in funding from the bipartisan Chips and Science Act.<\/p>\n
Ken Zita, a telecom expert who advised the Biden administration on industrial policies, said Washington was making the leap from \u201cno industrial policy\u201d to \u201chaving one\u201d after many years in which industrial planning by the federal government was deeply out of fashion.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ve had to take it from whole cloth, and say, \u2018What can we do? Where can we act?\u2019\u201d Zita said.<\/p>\n
A major challenge for the Biden administration has been how to pursue this policy shift without fanning anti-Chinese sentiment.<\/p>\n
Prabhakar\u2019s team is drafting research security guidelines for universities across the nation on how they should limit and monitor research relationships with China and other countries deemed adversaries. This task was inherited from the Trump administration.<\/p>\n
Prabhakar said her team is now \u201cpretty close\u201d to a final version of the rules, though she stopped short of saying when they may be released. She said that after they released a draft version of the rules for comment last year, feedback from the research community gave her pause, including input that the requirements for universities were too onerous.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s possible to put in so much process that you actually exacerbate the problem,\u201d she said. The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology questioned Prabhakar in February over the delays in producing a final version of the rules. She told the committee that drafting the regulations had turned out to be more complex than expected.<\/p>\n
\u201cDoing this in a way that respects every individual, their rights as an individual and respecting their dignity, I think, is critically important,\u201d she said. \u201cNot exacerbating anti-Asian bias in the environment that we are in \u2014 absolutely key.\u201d<\/p>\n
The draft guidelines issued by her office for comment calls for research institutes\u2019 training programs to include instruction on \u201cthe importance of nondiscrimination as a guiding principle,\u201d though it isn\u2019t entirely clear what this would look like in practice.<\/p>\n
More broadly, the Biden administration\u2019s approach to China has its share of skeptics. Some foreign governments suspect the export controls are more about trade protectionism than national security necessity.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I do travel \u2014 and by overseas l mean Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, U.K., you know, allied countries \u2014 almost to a person, they don\u2019t really understand what the national security objective is that the U.S. government is trying to accomplish with all these new controls,\u201d said Wolf, the former assistant commerce secretary.<\/p>\n
Some, such as Atkinson, say the grants for building new U.S. technological hubs have been distributed too diffusely.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe whole point of this was you can\u2019t have 50 places,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s not enough money. There\u2019s not enough technology to go around.\u201d<\/p>\n
Prabhakar defended these measures as part of a carefully considered long-term plan to ensure U.S. competitiveness.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s important to say that this is a really carefully calibrated strategy. It\u2019s not saying, \u2018We\u2019re going to roll up the sidewalks and never trade with anyone else around the world.\u2019 It\u2019s very globally engaged, working with our allies and partners.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Early in her career, Arati Prabhakar led the development of a self-piloting ship for a secretive U.S. military research agency. Now she\u2019s the White House\u2019s top technology official \u2014 the first to hail from a defense background since the Cold War and a representative of Washington\u2019s new hard-line consensus on China. For three decades, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5199,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstriumphs.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}