This week, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released its National Security Science & Technology Strategy (NSSTS). This offers the clearest picture yet of the administration’s practical agenda for science policy. As a follow-up to the Trump administration’s broader and more sweeping National Security Strategy (NSS) released in 2025, the NSSTS can be thought of as a guide that connects means to ends. If the NSS is ‘here’s what we are prioritizing,’ then the NSSTS is ‘here’s how we’re going to get there.’
The NSS represented a marked departure in tone and outlook for such a document. Written in an unusually conversational voice, it criticised previous administrations for pursuing too much globalism. It called for America to operate on a principle of flexible realism—emphasizing national self-interest, hard power, and pragmatism over rigid ideology or traditional alliances—in order to realize the “America First” agenda.
The new NSSTS document reflects the NSS in various ways. It refers to the NSS goal for the U.S. to remain the most “scientifically and technologically advanced” country in the world and also its commitment to prioritizing regulatory reform. It also repeats the NSS criticism that administrative stagnation is affecting the U.S. industrial base.
The NSS presents space as an important strategic domain, whereas the NSSTS provides further clarity about goals and prioritization. Given the breadth of the NSS’s focus, space is presented alongside undersea and nuclear technologies as one of the domains where U.S. advantages are strongest, while AI, quantum computing, and autonomous systems are identified as technologies that will shape future military power. The NSSTS provides more specificity, identifying space as one of three priority areas for U.S. battlefield dominance and power projection, alongside undersea technologies and AI/autonomous systems.
The main takeaway, however, is that the NSSTS represents the administration doubling down on space superiority. This can be seen most clearly in its explicit call for America to aim for: “Clear technological superiority in the space domain, and ability to detect, characterize, and counter threats to U.S. space interests from very low-Earth orbit and through cislunar space.” It’s also a big goal. Getting there, the strategy argues, will require the U.S. to focus on regulatory reform, training the workforce, and pursuing public-private partnerships.
On regulatory reform, the U.S. seems to be moving aggressively. The Federal Communications Commission recently officially adopted an overhaul of its licensing rules to establish a faster “licensing assembly line” for commercial space applications. The Office of Space Commerce’s mission authorization plan is currently under review, and just a few weeks ago, the Federal Aviation Administration proposed a rule to waive certain requirements under 13 federal environmental laws for commercial space licenses.1 These are three different agencies and three different dockets all moving in a similar direction, showing Washington’s desire to reduce the regulatory pipeline for commercial space.
The NSSTS follows the NSS in emphasizing regulatory reform and technological superiority, but where it departs from the NSS tells us more about how the OSTP is thinking about U.S. science strategy.
First, while the NSS focuses mostly on hard power and unilateral American dominance in space, the NSSTS emphasizes “cooperative mutual restraint.” The NSSTS document aims to prevent the placement of weapons of mass destruction in orbit and focuses on a strategy of deterrence through denial. Therefore, it seems that a strategy organized around technological superiority is also arguing for restraint!
Second, the NSSTS extends the NSS’s focus by including a focus on civil and commercial partners in space. The NSS mainly put space within a military and geopolitical context, while the NSSTS’s focus on activities like crewed spaceflight, reusable launch, and orbital debris remediation signals that the OSTP sees commercial providers as key partners in the process. The NSSTS specifies that federal R&D funding should “complement” rather than “compete” with private investment.
Third, the NSSTS goes beyond the NSS to explicitly link the nuclear and space dimensions of U.S. security strategy by prioritizing space nuclear power and nuclear propulsion systems. This may also be a sign that nuclear and space planning are converging into one area set instead of staying separate.
Another notable feature of the strategy is its approach to workforce development. The NSSTS recommends incorporating age-appropriate topics on space into general K-12 science education and teacher training. The document also calls for strengthening the workforce by attracting “top-tier global talent.” However, the NSS complicates that goal by having warned that the administration “cannot allow meritocracy to be used as a justification to open America’s labor market to the world in the name of finding ‘global talent’ that undercuts American workers.”
The NSSTS says agencies will use “existing authorities” to attract and retain global talent, but it doesn’t quite explain how they fit with the NSS’s position on foreign workers. The federal hiring tools it lists, which include direct hiring, fellowships, internships, and temporary assignments, may improve access to people already eligible to participate in the federal S&T enterprise. They do not, however, on their own, create new pathways for bringing talent into the country.
The NSSTS also calls for a “review of job qualifications to ensure that there are no unnecessary requirements, e.g., college degrees when certification would suffice.” The reasoning here is that hiring based on skills rather than college degrees can help expand the workforce and attract some technical and manufacturing talent. But one risk is that hiring based on skills cannot always substitute for higher education and formal training in areas like nuclear propulsion or quantum computing that require advanced expertise.
So, while the NSSTS is undeniably ambitious in terms of workforce development, there’s an unresolved tension. The NSSTS recognizes the need to attract “top-tier global talent,” but it does not explain how that objective fits with the NSS’s suspicion of opening American labor markets in the name of meritocracy. Maybe that tension can be mitigated through a focus on limited top-talent immigration. But until the administration specifies what ‘top talent’ is, U.S. science policy will remain uncertain, even though its goals have now been marginally further clarified.
You can read more about the three regulations in Space Jam’s three things posts on FCC reform, OSC mission authorization, and the FAA waiver.