A university group warned that the proposal would stifle the U.S. innovation pipeline and hurt the American public.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told Axios he wants the federal government to get half the dollars generated from patents that universities and their researchers develop with federal funding, the outlet reported Wednesday.
“The scientists get the patents, the universities get the patents and the funder of $50 billion, the U.S. government, you know what we get? Zero,” Lutnick says in an interview clip from the forthcoming first episode of The Axios Show.
“I think if we fund it and they invent a patent, the United States of America taxpayer should get half the benefit,” Lutnick says, adding, “if we are paying for the research, if we’re paying for the lab, if it’s our money, the American taxpayer’s money.”
“How do we not get our money back?” he says. “That’s insane.”
As Axios noted in its article about the interview, the Bayh-Dole Act generally gives universities the right to own patents developed with federal funding. The Commerce Department didn’t return requests for comment Wednesday about how the Trump administration could legally get around that law.
Kate Hudson, the Association of American Universities’ deputy vice president and counsel for government relations and public policy, said in an email that Lutnick’s idea “would completely gut universities’ ability to partner with the private sector to turn research discoveries into real-world technologies, cures, and solutions that serve the American people.”
“The proposal would obliterate the progress that university tech transfer has enjoyed in the 45 years since the passage of the seminal Bayh-Dole Act, which facilitated new university-industry partnerships and led to an explosion of technological progress and substantial economic gains,” Hudson said. “If enacted, the proposal would stifle the U.S. innovation pipeline, with the American people, not universities, being the ultimate losers.”
