Federal Research and Development in Support of Domestic Manufacturing and United States Jobs

The order directs nine named federal agencies — including Defense, Energy, Commerce, HHS, NSF, and NASA — to factor domestic manufacturing into their R&D funding decisions and solicitations. It requires recipients of federal R&D funding agreements to track and report to their awarding agency the locations where funded inventions are manufactured. It directs the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to develop standardized award terms, common invention-utilization reporting questions, and common waiver application questions for use across all covered agencies. It also directs agency heads to evaluate whether "exceptional circumstances" exist to strengthen domestic-manufacturing requirements under the Bayh-Dole Act, particularly for critical technologies such as semiconductors, AI, and energy storage.

The order does not itself impose new manufacturing requirements on private companies or reclassify any technology as restricted. All actions are conditioned on being "appropriate and consistent with applicable law," and the standard Bayh-Dole waiver pathway — allowing foreign manufacture when domestic production is commercially infeasible or when no U.S. licensee is available — is retained, but made more rigorous, transparent, and standardized.

Federal agencies that fund R&D (Defense, Agriculture, Commerce, HHS, Transportation, Energy, Homeland Security, NSF, NASA, and SBA), universities, companies, and nonprofits that receive federal R&D funding agreements, and small businesses commercializing federally funded inventions. Foreign manufacturers currently producing U.S.-funded inventions under waivers also face heightened scrutiny.

Universities, startups, and companies holding licenses on federally funded inventions will face new mandatory tracking and annual reporting on where products are manufactured. Agencies will apply more scrutiny before granting waivers that allow foreign production, and applicants seeking those waivers will be required to offer alternative benefits to the U.S. economy.

NIST leads the standardization work, developing award terms, common utilization questions, and waiver application forms in consultation with the Interagency Working Group for Bayh-Dole and OMB. Agencies then adopt these tools and begin collecting manufacturing location data from recipients. The Made in America Director receives annual utilization summaries; OMB and OSTP receive biennial implementation reports. Waiver oversight is tightened through required concurrence from the Made in America Director, public disclosure of waiver applicants and benefit terms, and a push to migrate all unclassified invention reporting to the iEdison federal tracking system by calendar year 2025.