• Offer a one-year visa extension to PhD recipients in science, technology, engineering, mathematics or other fields of national need; grant automatic work permits to those meeting security requirements and obtaining employment; provide a preferential system for acquiring citizenship for those who complete their degrees; and repeal the mandatory “go-away” provision now in U.S. immigration law.

• Offer preferential visas to applicants who have special skills in mathematics, science, engineering, and selected languages.

• Modify the “deemed export” law whereby faculty currently may be required to obtain export licenses to teach a technology class that includes a foreign student even if the material covered is unclassified.

• “Incentives for Innovation” (focuses on the innovation environment).

  • Adopt a “first-to-file” patent system and increase employment of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to permit accelerated handling of patent matters.

  • Expand and make permanent the R&D tax credit that has been extended eleven times since it was first enacted in 1981 but never made permanent.

  • Restructure the corporate income-tax laws to help make firms that create jobs in the United States more competitive.

  • Increase broadband Internet access throughout the nation.

The Gathering Storm report was prepared shortly after the nation’s research budget in the health sciences had, over a five-year period, doubled. The Gathering Storm review thus focused on the physical sciences, mathematics and engineering, fields for which real funding had been stagnant for decades. However, shortly after the “doubling” in the health sciences was achieved, the funding for that activity was permitted to erode once again—the exception being a major one-time, two-year funding infusion as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.