"The problem in society is not kids not knowing science. The problem is adults not knowing science," astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has said. "They outnumber kids five to one, they wield power, they write legislation."[1] It's a reframe worth testing against the actual composition of the people who write that legislation, because the numbers are public record, not a matter of opinion.
Thirty percent of House members and 51 percent of senators in the current Congress have law degrees and have practiced law -- by far the single largest professional background in either chamber.[2] Engineers make up roughly 4 percent of Congress -- a real overrepresentation relative to the roughly half a percent of the US population that works as an engineer, but still a small fraction of the body next to law's 30-51 percent. Scientists are rarer still.[3] A body that regulates drug approval timelines, AI, nuclear power, vaccine policy, and climate rules is, credential for credential, run overwhelmingly by people trained to interpret statutes, not data.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed as Secretary of Health and Human Services on February 13, 2025, by a 52-48 Senate vote -- the only Republican defection was Mitch McConnell.[4] Kennedy holds a bachelor's degree in history and literature from Harvard, a law degree from the University of Virginia, and a master's in environmental law from Pace -- no medical or scientific degree of any kind. He spent his career as an environmental attorney, and has been a prominent vaccine skeptic for two decades.[4] HHS is the department that sets policy for the FDA, the CDC, the NIH, and Medicare and Medicaid -- the country's actual scientific and public-health infrastructure, now run by a lawyer whose defining public position is doubt about one of that infrastructure's own core products.
After the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping deliberately elevated technically trained officials into China's top ranks to drive modernization -- the resulting "engineer-politicians" dominated Chinese governance through the 1990s and 2000s.[5] The numbers are precise, not approximate. Under Jiang Zemin, China's top three posts were held by Jiang himself (electrical engineering, Shanghai Jiaotong University), Li Peng (hydroelectric engineering) as head of the National People's Congress, and Zhu Rongji (electrical engineering) as premier. The Hu Jintao administration that followed ran the identical pattern: Hu (hydraulic engineering, Tsinghua) at the top, Wu Bangguo (electrical engineering) running the NPC, and Wen Jiabao (geological engineering) as premier.[5] For roughly two decades, straight through two full leadership transitions, all three of China's top government posts were held by trained engineers, every single time.
That era has ended, and it's worth being honest about how, because the current picture doesn't hand China an easy win either. Xi Jinping's seven-member Politburo Standing Committee has moved away from that technocratic pattern -- five of the seven current members share career ties to Xi through Fujian, Zhejiang, or Shanghai, a loyalty network more concentrated than anything in the post-Mao era, and political reliability now visibly outweighs technical credentials at the very top.[6] But one level down, the trend runs the opposite direction: the share of China's broader Central Committee with a science or technology background rose to 40 percent, up from 18 percent in the prior term.[6] China didn't solve this. It moved the technical expertise down a level, at the exact moment it concentrated loyalty at the top.
One more layer to that, and it's a real irony rather than a rhetorical one: none of the six leaders named above trained abroad, but the generation feeding today's Central Committee increasingly did, and the United States is where most of them went. Foreign-educated returnees on the Central Committee grew from 10.5 percent of the 17th Committee to 20.5 percent of the 19th -- and among those foreign-educated members, the US is the single largest source by a wide margin, at 42.9 percent, ahead of the UK and Germany combined.[7] The same country whose own Congress runs overwhelmingly on legal training has also been the top foreign training ground for the technocratic layer China is now building underneath its politically-selected leadership.
The pattern isn't unique to China, and its sharpest version doesn't even involve a country that stayed friendly. In 1975, the Shah's Atomic Energy Organization of Iran signed a direct agreement with MIT to train Iranian nuclear engineers, and the Shah's government paid for dozens of Iranian students to study nuclear engineering there in the mid-1970s. The effect on Iran's own technical base was immediate and precise: the country's count of nuclear scientists rose twelvefold, from 67 in 1974 to 862 in 1977, almost entirely on the strength of that US-trained cohort.[8] Four years later the Shah fell. The same US-trained generation became the technical backbone of a nuclear program under a government that turned adversarial almost overnight -- proof the mechanism runs on training pipelines, not on which government happens to be in power when the students come home.
Every serious legislative attempt at keeping foreign STEM talent in the US has been credential-gated, and gated the wrong direction. The STAPLE Act -- first introduced in 2009, reintroduced three more times with real bipartisan support, and never once out of committee -- covers PhD holders only, explicitly excluding both master's and bachelor's graduates.[9] The STEM Jobs Act (2012) prioritizes doctorates and extends leftover green cards to master's holders; no version reaches a bachelor's-level graduate at all.[9] That's a strange place to draw the line, because PhD holders already have the smoothest paths available to them -- O-1A options, easier employer sponsorship, extended OPT windows -- while bachelor's and master's graduates are left competing in the ordinary H-1B lottery with the fewest specialized routes open to them. Every fix on the table protects the tier least likely to need protecting.
It's also the tier where real capability is hardest to measure from a diploma alone, which is exactly why a credential-only filter misses it. The operator of this site holds a bachelor's degree and has managed six or seven PhDs across his own career -- not a rare exception in American industry, just an ordinary fact about how technical teams actually get run, because managing the work well was never what an advanced degree was built to certify. Talent isn't necessarily credentialed. A policy that only protects the most credentialed tier is measuring the wrong thing.
Why does this matter? Tyson's point wasn't really about IQ or education level -- it was about which credential a system rewards at the point where power actually sits, and how deep that reward runs underneath the top. The US system has rewarded legal training at that point for generations, consistently enough that a HHS secretary with no scientific background barely registers as an anomaly, with no comparable engineering culture embedded anywhere beneath Congress to compensate for it. China spent two decades rewarding engineering training at the very top, deliberately, as policy -- and even now that the top seven have shifted toward political loyalty, that twenty-year run left something behind that a single leadership transition doesn't erase: a Central Committee that's 40 percent science-and-technology-trained, a governing bureaucracy shaped by two straight administrations of engineer-politicians setting the norms other officials rose through, and increasingly staffed by officials trained in the very country now running short on engineers of its own. The selection criteria at the very top changed. The operating culture underneath it didn't reset with it.