Vice President JD Vance dismissed Thursday on Newsmax criticisms that the Trump administration’s cutbacks on federal research grants to higher education institutions and its focus on revoking some student visas will lead to an academic brain drain in the U.S., with many opting to study abroad.

“First of all, I’ve heard a lot of the criticisms, the fear that there were going to have a brain drain,” Vance said in an exclusive interview on “Greg Kelly Reports.” “If you go back to the ’50s and ’60s, the American space program, the program that was the first to put a human being on the surface of the moon, was built by American citizens — some German and Jewish scientists who had come over during World War II, but mostly by American citizens who built an incredible space program with American talent.

“This idea that American citizens don’t have the talent to do great things … do you have to import a foreign class of [students] and professors to do these things? I just reject it. I just think we should invest in our own people. We can do a lot of good.”

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