Because they are not paying for the research with their taxes and their governments are not reciprocating the openness.

Published research is accessible today by paying subscriptions to journals. The journals are privately owned. The end result is that today your tax $$ are going to enrich publishing companies many of which are not US companies either.

This way everyone benefits. There is no way of keeping the access embargoed to US citizens or tax payers. But that wasn't happening in the current model anyway.

Most international research is published in the same places as US research in part because prestige is aggregated by everyone doing the same.

Classified research inside the US remains classified of course.

What do you think the first step toward that is, if not this.

The benefits outweigh the cost several times over.

There is no such thing as a published scientific journal available to only one country.

Nobody is saying that the government can't fund private research (as it surely does in the context of security, defense, etc). But that if research is _published_, it ought to be open access rather than behind a paywall.