When Barack Obama takes office as president, he should immediately change or even scrap many cold-war-era regulations on high-tech exports and on immigration by foreign scientists and engineers, an expert panel said Thursday.

Restricting foreigners’ access to strategically important technology might have been useful decades ago, when the United States was the undisputed world leader across the technological spectrum, the panel said in a report issued by the National Academy of Sciences. But today, it said, the nation is losing scientific and engineering dominance even as militarily useful advances come increasingly from civilian research.

The regulations do little for the nation’s security, the panel said, while significantly hampering economic growth and innovation.

“We have failed to distinguish between technology which really does pose a fundamental threat, such as things having to do with nuclear weapons, and technologies which are broadly available,” like some computer or telecommunication technology, John Hennessy, a co-chairman of the panel, said in an interview. “In some cases, we have technologies that go on our export control list that are legally available outside the United States in unrestricted form.”