US politicians push agencies to restrict research collaboration with China

Lawmakers in the US House of Representatives from both sides of the political aisle have expressed concerns about China exploiting US research, but have diverged on how to protect the country’s research and fund it. The worries, voiced at a hearing on Capitol Hill on 15 July, follow an announcement by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) a week earlier that it would ban collaborations between US scientists that it funds and international institutions that the federal government considers dangerous to national security — including many leading Chinese universities.

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John Moolenaar — a Republican from Michigan and chair of the House Select Committee on China, which scheduled the hearing — praised the NSF’s policy and called for officials from other US science agencies who were testifying at the session to adopt the same prohibition. “Should American taxpayer dollars be used for research with entities within China’s defence-research and military–industrial base? The common-sense answer is no,” he said at the hearing.

Patricia Valdez, who is a research-integrity officer at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Jeremy Ison, who is the chief of staff for the undersecretary for science at the US Department of Energy (DoE), responded that they were looking closely at the NSF’s policy, although they emphasized that their agencies already have research-security measures in place.

On the other side of the aisle, Democrats agreed that collaborations with China could be fertile ground for research theft, but warned that staffing and spending cuts to US science agencies enacted by the administration of Republican President Donald Trump are worsening the situation. Rebecca Keiser, the head of the NSF’s Office of Research Security Policy and Strategy, testified at the hearing that her department has just five staff members today compared with ten in 2024, before Trump took office. “I have zero tolerance for the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] stealing what American scientists build,” said Ro Khanna, a representative from California who is the senior Democrat on the committee. “But we cannot protect American research while the administration is dismantling the very people and programmes that protect it.”

Heightened security

The NSF funds about 25% of basic US academic research and has historically placed few restrictions on international collaborations. But its new policy, set to take effect on 1 October, would prohibit senior personnel listed on research grants from collaborating with or receiving funding from ‘restricted entities’ — institutions, companies and individuals in China and other countries that have been designated a national security threat by US agencies such as the Department of Defense. Among these entities are leading Chinese institutions, including the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangdong.

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Over the past two decades, as China’s star has risen and tensions between it and the United States have ratcheted up, so too have US officials’ concerns over research security. During Trump’s first presidency, from 2017 to 2021, his administration launched the China Initiative, a controversial programme aimed at protecting US laboratories from espionage that saw the arrest of a number of US academics born in China. Many charges were eventually dropped or dismissed. Although Trump’s successor, Democrat Joe Biden, discontinued the initiative in 2022, his administration maintained a focus on research security.

Under the second Trump administration, research-security policy has largely been left to individual US agencies. In addition to the NSF’s policy change, the NIH altered how it funds foreign institutions last year, which had the effect of suspending many clinical trials. But that piecemeal approach might change: a far-reaching proposal issued by the White House Office of Management and Budget in May suggests a total ban on collaborations involving recipients of federal research grants and “foreign adversaries”, though it does not define who these adversaries are.

Perhaps the strongest push for restrictions comes from House Republicans, who have repeatedly called on the DoE to prohibit researchers of Chinese heritage who are not US citizens from working in US national laboratories. Jill Tokuda, a Democrat representing Hawaii, said at the hearing that the ban would hurt, not “help us get the very best and brightest” researchers to the United States.