Weak point: Feds must stop outsourcing research security to universities

Willie Sutton, the fabled bank robber, supposedly explained that he robbed banks “because that’s where the money is.” Like Sutton, China’s communist regime has targeted America’s research universities because that’s where much of our cutting edge research product is found.

America’s research enterprise, developed at universities and funded through federal research grants, remains highly vulnerable to malign foreign influence operations, according to warnings from Congress, the FBI and the Government Accountability Office.

Taxpayer investments in university research programs are vast. In Fiscal 2022 nearly $55 billion in federal taxpayer dollars made up 55 percent of total university research expenditures to develop emerging technologies in aerospace, biomedical, chemical, mechanical and metallurgical engineering, and other sciences.

To leapfrog competitors and become the world’s preeminent economic and military superpower by 2025, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) engages in covert theft and research exploitation. In a recent joint appearance with FBI Director Christopher Wray, the UK’s MI5 director warned that the “scale of [China’s] ambition is huge” and that it had already achieved “the biggest wealth transfer [of intellectual property] in human history.”

To achieve its goals, the CCP sometimes uses the research partnerships between highly capable Chinese and American research faculty to engage in research espionage, while also targeting “pliable” U.S. research faculty to acquire the research product it seeks.

Some recent CCP “talent recruitment” successes in covertly recruiting American university research faculty and staff illustrate our vulnerability.

In 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice charged renown nanotechnology expert Dr. Charles Lieber, Chair of Harvard’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department, with hiding his lucrative participation in China’s Thousand Talents Plan. Lieber was a “strategic scientist” at the Wuhan University of Technology, received $50,000 per month and extensive living expenses, and was given more than $1.5 million to set up a research lab at Wuhan University of Technology.

Despite this profound research security failure and significant foreign funding disclosure failures, taxpayers provided $676 million in federal research funding to Harvard in fiscal 2023.

Stanford University recently entered into a settlement agreement after a multi-year failure to disclose Chinese-funded research agreements in its applications for federal research grants between 2015 and 2020. The school engaged in this lie by omission, even as it received significant federal research grants from the Departments of the Army, Navy, Air Force, NASA and the National Science Foundation. The agreement followed the Education Department’s finding in 2020 that Stanford failed to report more than $64 million in Chinese donor identities between 2010 and 2020, just as it began large-scale expansion of its Chinese operations.

Despite its shocking research security failures, in Stanford received over $1 billion in federal research funding in fiscal 2023.

Texas A&M University proved that universities could do better if they tried. In 2020, an internal investigation revealed the hidden involvement of more than 100 of its STEM research faculty as paid participants in a Chinese talent recruitment program. Only five A&M research faculty had previously disclosed such involvements.

Months later, the Justice Department charged a prominent A&M engineering professor and NASA researcher with concealing his profitable ties to China. These developments came after the Education Department opened an investigation into the university’s compliance with foreign gift and contract disclosure requirements in 2019.

Unlike Harvard and Stanford, A&M resisted the temptation to bemoan the burdens of statutory compliance or falsely accuse federal investigators of “anti-Asian bias.” Instead, the university worked closely with federal agencies to find and confront the CCP’s insidious threat to its research.

At a time when FBI Director Christopher Wray sees “blinking lights everywhere” indicating elevated threats against the U.S., it’s an unacceptable national security gamble to keep placing important research security burdens on universities, who are poorly equipped to meet the responsibility even when they accept it.

As Congress considers legislation that would improve foreign funding disclosure obligations and provide enhanced penalties for compliance failures, the executive branch should quickly act to reverse the CCP’s penetration of our universities’ research enterprises.

In short, foreign research collaboration vetting should no longer be outsourced to universities by federal agencies. Although some agencies have slowly increased vetting of research grantees and their collaborators, there is little if any vetting consistency from agency to agency.

The National Science Foundation or another trusted federal agency, working in conjunction with our intelligence agencies, should provide foreign collaborator vetting prior to the award of research grants, to ensure that foreign collaborators (individual researchers, foreign corporations, and foreign universities) aren’t also engaged in espionage against us.

If the proposed foreign collaborators (identified in federal research grant applications by universities) pose unacceptable risks to our research enterprise, the grant application must be rejected. At the same time, the vetting program should reveal whether universities or their personnel are engaged in unacceptably high-risk research partnerships with the CCP or other nefarious governments, entities, or individuals.

With billions of dollars in federal research grants at stake, research universities would likely engage in heightened care in choosing their collaborations. Abuse or manipulation of, or intentional (or negligent) data breaches related to the vetting program by any federal employee should lead to severe criminal penalties.

A federal takeover of foreign research collaboration vetting responsibilities will provide policymakers, federal research agencies, universities, and the public reassurance that our national security interests are being protected.

Like before Pearl Harbor and 9/11, America is in a perilous position. The threat from China’s Communist Party has been repeatedly identified by Congress, federal agencies, and the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

We’ve been warned, but we need to act.

Paul R. Moore, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney who served as Chief Investigative Counsel at the U.S. Department of Education, is a senior fellow at the Prague Security Studies Institute.