Two congressional committees have written to the U.S. federal government's National Science Foundation to demand answers over the protection of American research from China and other foreign countries that seek to exploit it.
In a letter to the agency, the chairpersons of the committees asked what the major grant giver was doing about it.
As an example of the concerns in question, Newsweek published an exclusive report this week on how top artificial intelligence research flowed from the U.S. to China via a prominent researcher, Song-Chun Zhu, who received at least $30 million in federal grants from the Pentagon and the NSF while building up a parallel research system in China.
Warning of "systematic attempts to exploit, degrade, and misappropriate" American science which was supported by billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded research, James Comer (R-KY) Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, and Frank D. Lucas (R-OK) Chairman of the House Committee of Science, Space and Technology, gave the NSF by Nov. 14 to answer questions on its measures to protect scientific research as well as economic and national security.
Dated Oct. 31, the letter to Sethuraman Panchanathan, the director of the NSF, asked how many scientists awarded money by the NSF had also been identified as having conflicts of interest – and whether the NSF had "suspended, terminated, demanded repayment, temporarily barred, or permanently banned" the scientists, "due to violations related to foreign conflicts of interest."
The request comes amid growing reports from universities, research security experts, the F.B.I, Department of Justice, and most recently the heads of five Western domestic intelligence agencies that America's open system of scientific research was being exploited by some foreign governments – principally China – resulting in a potential loss of leadership not just in science and innovation but also in the economy and the military.
While other governments such as Russia and the United Arab Emirates also engage in activities to extract technology from the U.S. and its allies, research security experts say that China is by far the most active as it seeks to acquire the undisputed scientific and military leadership that would enable it rise to global predominance by 2049, a public goal often stated by its leaders. As relations between the U.S. and China deteriorate over a range of geopolitical and economic issues the unwanted outflow of top science and technology to China via scientific research and economic investment is coming under greater scrutiny.
In a statement to Newsweek, spokesman Mike England said that "the NSF will respond to the Committee's questions directly in writing by the deadline they set." Newsweek also reached out to the two committees for additional comment.
Importantly, many in the U.S. government including the Department of Defense, as well as research security experts, say that stopping scientific exchange and interaction would hurt the quality of research in the U.S., which has long benefited from being able to attract the brightest minds from around the world precisely because of its open and welcoming nature. They advocate for precise measures to stop undisclosed extraction and transfer rather than broadbrush banning.
In 2002, the NSF spent nearly $7 billion on research and education, dispersing it to 2,000 colleges and research institutions, the committees' letter noted. Earlier this year the head of the NSF internal investigations office known as the Office of the Inspector General (OIG), Allison Lerner, told the Science Committee about multiple cases of foreign exploitation and influence and said that the NSF had referred an undisclosed number of cases to the Department of Justice for investigation.
"The referrals to DOJ indicate that some cases pose a risk to national and economic security," the committees' letter said.
Among the questions the committees want the NSF to answer were: how it differentiates between legitimate talent recruitment programs from foreign institutions and those that are "malign"; what kind of analytic tools it uses to scrutinise applicants for potential conflicts of interest; how many awardees between 2018 and 2022 self-reported a foreign conflict of interest, how many the Office of the Inspector General had recommended terminating or suspending, and if that had been done.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
