Federal subsidies to strengthen China’s military must end

Last November, investigative journalists revealed that the U.S. Department of Defense had awarded $30 million in artificial intelligence research grants to a Chinese scientist at the Beijing Institute of Technology, a university tasked with developing next-generation weapons for the People’s Liberation Army. The news came as a shock to American policymakers and ordinary citizens alike. It was unthinkable that the U.S. government would fund the defense industrial base of our main adversary.

I would like to say that the story ends there. But the reality is that this scandal is just the tip of the iceberg. A new unclassified analysis provided to my office by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) reveals that American taxpayers unknowingly funded thousands of Chinese experiments with direct applications to the Chinese military. Their findings document more than 5,000 instances of research collaboration between DoD funding agencies and Chinese entities between 2019 and 2024.

These are not just any entities, but groups closely tied to Beijing’s ambitions to steal American technology and defeat the U.S. military in a potential conflict. NCIS lists eighty-one collaborations with China’s nuclear weapons research and development complex, hundreds of collaborations with the “Seven Sons of National Defense” and the “Seven Sons of Arms Industry”—China’s leading defense-industry affiliated universities—and seventeen collaborations with China’s National University of Defense Technology—the People’s Liberation Army’s top scientific research institute. NCIS also lists dozens of collaborations tied to Beijing’s “talent scouting” program, an initiative that recruits top minds to acquire information and expertise needed for China’s economic and military development.

In total, according to NCIS, about half of “the U.S.-China defense research relationships over the past five years have been conducted directly with China’s defense research and industrial base.” To be perfectly clear, these are far from mere academic experiments. They have focused on facial recognition, stealth technology, underwater acoustics, explosives, semiconductors, cryptography, cybersecurity, and data mining, to name a few topics. Such research, facilitated by our own government, may already have given Beijing an edge in key areas of 21st-century warfare.

This research is also problematic from a human rights perspective. For more than a decade, the Department of Defense has supported scientists who have collaborated with Huawei, Baidu, Alibaba, SenseTime, Tencent, and Hikvision (as well as the Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences) on red-flag topics like facial recognition and other surveillance-related technologies. Some of these companies are complicit in Beijing’s mass surveillance programs and systematic oppression of the Chinese people, including the genocide of Uighurs and other ethnic and religious groups. We have rightly sanctioned many of them for heinous crimes against humanity—and yet, apparently, we also contribute to their work.

How and why did we let this happen? Bureaucratic neglect, “science knows no boundaries” naivete, and genuine ignorance of Beijing’s technology theft strategies all played a role in this confusion. China now has virtually unlimited access to basic American research because of the lack of prohibitions in grant clauses on co-authorship and collaboration. NCIS deserves credit for its analysis, but at the same time, it reveals only a small sample of the problematic studies that the DoD and other U.S. funding agencies have made possible.

If so much taxpayer-funded research is vulnerable to exploitation by our adversaries, things need to change. After all, there is no justification for supporting groups or individuals explicitly bent on harming our national interests. Americans pay their taxes knowing that their government will use that money to protect them from foreign threats, not to help build weapons designed to kill them or their sons and daughters in uniform.

Should we respond by shutting down federal programs that fund innovative research and development projects? Of course not. We need more of these projects to offset the military advantage that irresponsible partnerships have given China. Nevertheless, Congress can and should establish safeguards to prevent any new research collaboration between the Pentagon and Beijing.

U.S. Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) and I are preparing to introduce new legislation, the American FORTIFY Research Actto protect taxpayer-funded research and close the loopholes that have allowed our adversaries to exploit it. Our bicameral bill would direct the U.S. intelligence community to assess the full scope of problematic research collaboration with China, restrict defense collaboration with Chinese entities, crack down on federal grant application fraud, increase transparency within grant-making institutions, and much more.

Passing and implementing new legislation is difficult, especially during a presidential election, but it is what the country needs to prevent government incompetence from jeopardizing our security. It is also what the American people need to begin to rebuild their trust in our institutions. The longer we delay acting, the weaker that trust will become—and the more justified that weakening will be.

About the Author:

Marco Rubio is the longest-serving U.S. Senator from Florida. He also serves as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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