In case you missed it: Rubio: Stop federal subsidies from strengthening communist China

Stop Federal Subsidies That Bolster Communist China

U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL)

July 7, 2024

National interest

…A new unclassified analysis provided to my office by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) reveals that for decades, American taxpayers have unknowingly funded thousands of Chinese experiments with direct applications to the Chinese military. There have been more than 5,000 instances of research collaboration between DoD funding agencies and Chinese entities in the past five years alone.

To be perfectly clear, these experiments are far from purely academic. They have covered eavesdropping, 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 advantage in key areas of the 21^st War of the century.

This research is also problematic from a human rights perspective. For more than a decade, the Department of Defense has supported scientists who partnered with companies complicit in Beijing’s mass surveillance programs and systematic oppression of the Chinese people, including the genocide of the Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious groups.

China now has virtually unlimited access to American basic research because of the absence 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….

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…. Passing and implementing new legislation is difficult, especially during a presidential election year, but it is what the nation needs to prevent government incompetence from jeopardizing our security.

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