Stop building China’s military with US tax dollars

[Pelican Press 0]

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Stop building China’s military with US tax dollars

Speaking in Guangzhou, China, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently

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that “President Biden and I firmly ******* the idea that the ******* States should decouple from China.” She added that “when needed” the U.S. would deploy its economic tools “in a narrowly targeted manner to protect our national security and that of our allies.”

To Yellen, China ******** a valuable and trusted partner. That trust appears to be misplaced.

Days ago, the House Select Committee on the ******** ********** Party and the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released a long-awaited ******

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on the vulnerability of our research innovations. Its chilling title alone should alarm the ********* people: “CCP ON THE QUAD: How ********* Taxpayers and Universities Fund the [******** ********** Party’s] Advanced Military and Technological Research.”

It

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that the Department of Defense funded more than 2,000 scientific research papers with ******** collaborators who were directly affiliated with the ******** ********** Party’s defense research and industrial base.

The research collaborations involved “emerging technologies” related to hypersonic and fourth-generation nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence, semiconductors, advanced lasers, high-performance explosives and rocket fuels and robotics.

******** weapons improved by those federally funded collaborations are now aimed at us and our allies.

Besides its military threat, China is now meddling in our elections.

The Department of Justice’s top national security official

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of China’s “malign influence activities” to affect our elections. U.S. Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen revealed that China “is focused on influencing down-ballot races — congressional races in particular — focusing on candidates that it views as particularly threatening to core [********] security interests.”

More than two years ago, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned of China’s attempts to influence our elected officials and

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as combining “the surveillance nightmare of East Germany” with the “tech of Silicon Valley.” Access to the U.S. research enterprise is helping China build that monster.

Wray

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about China targeting America’s university research innovations. Last April, he warned of the ******** ********** Party’s “broad and unrelenting” threat to our “critical infrastructure” in academia and the private sector, warning that China has tried to pilfer “intellectual property, technology, and research” from nearly every ********* industry.

None of these warnings are new. More than five years ago, Wray

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that the U.S. needed a “whole-of-society” response to China’s threat, then describing China’s access to U.S. government-funded research innovations.

The government’s response since 2021? The Justice Department ended its China Initiative, which had focused the agency’s investigative resources on thwarting China’s nefarious efforts. Investigations of university research disclosure failures that largely began during the Trump administration have moved at a snail’s pace under Biden, with several concluding just recently. (See the Justice Department’s settlements with the

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,

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and the

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.)

The Education Department downgraded its foreign funding

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by shifting oversight from its General Counsel’s office to a component with no subject matter expertise: Federal Student Aid. The nomenclature changed, too. “Civil investigations” into university foreign funding disclosure failures are now merely “

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.”

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issued by Trump and retained by Biden, in Jan. 2021 federal agencies were directed to strengthen protections against foreign theft of federally funded research.

But it took until July for the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy to finally issue

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for implementing research security obligations to federal agencies (occurring almost 2 years after the CHIPS and Science Act’s enhanced requirements for NSF-led research security risk mitigation).

Importantly, the House has a bipartisan appreciation of China’s mounting threat. Last December, 246 Republicans and Democrats voted for the

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, which would significantly tighten foreign funding disclosure requirements for universities, particularly involving countries of concern — China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. Unfortunately, the Senate has ******* to even schedule a vote on this bipartisan bill.

Inexplicably, five years after Wray identified the need, there is no whole-of-government response to China’s clear and growing threat.

Many (though not all) prominent research universities, addicted to foreign funding and scientific collaborations with talented ******** researchers, often oppose further disclosure requirements and show little sense of obligation to the taxpayers who provide about $55 billion in federal research dollars annually.

If federally funded scientific collaborations were helping to build the military might of Russia, the groundswell of outrage would be immediate. Hearings would be held. Further research collaborations with Russia would be statutorily banned. The president would demand as much.

But the same political grandees who bray endlessly about Russia — an adversary which poses far lesser economic and military threats to the U.S. — rarely find their voices when it comes to confronting ******** aggression.

Why? Vladimir Lenin supposedly predicted that capitalists would sell him the rope with which he would hang them.

As described in a groundbreaking

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last May, “U.S. asset managers and index providers are actively funneling billions of dollars of U.S. investor capital to ******** ********** Party companies, including ******** firms that have been sanctioned by the U.S. government for human rights abuses and that are helping to modernize China’s People’s Liberation Army.”

Similarly, many university endowments are heavily invested in China. Our universities also frequently have valuable contracts with ******** businesses and universities.

Lenin couldn’t have imagined that we would pay for the rope, too.

Despite appearances, the U.S. is not helpless to protect itself and its taxpayer-funded research innovations.

The Senate should immediately pass the DETERRENT Act.

Then, with the support of this or the next president, Congress should prohibit recipients of federal funds from engaging in scientific collaborations with ******** researchers if the research may be used to benefit the advancement of China’s army.

Paul R. Moore, former chief investigative counsel at the U.S. Department of Education, is a former assistant U.S. attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice and is a senior fellow at the Prague Security Studies Institute.

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