Dear Commons Community,
Scientists and research advocates in the United States are mobilizing to fight a bill that would essentially prohibit researchers with any ties to China and other countries deemed hostile from receiving federal funding. Nearly 800 academics signed a 29 October letter opposing the ban, part of a bill passed recently by the U.S. House of Representatives that sets spending priorities for the Department of Defense (DOD). A coalition of higher education and research advocacy groups has also urged Congress to strike the language as members reconcile the House version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with what the Senate adopted last month. Final passage is expected by the end of the year. As reported by Science.
The Securing American Funding and Expertise from Adversarial Research Exploitation (SAFE) Act would deny all federal funding to any U.S. scientist who collaborates with anyone “affiliated with a hostile foreign entity,” a category that includes four countries: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Prohibited activities would include joint research, co-authorship on papers, and advising a foreign graduate student or postdoctoral fellow. The language is retroactive, meaning any interactions during the previous 5 years could make a scientist ineligible for future federal funding.
The act’s author, Representative John Moolenaar (R–MI), wants to “stop federal [science] funding from going to universities or researchers that collaborate with China’s military and intelligence services.” Moolenaar chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, which has produced a slew of reports in the past 2 years decrying what it sees as a rising tide of such harmful collaborations.
The proposed measure goes far beyond what’s needed to protect U.S. interests, the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the American Public and Landgrant Universities (APLU) say in their recent letter to the chairs of the conference on the NDAA bill. “While we are well aware of the need to prohibit certain types of collaborations to ensure our national security,” they write, “[the act] would capture every single research agreement, every study abroad program, every language program, every professional conference, and every campus facility that a U.S. university might have in partnership with another institution abroad.”
The lack of a clear definition of “affiliated with a hostile foreign entity” could trigger arbitrary and biased enforcement of the funding ban, warns the Asian American Scholar Forum (AASF) in a similar letter. It cites the “chilling effect” of the China Initiative launched by President Donald Trump in 2018 to prevent economic espionage, which led to the targeting of hundreds of U.S. scientists of Chinese descent for allegedly failing to disclose their ties to China.
“It will accelerate the breakdown of the people-to-people trust that’s so important in scientific collaborations,” says Haifan Lin, a Yale University cell biologist and AASF board member. “And without this kind of positive energy, the U.S. and China will become more and more polarized and eventually become each other’s enemy.” Lin himself lost access to National Institutes of Health funding for 2 years under the now-defunct Trump initiative after NIH asked Yale whether he had accurately disclosed his adjunct position at Shanghai-Tech University, which led to a collaboration between the two institutions. He was cleared of any wrongdoing.
Representative Zoe Lofgren (CA), the top Democrat on the House science committee, says Moolenaar’s approach ignores what Congress has already done to prevent U.S. adversaries from stealing intellectual property. Existing measures generally target specific fields applicable to key military technologies, she notes; in other cases, they require disclosure of ties but don’t ban new funding. “The SAFE research act ignores, and sometimes entirely contradicts, what has already been passed into law,” Lofgren said before the 10 September House vote.
Steven Kivelson of Stanford University, who organized the 29 October letter from scientists, says collaboration with Chinese colleagues is vital to his research in condensed matter physics—and a net gain for U.S. science. He co-authored a recent paper on quantum spin liquids in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that depended on computational resources provided by collaborators in China, some of them former students. Later this month he will travel to Beijing for an international conference on quantum states of matter, where he will “learn about ongoing experiments that I wouldn’t know about otherwise,” he says. (AAAS, which publishes Science, is a co-sponsor of the meeting.)
Kivelson says his research has no military applications in the foreseeable future. Maybe some practical use will emerge, he adds, “but the timescale is so long that it’s sort of ludicrous to think it needs to be kept secret.”
Opponents of the SAFE Act also argue that universities are already aware of collaborations that might pose a threat to national security. A report issued by Moolenaar’s committee in September found that in the past decade, 8800 papers derived from federally funded research had Chinese co-authors. But it also showed the 2024 number was less than half the peak in 2018. “He may want the number to be zero,” one higher education lobbyist says. “But the report shows we are definitely getting better at vetting co-authors.”
In addition to removing the SAFE Act, research advocates have asked lawmakers to drop or modify several other security provisions now in either the House or Senate versions of the defense bill. For example, the House bill would ban academic scientists from going to work for a foreign entity of concern for 3 years after their grant expired, a requirement that AAU and APLU say is impractical and unfair. “Universities have no legal authority to track former employees, let alone verify that their reported status is certifiably true and accurate,” the groups argue in their letter. Higher education groups also want conferees to remove a Senate provision that would make an entire institution ineligible for DOD funding if any employee had ties to foreign entities of concern. That ban now applies only to the individual.
It’s hard to predict where the conferees will end up. But many observers worry that, if conferees knock out the SAFE Act in the final measure, lawmakers will feel pressure to adopt other new research security provisions to show they are not “soft” on China.
Kivelson acknowledges that he’s fighting an uphill battle to stave off tougher restrictions on scientific interactions with China. “The image of tilting with windmills does come to mind,” he says. “But this issue is so important to scientists, I feel that we need to do whatever we can.”
Banning research collaborations with China is wrong. Its government is making a significant investment in research that would benefit all of us.
Tony
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