The watchdog for the Department of Health and Human Services concluded that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services did not consider risks to U.S. national security when it came to China gaining access to genomic data.
The HHS inspector general released a report last week, concluding the “NIH did not consider the risk presented by foreign principal investigators when permitting access to United States genomic data” and that Medicare and Medicaid’s enterprise risk management process “did not consider national security risks for any of CMS’s programs in accordance with federal requirements.”
CMS’s information systems “process millions of highly sensitive pieces of information, including personally identifiable information, protected health information, and federal tax information records,” the watchdog report said. Yet CMS “was unable to ensure that it had implemented effective controls to protect against threats from foreign and domestic adversaries.”
The HHS watchdog recommended that CMS “implement a process to assess all of its programs for national security risks.”
CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure wrote to the HHS inspector general’s office in June, saying the federal agency “concurs” with the watchdog’s recommendation and that CMS “is in the early stages of establishing an agency enterprise risk management program and will consider how to assess national security risks across its programs.”
“We determined whether CMS was considering national security threats as it assessed risks to its operations, and we found that national security threats were not being considered,” a spokesperson for the HHS watchdog told the Washington Examiner on Monday. “Our audit objective was to determine whether CMS’s Enterprise Risk Management process considered national security risks to all CMS programs in accordance with federal requirements. We did not audit specific concerns with genomic data sharing, foreign nations, or China.”
Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Marco Rubio of Florida had requested the HHS watchdog review in June 2019, but in January, they asked the watchdog to expand the scope of its investigation in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
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“When taxpayer dollars and data are flying out the door to entities with connections to the CCP or other foreign adversaries, our government ought to be taking every step available to protect national security,” Grassley said Friday. “This is especially true after the apparent governmental failures to properly oversee how American taxpayers funded entities like the Wuhan Institute of Virology. CMS needs to quickly adopt the inspector general’s recommendations before sending any more taxpayer dollars and data to entities that are a potential threat to our security, including Chinese government-affiliated programs.”
Rubio added: “It is ridiculous that our current policies enable the Chinese Communist Party to access Americans’ genomic data.”
He urged the Senate to pass the Genomics Data Security Act, which he introduced in May, with his office saying the proposal would “modernize” the NIH “by requiring that the NIH prioritize national security considerations” and would “prohibit any NIH funding from going to support entities with direct ties to” the Chinese government.
The National Counterintelligence and Security Center previously warned that China’s “mass collection of DNA at home has helped it carry out human rights abuses against domestic minority groups and support state surveillance” and that its “collection of healthcare data from America poses equally serious risks, not only to the privacy of Americans, but also to the economic and national security of the U.S.” The February alert warned that China “has for years been able to gain access to U.S. healthcare data, including genomic data, through a variety of channels, both legal and illegal” and the “combination of stolen personally identifiable information, personal health information, and large genomic data sets collected from abroad affords the PRC vast opportunities to precisely target individuals in foreign governments, private industries, or other sectors for potential surveillance, manipulation, or extortion.”
A Reuters investigation found that a Chinese genetics company originally called Beijing Genomics Institute, now BGI, that is “selling prenatal tests around the world developed them in collaboration with the country’s military and is using them to collect genetic data from millions of women for sweeping research on the traits of populations.”
BGI released a statement in response, claiming, “Assertions that BGI is motivated by anything other than the advancement of health outcomes are both deeply disappointing and factually incorrect.” The Chinese company said BGI’s prenatal testing “was developed solely by BGI — not in partnership with China’s military.”
The Commerce Department added to its blacklist in July 2020 nearly a dozen Chinese companies “implicated in human rights violations and abuses” against the Uyghur Muslims, including assisting China’s “campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, forced labor, involuntary collection of biometric data, and genetic analyses targeted at” the Uyghurs. BGI subsidiaries Xinjiang Silk Road BGI and Beijing Liuhe BGI were added.
William Evanina, former director of the NCSC, warned in February about China’s efforts to obtain U.S. genetic information and other personal data.
Evanina pointed a finger at BGI and other Chinese efforts to obtain U.S. data, including allegedly exploiting the coronavirus by flooding the U.S. with a variety of genetic tests during the pandemic.
“They are the ultimate company that shows connectivity to both the communist state as well as the military apparatus,” Evanina said. “There is no such thing as a private company in the Communist Party of China.”
John Demers, DOJ’s then-head of its national security division, warned that such genetic information “can be used from a counterintelligence perspective to either coerce you or convince you to help the Chinese” and that “the worst case would be the development of some kind of biological weapon” because “if you had all of the data of a population, you might be able to see what the population is most vulnerable to.”
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The Defense Department warned military members that direct-to-consumer genetic tests could “potentially create unintended security consequences and increased risk to the joint force and mission.”
Then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe warned in December, “From a military force standpoint, the People’s Republic of China has a military of 2 million. They want them to be the largest, and they also want them to be the strongest, which is why they are engaged in … gene editing, literally trying to alter the DNA, experimenting on DNA to make soldiers, sailors, and airmen stronger and more powerful.”
