A top Senate Republican introduced legislation Thursday aimed at stopping foreign governments, particularly China, from engaging in the widespread theft of U.S. taxpayer-funded research and intellectual property developed at U.S. universities.
Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio spoke with the Washington Examiner about his bipartisan bill, called the Safeguarding American Innovation Act, that he said is co-sponsored by nine Republicans and six Democrats, with others showing interest in joining.
“I think it would be really important if we could get this bill passed to push back against what China has been doing now for two decades,” Portman said. “More and more people are waking up to the fact that our research, often supported by U.S. tax dollars, is leaving our shores and going to China to help fuel their economic and military rise.”
Portman’s legislation, if passed, would enact five major reforms to protect U.S. research. Portman argued the proposals “are all commonsense, nonpartisan approaches on how to tighten things up here in our country so that we continue to lead the world in research — but also so that research doesn’t leak to other countries, particularly China.”
The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, led by Portman, released a report last week detailing how the federal government provided “little-to-no oversight” of Chinese state-owned telecoms for two decades and how China is targeting U.S. communications the same way it has targeted education, research, and personal data. That subcommittee previously released reports on China’s foreign funding on U.S. campuses, theft of U.S. research, and cyberattacks against U.S. companies.
The first big change Portman’s bill would put into law is punishments, including hefty fines, jail time, and grant prohibitions for those who intentionally fail to disclose foreign support when applying for federal grants.
Portman referenced last week’s revelation from an ongoing National Institutes of Health investigation that 54 scientists had lost their jobs over a failure to disclose financial ties to foreign governments. The vast majority of those cases involved funding from a Chinese institution. Portman said he was told that more than half the researchers were part of China’s Thousand Talents Program.
“The contracts with Chinese funding come with a price, and that is you’re not allowed to talk about it — and you have to agree to give your research to China,” Portman said.
The senator said his legislation would ensure that NIH and other federal grant-givers got a handle on this undue foreign influence. Portman said three other nonpublic actions have also been taken by U.S. authorities in the foreign-funding arena.
“I think we’re just scratching the surface,” Portman said. “I think it’s a bigger problem than you may realize.”
Portman noted the FBI said in one hearing that “they were basically asleep at the switch for the last two decades.” But, he added, recently “they’ve been pretty aggressive, and as time goes on, I think you’re going to see more and more of these.”
The Justice Department has increased its scrutiny of China’s activities recently, launching the China Initiative in 2018 and charging espionage cases, cracking down on hacking schemes, prosecuting efforts to steal trade secrets, and going after the Thousand Talents Program, including Harvard professor Charles Lieber.
The Ohio Republican predicted that “if we pass the legislation, you’ll see a lot of this coming to the surface.”
“We cannot afford to have our taxpayer-funded research be going to other countries, and in some respects, being used against us in terms of global competition,” Portman said. “Specifically, with regard to the military, certainly that’s direct competition to us — that the Chinese have been able to leapfrog some of the technological work that has been done by simply taking our research.”
The second reform would amend Section 117 of the Higher Education Act of 1965 by lowering the reporting threshold required for U.S. universities that receive foreign gifts from $250,000 down to $50,000 while empowering the Education Department to punish schools that fail to report.
Portman said that “transparency is a good thing” and the new law would eliminate the “ambiguity” that is the subject of complaints by universities.
“Overall, I think what you’ll see is a lot more reporting, and that’s good not just for the Department of Education and those who would be enforcing these laws, but also for taxpayers but for parents and for students too,” Portman said. “If you’re getting money from China or from other countries, that’s something that ought to be reported … so people can understand what strings are attached.”
“As the State Department said at one of our hearings, the universities and the Chinese Communist Party are working together,” the senator said.
Last month, the Education Department told House Republicans it was concerned about the threat posed by the Chinese government and that its inquiry triggered “catch-up” reporting of more than $6.5 billion in previously undisclosed foreign funds “primarily” from Chinese and Middle Eastern sources on campuses nationwide.
The third big legislative change would strengthen the Student and Exchange Visitor Program by requiring the State Department’s exchange sponsors to put safeguards in place to stop unauthorized access to sensitive technologies. The fourth would increase the State Department’s authority to deny visas to foreign nationals seeking access to these sensitive technologies.
A number of Republican senators proposed a ban on issuing visas to graduate students in technology fields, while House Democrats have raised concerns that ethnically Chinese scientists are being racially profiled. The Trump administration announced in May it would revoke thousands of visas held by Chinese graduate students who had ties to the Chinese military.
Portman’s fifth proposal would create a Federal Research Security Council within the Office of Management and Budget and would mandate a standardized U.S. government grant process and the creation of a government-wide grantee database.
“What’s happened is that for a couple decades our research, including U.S. taxpayer-funded research, has been taken by a country that has become a rival. And China is a rival in every respect,” Portman said. “It’s not about the Chinese people … it’s about the Chinese Communist Party that has been very determined and persistent in taking research from the United States and taking advantage of it.”
The Ohio Republican said his concern was that “we have allowed this to happen by being naive about the world in which we live, where China is systematically, quite openly, and almost fragrantly targeting the most promising technology and the most promising researchers and has bought it, cheap, by paying the researchers and not paying the U.S. taxpayers — and we can’t let it continue.”
