The Chinese Communist Party wants to be the world’s sole superpower. To achieve its vision of global dominance, China is getting help from an unexpected source: the United States. A recently published U.S. congressional report highlights how Beijing is exploiting American resources and technology.
The report, titled “Containment Breach,” provides an exhaustive overview of how the CCP is utilizing the Energy Department’s intellectual property. The investigation found a “pervasive and deeply troubling pattern of U.S. taxpayer-funded research being conducted in collaboration with Chinese entities that are directly tied to China’s defense research and industrial base—many of which appear on various U.S. government national security entity lists.”
The report notes that some of this technology is central to the growing competition between Washington and Beijing, including “research in sensitive technical domains such as quantum sensing, semiconductors, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials, nuclear science, and explosion science—many with clear dual-use, national security, and military applications.” The CCP is looking for an edge in its quest for supremacy over America — and the U.S. is practically offering it up on a silver platter.
The Select Committee on China found that the Energy Department had “decades-long failures to promptly and proactively implement adequate research security and due diligence measures.” Indeed, the DOE didn’t even establish an office for research, technology, and economic security until 2023. And this was “years after extensive public evidence had already documented [China]’s systematic targeting and exploitation of U.S. national laboratories, academic institutions, and federally funded research partnerships,” the congressional inquiry noted.
As a result, American taxpayers have been footing the bill for research and technology that benefits our country’s foremost opponent. And unfortunately, this practice has continued even after the RTES office was established to prevent such an occurrence.
For example, between June 2023 and June 2025, the DOE funded an estimated 4,350 research papers with relationships to organizations associated with the Chinese government. And of these, approximately half were conducted in partnership with entities within China’s defense research and industrial base.
It gets worse. American tax dollars helped fund the so-called “Seven Sons of National Defense” Chinese universities, national defense-designated laboratories, China’s primary nuclear weapons research and development complex, the Chinese military’s National University of Defense Technology, state-owned enterprise defense conglomerates, and a Chinese cyberrange, among others. Many of these are directly linked to the Chinese military, and some of them “appear on U.S. government entity lists due to their roles in advancing China’s military capabilities or engaging in human rights violations,” the report observes.
The Pentagon has noted that China is America’s sole “pacing challenge,” meaning that Beijing is the only country capable of going toe-to-toe with the U.S. And America, if inadvertently, is aiding its foremost opponent. History offers a warning of what this portends.
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The U.S. won the last Cold War thanks to American innovation and technology. The capitalist model favored by the West ensured that the Soviet Union would be comparatively backward and unable to compete in the emerging fields that dominated the latter half of the 20th century and much of our own. Simply put, communism wasn’t able to keep up.
Chinese leaders have spent decades studying the fall of the Soviet Union and are dead set on learning from its mistakes. They mean to steal what they can’t create, perpetrating the greatest scale of industrial espionage and piracy in history. But the recent congressional report highlights a troubling fact: In many cases, they don’t even have to steal. America is literally giving its advantages away. That’s a recipe for disaster.
The writer is a Washington, D.C.-based foreign affairs analyst. His views are his own.
