Republican Sen. Joni Ernst is sounding the alarm on “foreign adversaries,” including China and Russia, infiltrating US laboratories — after a recent congressional report revealed that thousands of foreign citizens were granted access to the research facilities last year.
“National Laboratories are prime targets for espionage and theft by foreign adversaries,” the Iowa lawmaker wrote in a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm Wednesday.
“For decades, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been actively recruiting scientists from National Labs to work on their own military programs and stealing our research using visiting students and scholars.”
Ernst has demanded data from the Department of Energy about the access that Chinese, Russian and Iranian nationals have garnered to the department’s 17 national laboratories over recent years.
She cited a report from the Senate Intelligence Committee which revealed that “approximately 40,000 citizens of foreign countries, including more than 8,000 citizens from China and Russia, were granted access to the premises, information, or technology” of the labs in fiscal year 2023.
“After COVID-19 we should have learned our lesson about trusting Communist China’s scientists,” the Hawkeye State Republican told The Post.
“We know our adversaries run sophisticated espionage programs to steal research, we do not need to invite them in.”
Details of the congressional report’s findings were revealed in a recent bill backed by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.) earlier this year.
Some estimates suggest that over 4,400 scientists from China and 300 from Russia visited the Energy Department’s network of laboratories this year, Ernst’s office said.
The Iowa senator is now demanding data on the number of visitors to national labs from Russia, China and Iran in fiscal years 2024, 2023 and 2022.
She also wants information about the number of those individuals who were found to be “counterintelligence risks” beforehand.
Ernst gave a deadline of Nov. 29 for Granholm’s team to fork over that data.
The Energy Department has 17 national laboratories spread out across the country, including the Ames National Laboratory in Iowa.
Amid geopolitical tensions with China, Russia and Iran, there have been heightened concerns about safeguarding US technological secrets.
Back in March, for instance, a US national was arrested for allegedly seeking to swindle secrets from Google’s Artificial Intelligence program.
Some estimates suggest that the US is losing some $600 billion a year in intellectual property theft from Chinese espionage.
Ernst had worked on legislation to address concerns with US trade secrets in the past. In 2022, for example, she helped craft a bill aimed at stopping Chinese and Russian firms from getting sensitive tech secrets from Small Business Administration programs.
She also backed legislation to ban funds from going to research in adversarial nations.
The Post contacted an Energy Department spokesperson for comment.
