WASHINGTON — A key military spending bill making its way through Congress includes a pair of provisions to prevent taxpayer dollars from funding research benefitting foreign adversaries, including Russia and China.
The first of two amendments offered by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) to the National Defense Authorization Act will bolster the Pentagon’s ban on funding research by academics with ties to countries identified as antagonistic to the US.
It will specify the prohibition of defense dollars for “academic institutions and research institutions of the People’s Republic of China,” and “the Russian Federation.”
The second provision will prohibit any Department of Defense funds from “any research, development, testing, evaluation, or training at any animal research facility located in or owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by a foreign adversary.”
It also stipulates that the provision can be waived if the Secretary of Defense determines that the exemption would be “in the national security interests of the United States” and submits a justification to Congress.
“It is insane that I’ve had to fight for years to stop funding foreign adversaries’ labs and shady experiments by Chinese scientists with American defense dollars,” Ernst told The Post in a statement. “I am proud to have secured a major win for common sense, taxpayers, and the safety of our citizens.
“While we celebrate this long overdue win today, the fight is not over, and I will continue working to ensure that not a single tax dollar is wasted boosting the research of our adversaries or on conducting cruel and unethical experiments on animals,” the Iowa Republican added.
Both amendments would take effect during fiscal year 2026 if passed by both chambers of Congress and signed into law by President Trump, who inked an executive order in May to ban so-called “gain of function” research funded by US taxpayers in countries of concern like China.
The experiments tinker with pathogens and can make them more easily transmissible or infectious for humans.
The changes to the bill come on the heels of a Pentagon audit last year that exposed untracked distribution of American defense dollars to risky research overseas — even after lawmakers, intelligence officials and scientists sounded the alarm about the lack of oversight.
Millions of dollars flowed to the now-infamous Wuhan Institute of Virology, where the COVID-19 pandemic began, between 2014 and 2023 for what a National Institutes of Health official confirmed was gain-of-function research.
The June 2024 report by the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General admitted that the Pentagon doesn’t know exactly how much of its spending is being routed to China and foreign nations for the research — but at least seven primary grants totaling more than $15.5 million were found to have passed through subrecipients to “contracting research organization[s] in China or other foreign countries for research related to potential enhancement of pathogens of pandemic potential.”
That funding was the Pentagon prohibiting such research, which is classified as “offensive biological work.”
“Washington hasn’t learned any lessons from COVID-19,” Ernst told The Post after the DoD report came to light as a result of her tucking a provision demanding the audit into the annual defense bill.
“Without my calls to audit DoD spending, these dollars wasted on our adversaries would have never been unmasked.”
Though the report found that the Pentagon “did not track funding at the level of detail necessary to determine whether the DoD provided funding to Chinese research laboratories or other foreign countries,” defense officials insisted to auditors that none of the experiments involved “strengthening” any viruses.
An earlier investigative collaboration between Ernst and the taxpayer watchdog group Open the Books found that the US government has spent at least $1.3 billion for various research programs involving Russian and Chinese entities between 2018 and 2023, Fox News reported.
White Coat Waste, another monitoring group, has called for other federal agencies to pull the plug on funding overseas animal testing, with Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) holding a hearing earlier this year on instances which have involved animal cruelty.
“For the sake of national security and animal welfare, we need to stop sending tax dollars to animal research labs in Communist China and other hostile foreign nations committed to destroying America,” Mace said.
“We’re leading the fight to end this taxpayer-funded madness. One US-funded Wuhan lab catastrophe is already too many.”
“As the first and only group to expose and end U.S. taxpayer funding for gain-of-function in Wuhan, treadmills tests on crippled cats in Russia, and the Pentagon’s puppy poisoning experiments in China, White Coat Waste is proud to work with Senator Joni Ernst and Representative Nancy Mace to cut Defense spending in our enemies’ unaccountable animal labs,” added the organization’s senior vice president Justin Goodman.
“Taxpayers should never be forced to fund foreign adversaries’ wasteful and dangerous animal experiments—and thanks to our investigations and relentless campaigns, soon they won’t have to.”
Ernst has also sounded the alarm over a recent report from the Senate Intelligence Committee, which found 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 Department of Energy labs in fiscal year 2023.
Other bombshell reports released this year have raised concerns about incursions by foreign adversaries into American research hubs.
An expose published this spring by the Stanford Review, a student publication, revealed that Chinese Communist Party spies had found a foothold at the prestigious West Coast university.
