According to Florida Senator Marco Rubio, the U.S. Department of Defense collaborated on a shockingly high number of experiments with Chinese scientists that have direct implications for the technology of the Chinese military.
Rubio, who serves as the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, shared the news over the weekend in a piece he wrote for The National Interest.
“Last November, investigative reporters uncovered that the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) had provided $30 million in artificial intelligence research grants to a Chinese scientist at the Beijing Institute of Technology, a university tasked with developing next-generation weapons for the People’s Liberation Army,” Rubio said. “The news came as a shock to American policymakers and ordinary citizens alike. It was unthinkable that the U.S. government would fund our chief adversary’s defense industrial base.”
Rubio goes on to note that the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) found “more than 5,000 instances of research collaboration between the DoD’s funding agencies and Chinese entities between 2019 and 2024.”
The Sunshine State Senator says, “Bureaucratic negligence, naïveté of the ‘science knows no borders’ variety, and genuine ignorance of Beijing’s technology theft strategies all played parts” in the national security failure.
Rubio and fellow congressman Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) are preparing a new bill to close loopholes allowing China to get assistance from America with their military tech.
“[T]he FORTIFY U.S. Research Act,” Rubio says will “safeguard taxpayer-funded research and close loopholes that have enabled our adversaries to exploit it. Our bicameral bill would direct the U.S. intelligence community to assess the full extent of problematic research collaboration with China, restrict defense collaboration with Chinese entities, crack down on federal grant application fraud, increase transparency across grant-making institutions, and more.”
Can Rubio and Wenstrup get this critical piece of legislation off the ground during an election year?
Here’s hoping.
