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Bochen Han

China is still trying to recruit US-based researchers despite years of heightened scrutiny, members of Congress were told on Thursday at a hearing where multiple science agencies warned that tighter security measures must go hand in hand with efforts to retain foreign talent.
“Just in the past week, I have received three emails that were forwarded to me from researchers in the community who had been approached for recruitment by Chinese malign foreign talent recruitment programmes,” said Rebecca Keiser, acting chief of staff of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
“The fact that they were approached, even now in 2025, is extremely concerning,” she continued, adding that Beijing kept changing the names of recruitment programmes, making it difficult to enforce security measures.
The comments came during a House science committee hearing focused on protecting US research from China.
Officials from the National Institutes of Health, Nasa and Department of Energy also testified amid growing political pressure to sever scientific ties with China.
Washington has for years raised concern about state-backed programmes from China, such as the Thousand Talents Programme, which was set up in the late 2000s to draw in leading researchers from overseas.
Keiser urged Congress to act to protect early-stage research, citing a recent case in which a China-based researcher sought to join an NSF-funded project and get an agreement to publish its results.
She added that such research often fell outside the scope of existing US export controls and other laws, including those designed to protect intellectual property.
She and other witnesses stressed that US agencies had responded to outreach efforts from China by tightening vetting procedures for foreign researchers, but warned against measures that could deter legitimate international cooperation.
Asked by Florida Republican Daniel Webster whether the US could remain competitive in global research without China, Patricia Valdez, a chief research integrity officer at the NIH, said no.
“We definitely need to have international collaborations,” Valdez said. “Science is global. We can’t cut off all the other countries.”
Daniel Evans, a senior research official at Nasa, said concerns about China’s “malign” foreign talent recruitment programmes should not obscure the parallel challenge of retaining foreign-born researchers trained in the US.
He cited an example of his Chinese officemate at Harvard who conducted “benign” research in the US and later returned to China to found a tech company.
“The issue wasn’t so much that we trained him – it’s that we lost him, and the long-term economic benefit of that US research investment was actually accrued to an overseas nation,” Evans said.
Jay Tilden, director of the counter-intelligence office at the Department of Energy, said universities were a key area for research security, arguing they needed support from the US government to assess whether incoming scientists posed acceptable risks.


Tilden also called for congressional support to develop “US-born talent”, while noting that it would take the country a long time to “wean” itself off its reliance on Chinese and other foreign researchers.
The witnesses found a receptive audience from members of both parties, with Rich McCormick, the Republican chairman of the subcommittee on scientific investigations and oversight, saying lawmakers were grappling with a persistent tension.
“We walk a fine line between talent and risk … We’ll never be done. It doesn’t matter who the president is, doesn’t matter who the chair is, doesn’t matter who has the majority, this issue will follow us for the rest of our lives.”
The difficulty of drawing that line became clear when a provision that would have imposed funding restrictions and disclosure requirements on university research collaborations with Chinese entities was left out of a defence bill signed into law on Thursday.
But some lawmakers still lean towards more blanket restrictions.
“We need to be open and secure, but I don’t know that we can do that with our adversaries. They have been robbing us blind for decades,” Pat Harrigan, a North Carolina Republican, said on Thursday.
Meanwhile, efforts to shed light on US government funding of research involving Chinese institutions continue.
On Wednesday, the House committee on China released a report identifying around 4,350 research papers published between June 2023 and June 2025 that acknowledged funding from the Energy Department or research support while involving relationships with Chinese entities.


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Multiple US government agencies told a House committee that security concerns should not stop efforts to retain foreign-born researchers


Multiple US government agencies told a House committee that security concerns should not stop efforts to retain foreign-born researchers.


US-China tech war

Scientists

United States

National Science Foundation (US)

China still targeting US-based researchers for ‘malign’ purposes, lawmakers warned

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Multiple US government agencies told a House committee that security concerns should not stop efforts to retain foreign-born researchers

Multiple US government agencies told a House committee that security concerns should not stop efforts to retain foreign-born researchers