Senate Democrat Blocks Bill Targeting Chinese-Military-Linked Biotech Giant

S enator Gary Peters (Mich.) is holding up a legislative proposal that would target U.S. adversaries’ biotech companies, including the Chinese-military-linked BGI Genomics, National Review has exclusively learned. His stance against the provision comes as the conglomerate wages a major lobbying offensive on Capitol Hill.

The DNA-sequencing giant, based in Shenzhen, has taken part in dystopian research projects focused on race and ethnicity in tandem with the People’s Liberation Army. The U.S. intelligence community has pointedly warned that BGI is part of a Chinese-government strategy to hoover up massive sets of genetic data from across the world.

Reuters has reported that BGI has funneled data harvested from millions of women’s prenatal-testing kits into experiments using a Chinese military supercomputer focused on the genes of Uyghurs and Tibetans. The newswire service also reported that BGI worked with People’s Liberation Army researchers to develop drugs that Chinese soldiers could use to treat altitude sickness while operating on high plateaus.

According to Anna Puglisi, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology and a former U.S. intelligence official, “BGI isn’t just a company. BGI runs their genome database in China, for the Chinese government. And China has said it will use anything that it acquires for both its military and civilian use.” She cautions, “I think we’re kidding ourselves if we think there’s some kind of firewall, so to speak, between entities such as BGI and the Chinese government — and as an extension, the PLA.”

Legislators are hoping to ban federal agencies from working with BGI by including a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, Congress’s annual defense-policy bill. The version passed by the House in July included an amendment barring such federal contracts. A bicameral conference committee is now considering the provision’s possible inclusion in the text of the NDAA that lawmakers hope to vote on by Christmas.

But Peters, as an aide confirmed when NR asked for comment, has withheld his approval of that provision’s inclusion in the conference text. As chairman of the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs, Peters has the ability to withhold his approval of NDAA provisions that fall under his jurisdiction, effectively blocking them from the final legislation.

Peters’s aide said that he “fully shares [the provision’s] goal — to address significant security concerns related to some biotech companies” — but that “the provision as currently drafted would be extremely difficult to effectively implement and would have adverse effects on American businesses and scientific progress.” Instead, Peters’s team maintains that he wants to pass an improved alternative. “Senator Peters has been working to help draft alternative, bipartisan consensus language that can be successfully implemented to achieve the goal of protecting American genetic information and boosting procurement of technology from non-adversarial sources,” the aide added.

After NR reached out, Peters’s staff further clarified that the senator hopes to include improved language — focused on creating “a comprehensive process to address bad actors in this space” — in the text of the NDAA. Several sources familiar with the situation, however, said that the senator’s staff had not previously offered or spoken about such a new NDAA provision.

One U.S. firm that might be affected by the legislation is BGI’s U.S. subsidiary, Complete Genomics. It has already spent at least $150,000 since July to hire a K Street firm to lobby Congress and the executive branch on the provision, according to disclosures filed with the Senate. That firm, the Vogel Group, did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, BGI Group has hired the white-shoe law firm Steptoe & Johnson to lobby on its behalf, paying the firm $270,000 for its work from the start of July through the end of September.

In recent years, BGI Genomics and its subsidiaries have come under increasing pressure not only in Congress but also from the executive branch. The Pentagon labeled it a “Chinese military company” last year, and the Commerce Department added several of its subsidiaries to an export blacklist, alleging that they’re implicated in Beijing’s atrocities against Uyghurs and its mass-surveillance activities.

In a 2021 bulletin warning about the Chinese government’s efforts to collect large sets of genetic data from around the world via BGI and other firms, the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center pointed to the global use of BGI Covid testing kits and the opening of over a dozen labs operated by the firm in foreign countries.

China has “clearly stated it wants to go from being a biotech power to a biotech superpower, and it sees genomics and these kinds of relationships that it builds as key to that,” Puglisi told NR.