Joni Ernst Secures Amendment in Defense Policy Bill to Block Tax Dollars from Funding Chinese, Russian Research

The annual defense-policy bill making its way through the Senate will include a provision to prevent Pentagon funds from going to the research labs of American adversaries.

Senator Joni Ernst (R., Iowa) secured an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2025 to prohibit Pentagon funds from being spent on research grants to mostly Chinese and Russian educational institutions.

“Except as provided in subsection (b), none of the funds authorized to be appropriated by this Act or otherwise made available for the Department of Defense for fiscal year 2025 may be obligated or expended to award a grant or contract to an institution of higher education for the specific purposes of conducting fundamental research in collaboration with a covered entity,” the provision reads.

The “covered” entities listed are almost entirely Chinese and Russian institutions that the Pentagon has determined are engaging in campaigns to acquire American defense secrets through illicit means. The amendment contains a process for the Pentagon to obtain a waiver on national-security grounds and it requires Congress be informed of the waivers.

“Defense dollars should be used to boost America’s national security not to underwrite our adversaries,” Ernst said. “China and Russia already run sophisticated espionage programs to steal intellectual property, we do not need to help them. I’m cutting off funding for foreign labs actively working to undermine us.”

The House easily passed the NDAA last week with bipartisan support, over Democratic objections to a section of the mammoth bill that bans the military’s health insurance plan from covering transgender procedures for minors. The Senate is expected to pass the NDAA this week for President Joe Biden to sign before lawmakers go home for Christmas. It contains a hefty pay raise for rank-and-file troops and an increase in the military budget, to $895 billion, a boost that does not keep up with the rate of inflation.

Ernst has pushed for greater transparency about U.S. taxpayer dollars sent to foreign adversaries. She wrote a letter to the Pentagon in June demanding that the agency release the full version of a report on the millions of tax dollars going toward Chinese labs and other foreign facilities. The Pentagon conducted the audit into the risky research because of a provision Ernst pushed for in the fiscal year 2024 NDAA mandating it.

Ernst is also chairwoman of the Senate DOGE caucus, a group of lawmakers working with businessmen Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy on President-elect Donald Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, a presidential advisory commission tasked with reducing government waste.

Taxpayer-funded research grants to China have come under particular scrutiny since the Covid-19 pandemic, because of the federally funded coronavirus research experiments that took place at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a lab where many believe the pandemic originated. EcoHealth Alliance, the U.S. nonprofit that facilitated those experiments, is currently suspended from receiving taxpayer funds — in large part because of congressional scrutiny earlier this year.

Federal law enforcement has handled dozens of cases of Chinese Communist Party espionage cases from February 2021 to August 2024, according to a House Homeland Security Committee report released in October. The FBI opens new cases to counter Chinese espionage roughly every twelve hours because of the ongoing threat.