Amid the rush of global developments around the new year, the Select Committee on China quietly dropped a report that should have been headline news. According to new findings, the Department of Energy under the Biden administration failed to protect sensitive taxpayer-funded research from foreign exploitation – specifically by agents of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The 120-page joint investigation by the House Select Committee on China and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence documents what it calls “a pervasive and deeply troubling pattern of U.S. taxpayer-funded research being conducted in collaboration with Chinese entities that are directly tied to China’s defense research and industrial base.”
While the report traces systemic weaknesses back decades, its most damning evidence focuses on the period from 2023 to 2025—squarely during President Biden’s term—when the Department of Energy continued funding research partnerships with Chinese institutions tied to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), despite years of public warnings from Congress, the intelligence community, and federal law enforcement.
“The CCP has long operated below the threshold of armed conflict to defeat the U.S. without firing a shot,” said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rick Crawford, who called CCP behavior “a systematic plunder.”
“The Department of Energy failed to ensure the security of its research, and it put American taxpayers on the hook for funding the military rise of our nation’s foremost adversary,” Select Committee on China Chairman John Moolenaar stated.
The report details how DOE’s Office of Science, one of the federal government’s largest funders of advanced research, supported projects in materials science, artificial intelligence, nuclear engineering, semiconductors, and advanced computing while failing to prevent collaboration with entities linked to the PLA.
Investigators found that “approximately 4,300 research papers between June 2023 and June 2025” acknowledged DOE funding while involving Chinese partners, and that “approximately 2,200 publications—roughly 50 percent—were conducted in partnership with entities affiliated with China’s defense research and industrial base.”
Those collaborations involved “sensitive technical domains such as quantum sensing, semiconductors, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), advanced materials, nuclear science, and explosion science—many with clear dual-use, national security, and military applications.”
The report also documents DOE’s internal failures, noting that the agency “did not establish the RTES office until 2023, years after extensive public evidence had already documented the PRC’s systematic targeting and exploitation of U.S. national laboratories, academic institutions, and federally funded research partnerships.”
In other words, even after taking office in 2021—with the scope of China’s research espionage already well documented—the Biden administration waited two more years to create a basic internal security office, while sensitive research continued flowing to Chinese institutions tied to Beijing’s defense sector.
Chinese officials responded with familiar denials.
Liu Pengyu, spokeswoman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., claimed that Americans do not back a sweeping probe into alleged Chinese violations, predicting its inevitable failure. She went on to charge congressional committees with launching political attacks and smearing China.
“A handful of U.S. politicians are overstretching the concept of national security to obstruct normal scientific research exchanges, a move that wins no public support and is bound to fail,” Liu said.
But former insiders say this response only reinforces the findings.
“She fights for the CCP like a soldier armed only with lies,” a former high-ranking PLA officer who defected in the 1990s told this author. “For Beijing, leading technology in every industry has a military use,” he continued. In China, every part of society is a battlefield, treated as a front line.
“When an opera singer wins, it is victory on the opera front; when an engineer succeeds, it is victory over the West on the engineering front,” he explained. “For the Chinese, this is not just patriotism but a campaign to dismantle the Christian West. You must see it for what it is.”
Liu’s claim that Congress was unfairly “smearing” China quickly unraveled after Chinese state media disclosed that American-derived expertise had helped fuel a major PLA breakthrough.
Last month, PLA journals reported that Chinese scientists built a 50-megawatt gas turbine for the navy’s next generation of warships. The PLA Daily called it a “decisive achievement.” The Global Times said it would strengthen China’s industrial base. Until now, China produced only 25-megawatt turbines. A PLA article claimed the new engine will power advanced weapons and electric propulsion systems.
Sun Peng, deputy director of the Chinese 703rd Research Institute, said the turbine overcame major technical barriers and allows China to move from copying others to independent innovation.
Chinese engineers from the 713th Research Institute of the China Shipbuilding Corporation reportedly authored the work. But the congressional report identifies both the 713th Research Institute and the HIT Zhengzhou Research Institute as PLA-linked beneficiaries of DOE-connected research partnerships.
Before the Trump administration, the Chinese Zhengzhou Institute collaborated with Harvard, the University of Minnesota, and Oakland University. Reports link a key turbine researcher to Zhengzhou University and to training supported by Oakland University’s expertise.
In other words, this means that the Chinese military likely achieved this major breakthrough thanks to U.S. taxpayer-funded research at the Department of Energy.
Investigators argue that this pattern is central to China’s technological strategy: acquire American foundational knowledge, reproduce it inside state-controlled institutions, then claim it as domestic innovation.
The report outlines additional benefits China obtained from DOE-connected research, including next-generation battlefield simulation software, wind tunnels recreating hypersonic flight conditions, and training pipelines for AI engineers.
“These longstanding failures and inaction have left taxpayer-funded research vulnerable to exploitation by China’s defense research and industrial base as well as state-directed technology transfer activities,” the report states.
Dr. Dianmu Tsui, a former high-ranking CCP inspector interviewed by this author, said the party “would always choose its interests,” violating agreements with foreigners. According to Tsui, the party views rules and international norms as obstacles in what it calls “the final war” with the bourgeoisie. Tsui, who defected in 1989 and later became a Protestant Christian, described the CCP as “an evil force serving the antichrist’s goals.”
The financial consequences of China’s malign actions are staggering. A Japanese specialist advising Tokyo estimated that the losses to the United States—measured in research duplication, lost commercialization, and stolen development time—likely amount to cost savings for Beijing “in the tens of trillions of dollars.”
The report follows earlier congressional investigations into similar failures at the Department of Defense and American universities. In response, Chairman Moolenaar introduced the SAFE Research Act, which would prohibit federal research funding to collaborators tied to adversarial governments, require enhanced disclosure of foreign affiliations, and establish a centralized national research security authority.
The goal, the committee says, is to ensure that American science only serves American security. As the report bluntly concludes, taxpayer dollars “should be used to defend the nation—not strengthen its foremost strategic competitor.”
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
