ARE RESEARCH SECURITY POLICIES IN THE US WORKING? A Case Study on Research Collaborations with PRC Defense Laboratories and US Federally Sponsored Research

In January 2021, the first Trump Administration issued National Security Presidential Memorandum-33 (NSPM-33), which established new policies on research security and integrity, largely in response to growing concerns about the malign influence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) over US fundamental research. Implementation of NSPM-33 was further expanded under the Biden Administration and sought to create new policies and processes to strengthen protections of US government-supported R&D against foreign government interference and exploitation.

The House Select Committee on China released several reports starting in 2024 that identified extensive research collaborations and partnerships between US universities and PRC defense-linked research institutions involving research (then) funded by the Departments of Defense and Energy. The reports surveyed PRC entities that are commonly known to conduct defense research or support its military industrial base and argued that the US government has failed to implement meaningful policy changes or mitigation strategies to safeguard critical technology research.

This study takes a similar approach but focuses on a narrower subset of US research collaborations with PRC entities that unambiguously pose critical risks to US national security, based on surveys of scientific literature published from January 2019 through July 2025. Specifically, this study examines the extent to which US institutions have engaged with national-level laboratories the PRC designates as defense laboratories and quantifies the amount of federal research dollars provided to the US entities.

The authors of this study recognize that distinguishing a national defense laboratory in China from other national or provincial laboratories that support defense research may, in practice, be a semantic exercise. There are many other Chinese laboratories that extensively engage in defense research, run classified programs, and/or support or partner with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and state-owned defense enterprises. The PRC’s military-civil fusion policies further blur the lines between defense research organizations and civilian academic institutions, and it is unclear what criteria the PRC uses to officially label an entity a defense laboratory. Exhaustively surveying all of China’s defense-supporting research organizations and their international partnerships far exceeds the scope of this study, which is limited to examining identifiable PRC laboratories (usually referred to as “state key laboratories”) that the PRC itself designates as defense key laboratories.