Washington, Feb 20 (IANS) Two senior Republican lawmakers have written to NASA and the FBI raising concerns over what they describe as potential Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-linked research collaborations involving US taxpayer-funded grants, including a NASA award.
In letters dated February 12 to FBI Director Kash Patel and NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley and House Select Committee on the CCP Chairman John Moolenaar said they were pursuing oversight of “the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) influence over our nation’s universities and other research institutions.”
“It is well established that our university systems serve as soft targets in China’s quest to acquire US knowledge, research, and intellectual property, which is often funded by our taxpayers,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter that was made available to the media on Thursday.
The letters refer to a December 17, 2025, investigative report by the House Select Committee on China and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which alleged that the CCP “exploits the US Department of Energy (DOE) to gain access and divert American taxpayer-funded research to fuel its military and technological rise.”
One case study cited in the report involved Stanford Professor Wendy Mao. According to the lawmakers, while conducting research under a DOE-funded award, she “concurrently held a position at the Center for High Pressure Science and Technology Advanced Research (HPSTAR)— an organization within the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP), which has been listed on the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) Entity List since 1997.”
They added that “Professor Mao has at least 58 co-authored publications acknowledging DOE funding or support, including 31 publications with HPSTAR since 2013.”
The letters point to a 2024 research publication that acknowledged support from NASA’s Exoplanet Programme and the National Science Foundation, while crediting computational resources from a Chinese university’s supercomputing centre. The publication “lists only Stanford and Chinese co-authors yet explicitly acknowledges NASA funding, which—absent an FBI-certified congressional waiver—raises questions about potential violations of the Wolf Amendment.”
The Wolf Amendment, included in annual appropriations legislation, bars NASA and NASA-funded researchers from engaging in bilateral collaboration with Chinese entities without specific authorisation and certification to Congress and the FBI.
In their letter to the FBI, the lawmakers asked whether a Wolf Amendment waiver was sought for NASA Award No. 80NSSC23K0265, how many such waivers have been requested since 2015, and what internal processes the Bureau follows in assessing applications.
They also asked NASA to provide “all records for Award No. 80NSSC23K0265 including subaward records” and to detail “what internal legal guidance, memoranda, or policy interpretations govern NASA’s application of the Wolf Amendment, and when were they last updated.”
The lawmakers set a February 26, 2026 deadline for responses.
–IANS
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