US Lawmakers Introduce Bill to Ban Chinese Researchers From National Labs

‘Make no mistake, Beijing is actively exploiting weak security protocols,’ Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) walks through the Senate Subway after a vote at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 5, 2022. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

Republican lawmakers have proposed legislation that would block national laboratories from admitting citizens of foreign adversaries, particularly those from communist China.

The bill was introduced by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) on March 11 amid growing concerns in Washington over intellectual property theft and espionage activities supported by Beijing.

“Foreign nationals in our country’s most sensitive labs pose a clear threat to our national security and should end immediately,” Cotton, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement while introducing the legislation.

“The Chinese Communist Party [CCP] and other hostile regimes have systematically targeted these labs, luring away top scientists and using American research to fuel their military ambitions,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a co-sponsor of the bill, said in a statement.

The Guarding American Technology from Exploitation (GATE) Act aims to prohibit foreign scientists from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Cuba from visiting or working at the Department of Energy National Laboratories.

Such a ban would not affect U.S. citizens or those with permanent residency, and there are provisions for waivers. According to the bill’s text, the secretary of energy would be able to grant a waiver for academic visitors from these five nations if they could demonstrate that the benefits of their presence “outweigh the national security and economic risks to the United States.”

‘Zero Reciprocity’

There are currently 17 national labs overseen by the Energy Department, which engage in research across diverse scientific fields, from energy technologies to nuclear deterrence.

According to Cotton’s office, in fiscal year 2023, around 40,000 foreign scientists accessed these labs, with nearly 8,000 of them from China and Russia. The figure means that one in every five foreign scientists entering America’s top labs comes from the “most dangerous foreign adversaries,” Cotton’s office stated.

During a February hearing held by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Cotton asked the lawmakers and researchers: “Do you think one out of every five foreign scientists in a Chinese or Russian equivalent site is American?”

He added, “There is zero reciprocity on this issue.”

Sen. James Risch (R-Idaho), chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, echoed these concerns about academic researchers from China.

“An engineer who comes here and goes to one of the labs may have no malign ideas whatsoever, but for a person who lives in a communist, autocratic country, nothing belongs to them,” Risch told the energy panel.

“Their property doesn’t belong to them; their thinking doesn’t belong to them; their intellectual knowledge doesn’t belong to them. It belongs to the Chinese Communist Party,” he added.

‘A Deliberate Strategy’

U.S. officials have long warned that the CCP has engaged in a wide-ranging espionage campaign targeting American intellectual property (IP), including systematic theft, forced transfer, hacking, and other methods in its bid to achieve its global ambition and surpass the United States. In 2021, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray told lawmakers that his agency launched China-related counterintelligence investigations “every 12 hours.”

Beijing also initiated talent recruitment programs, including the Thousand Talents Plan, to woo foreign experts, including ethnic Chinese and foreigners, to work in China.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) during a Senate Foreign Relations hearing at Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington on Jan. 15, 2025. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images

Lee, chairman of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, said during the hearing that through the Thousand Talents Plan and other recruiting programs, “the CCP systematically recruited elite scientists, nationals of the People’s Republic of China who are trained in the West, built their careers in American labs, and worked with American funding to develop American technology, and then the CCP lured them back to China.”

“It’s a deliberate strategy to leverage U.S. taxpayer-funded expertise for the benefit of the Chinese military,” he said.

“And tragically, we’re starting to see the consequences,“ he continued. ”Former [Department of Energy] researchers are helping China develop hypersonic missiles, deep earth-penetrating warheads, and advanced submarines—these are weapons designed to outmatch and deter the United States.

“Make no mistake, Beijing is actively exploiting weak security protocols.”

A 2021 report by Strider Technologies, a private intelligence firm, found that at least 162 scientists who had worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory—home to the development of the world’s first atomic bomb—were poached by Beijing to work on its military programs over the past three decades.

A former Los Alamos scientist was sentenced to five years of probation in 2020 after he pleaded guilty to lying about his involvement in the Chinese state-sponsored Thousand Talents Program.

In response to the growing concerns, the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which was signed into law in December 2024 by President Joe Biden, includes a provision that restricts a citizen or “agent” from four foreign adversaries—including China—from accessing non-public areas of the Energy Department’s national security labs and nuclear weapons production facilities.

The restriction, effective next month, only covers the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories.

During the February hearing, Paul Dabbar, who served as the Energy Department’s undersecretary for science during President Donald Trump’s first term, pointed out that under China’s National Security Law, Chinese nationals must hand over all information at request.

Dabbar, the incoming deputy secretary of commerce, recommended expanding the ban on Chinese nationals at all national labs unless they secure a waiver.

“There’s been literally a whole generation of successful efforts by communist China in stealing stuff,” he said.