The US military has plenty of enemies. But now they’re inside the gates.
And the Pentagon made a groundbreaking announcement with huge ramifications.
The Department of War ordered 30 American universities — including Harvard, NYU, MIT, Duke and Georgetown — to audit their financial and research relationships with foreign entities by the end of the month or risk losing federal research dollars, the latest move in the Trump administration’s push to wall off sensitive American research from exploitation by adversarial governments.
The mandated audits, due Aug. 31, require each institution to review its collaborations with foreign entities and assess whether any of its “sensitive or export-controlled research” has been exposed, with schools required to terminate any partnerships found to be problematic.
A Zero-Tolerance Approach To Compromised Research
“The Department of War has zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security,” said Emil Michael, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering. “Institutions that receive funding from American taxpayers must uphold the highest standards of research security, and these mandated audits will ensure accountability across the board.”
Dr. Joseph Jewell, Assistant Secretary of War for Science and Technology, framed the effort as a matter of protecting the return on taxpayer investment rather than targeting any particular school: “Universities are critical partners in executing a wide range of Department of War research programs, and the Department must therefore ensure that our research investments are well protected from foreign exploitation.”
The audits target relationships with any of the 130 academic and research institutions in China, Russia and Iran identified under Section 1286 of the Fiscal Year 2019 National Defense Authorization Act — entities the law defines as posing a heightened risk of seeing U.S.-funded research misappropriated.
Harvard’s China Ties Draw Renewed Scrutiny
Harvard’s inclusion on the list comes amid mounting evidence that the Ivy League school has struggled to safeguard its research partnerships with Chinese institutions. A recent report found Harvard-affiliated researchers co-authored more than 140 publications with researchers tied to Chinese universities, while the school reportedly received more than $600 million in Chinese funding under the federal Section 117 foreign-gift disclosure system — more than any other American university, according to Education Department data cited by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.
The stakes of that exposure have only grown starker: Reuters reported in July that China has used outputs from U.S. artificial intelligence models to help train its own defense capabilities, underscoring exactly the kind of downstream risk the Pentagon’s audit is designed to catch before it happens rather than after.
Part Of A Broader Reckoning On Campus-China Ties
Monday’s order continues a trend that has already reshaped American higher education: Confucius Institutes, the Beijing-funded language and culture centers once common on U.S. campuses, dropped from roughly 100 to fewer than five in just four years amid federal funding restrictions and mounting political pressure, according to a 2023 watchdog report. Lawmakers have separately sounded alarms over tech mogul Neville Roy Singham’s $278 million network, which they say has spread Chinese Communist Party propaganda through American institutions.
The full list of schools facing the Aug. 31 deadline also includes UC Berkeley, UCLA, USC, UT Austin, Penn State, Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and Virginia Tech, among others. Fox News Digital reached out to the Department of War and all 30 universities for comment.
