Why Is the U.S. Government Going After Universities?

Li Zhide

On August 17, 2026, the Pentagon suddenly pulled 30 universities into what amounted to a sweeping institutional audit, giving them only two weeks to prepare. Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, Duke, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, New York University, and other major institutions were all on the list. They were ordered to review, by August 31, their academic, financial, and research ties with foreign institutions, with particular attention to entities in China, Russia, and Iran that the U.S. government considers national security risks, as well as certain organizations connected to former Confucius Institutes. The universities were also required to examine whether sensitive research or export-controlled technologies might have been exposed, propose corrective measures, and possibly terminate relationships deemed especially risky. Schools that fail to comply could jeopardize their eligibility for future federal research funding. The Pentagon did not publicly explain what specific project or relationship had caused each of the 30 universities to be placed on the list.

A day later, Representative John Moolenaar, chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, publicly backed the move. His argument was straightforward: if universities accept American taxpayers’ money, they should not be able to receive federal research funds while collaborating with foreign institutions that the U.S. government has already identified as security risks. On the surface, this looks like another round of research-security inspections. But the story is larger than that. Viewed against nearly a decade of U.S. technology policy, the government is redefining what a university is. Universities were once understood mainly as open systems for producing knowledge. Increasingly, they are being treated as part of the national machinery of technological competition. The old concern was whether an individual professor had secretly taken foreign money. The new concern is whether an entire university has become a channel through which technology, talent, data, and knowledge can flow to strategic competitors. That is the deeper change behind the question of why the U.S. government is now “going after” universities.

To understand what is happening, it helps to begin with a fact that is easy to overlook: a large share of America’s most important basic research is funded by the government and carried out at universities. In fiscal year 2023, U.S. universities spent $108.8 billion on research and development, of which the federal government provided $59.7 billion, or 55 percent. In fiscal year 2024, total university R&D spending rose further, to $117.7 billion. American universities are therefore not simply institutions that collect tuition and teach undergraduates. They are also among the most important laboratories at the upstream end of the American innovation system.

This arrangement has deep historical roots. In 1945, Vannevar Bush submitted Science, the Endless Frontier to the president, arguing that the federal government should provide sustained support for basic research in universities. After the National Science Foundation was established in 1950, a broad postwar bargain gradually took shape: the government would provide money, scientists would conduct research, and universities would retain substantial academic autonomy. The underlying belief was that basic research did not need to think every day about making airplanes, missiles, or profits. Give talented people enough freedom to explore, and the knowledge they produced would eventually feed into medicine, industry, defense, and economic growth.

The results of that system are well known. The problem lies in the very source of its success.

In the middle of the twentieth century, there was often a relatively long distance between basic science and military technology. In the age of artificial intelligence, quantum computing, biotechnology, autonomous systems, advanced materials, and semiconductors, that distance is shrinking. An apparently open academic paper, a dataset, an algorithm, or the technical knowledge carried by a visiting scholar can move quickly into industry and, potentially, into military systems. An academic order that became powerful because it was open now faces an uncomfortable paradox: the more freely the United States places its best knowledge inside open universities, the stronger its capacity for innovation becomes; yet as competition with China has intensified, that same openness is increasingly being viewed by national security agencies as a vulnerability. This is not a problem that can be solved simply by declaring openness good or security good.

It would also be a mistake to explain the current campaign simply as the Trump administration attacking universities. That would erase a much longer history. American concern about research ties with China has been building for nearly a decade. In 2018, during Donald Trump’s first term, the Justice Department launched the China Initiative, focusing on economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, foreign talent programs, and researchers who failed to disclose relationships with Chinese institutions. At the time, the Justice Department said that roughly 80 percent of economic espionage prosecutions involved conduct that might benefit China, while about 60 percent of trade-secret theft cases had some connection to China.

But this approach soon created another problem. Some scholars who were investigated were never shown to have committed espionage. Universities and Asian American organizations began asking whether the government was gradually treating a “China connection” as evidence of a “China threat.” In 2022, the Biden administration’s Justice Department ended the use of the name “China Initiative.” Matthew Olsen, then assistant attorney general for national security, explained the problem clearly: threats posed by the Chinese government were real, but putting a wide range of cases under a program explicitly named after China had created the impression that the Justice Department was applying a different standard to Chinese and Chinese American researchers. It could also produce a chilling effect across the scientific community. The Justice Department did not stop pursuing espionage or research-security cases. It placed them instead under the broader Strategy for Countering Nation-State Threats.

So from Trump’s first term, through the Biden administration, and into Trump’s second term, what endured was not a program name but a judgment: international scientific collaboration at universities had become a national security issue. What changed was the method. Earlier enforcement concentrated on individuals: Did this professor hide foreign income? Did he participate in a foreign talent program? Did she transfer technology? The new approach increasingly examines institutions: Who does the university collaborate with? Who funds the work? Who appears as co-author? Which laboratories are jointly operated? Who can access the data? Where do visiting scholars come from? Who jointly supervises students?

That is a significant shift.

The Securing Innovation and Research from Adversaries Act, or SIRA, introduced by Moolenaar in May, shows just how far this shift could go. It is still a bill before Congress, not a government-wide law already in force. Government records show that H.R. 8901 was introduced on May 19, 2026, and referred to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. But the bill’s definition of “research collaboration” reveals how broad Washington’s proposed net has become.

The bill would prohibit people and institutions receiving federal research funding from using those funds to conduct research collaborations with foreign entities on U.S. government restricted lists, or with individuals associated with those entities. More important, “collaboration” would no longer mean merely a formal agreement between two universities. It would include joint research, co-authored publications, data exchanges, shared software or research infrastructure, joint laboratories, visiting scholars, personnel exchanges, and joint supervision of students. In other words, the government is moving beyond the question of whether money is flowing abroad. It is beginning to regulate the relationships through which knowledge itself moves.

Nor is this simply a blacklist of Chinese universities. The legislation draws on multiple government lists, including the Commerce Department’s Entity List and Military End User List, Treasury sanctions lists, the Defense Department’s Chinese Military Companies List, lists involving military-civil fusion, telecommunications security, forced labor, and biotechnology concerns. The bill also contains a waiver mechanism. If a collaboration is necessary for U.S. national security, or serves a clearly defined scientific, public health, or national security purpose that cannot reasonably be achieved in another way, the responsible federal agency could approve it case by case, provided that Congress is informed of the justification and the measures taken to reduce risk.

The underlying logic is now clear: the United States is moving from disclosure of foreign relationships toward restrictions on certain foreign relationships. The older principle was: you may collaborate, but you must tell the government. The emerging principle is closer to this: with some partners, even full disclosure may no longer make collaboration acceptable.

That is an important turn in American research policy.

One reason, of course, is China.

In January 2026, the Government Accountability Office released a report examining five major federal research-funding agencies: the Department of Defense, Department of Energy, NASA, National Institutes of Health, and National Science Foundation. NIH data showed that between 2017 and 2024 it received 657 allegations involving “undue foreign influence,” of which 570 involved China. Those numbers do not tell us whether every allegation was substantiated, but they help explain why U.S. security agencies continue to place China at the center of research-security policy.

China is also no longer the country it was twenty or thirty years ago, when it was mainly learning advanced technology from the United States. Semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum science, biotechnology, renewable energy, drones, telecommunications, and advanced manufacturing have all become central arenas of strategic competition between the two countries. Many of these technologies are inherently dual-use. An algorithm developed in a university laboratory may one day control industrial robots and, not long afterward, autonomous military systems. Security agencies operating in this environment can no longer comfortably rely on the old assumption that civilian research belongs to universities while military research belongs to the military.

There is another reason: the federal government has developed a clear “trust deficit” toward universities.

The Department of Education reported this year that American universities disclosed more than 8,300 foreign gifts and contracts in 2025, worth over $5.2 billion, of which more than $528 million came from China. An important distinction is necessary here. Foreign funding is not in itself illegal, and it is certainly not the same thing as espionage. Section 117 of the Higher Education Act requires disclosure above specified thresholds; it does not ban universities from accepting all foreign funds.

The problem is that federal officials have found cases in which universities reported funding late, failed to report it, or did not make relationships sufficiently transparent. That has gradually changed the policy logic. If universities cannot reliably manage foreign relationships themselves, Washington will increasingly decide which relationships are acceptable and which are not.

On August 13, just days before the Pentagon’s review of the 30 universities began, two House committees released an investigative report on Harvard. The report accused the university of maintaining relationships with institutions that the U.S. government considers connected to China’s military or implicated in human rights concerns, and it called on Congress to pass the SIRA legislation. These were congressional findings and allegations, not judicial rulings. Still, only days later, Harvard appeared on the Pentagon’s list of 30 universities.

It is difficult to regard the timing as entirely accidental.

But a line has to be drawn here.

The Pentagon has not publicly explained why each of the 30 universities was selected. Officials gave the media the list of institutions, but not a university-by-university account of the evidence. The American Council on Education has therefore objected that the list and the language surrounding it may create the impression that the institutions have already been found to have engaged in improper conduct, even though many universities have spent years adjusting their programs to meet federal research-security requirements, and the higher-education sector itself participated in shaping some of the early security rules.

That criticism is reasonable.

An audit is not a conviction. A relationship with a Chinese institution does not automatically amount to technology theft. A paper co-authored by Chinese and American researchers does not automatically mean that the work assists the People’s Liberation Army. Serious risk assessment has to examine the nature of the research, the partner institution, the identity of the participants, financial relationships, the sensitivity of the technology, and its potential end use.

If “anything connected to China” itself becomes the measure of risk, the United States could easily return to the mistakes exposed by the China Initiative.

The January GAO report is especially interesting because it supports two apparently contradictory conclusions at the same time. On one side, a large number of foreign-influence allegations did involve China. On the other, the GAO found that none of the five major federal research agencies had properly evaluated whether their research-security programs were doing enough to prevent discrimination based on race or national origin. At the Defense Department, some transparency measures, anti-discrimination training, and leadership commitments remained only partly implemented or not implemented at all.

The threat is real. The risk of wrongful suspicion is also real. Recognizing one does not require denying the other.

If this issue is reduced to “the United States no longer wants universities to work with China,” it is being understood too narrowly. What America is really competing over is the lead time on future technologies.

Basic research has an awkward quality: it is often impossible to know today which discovery will matter most ten years from now. When lasers first appeared, few people understood how deeply they would enter telecommunications, medicine, manufacturing, and weapons systems. The early internet was not designed with e-commerce, short-form video, or today’s artificial intelligence in mind.

This creates a natural anxiety inside national security institutions. By the time a technology has clearly demonstrated strategic value, it may already be too late to protect it. American policy is therefore moving toward pre-emptive protection.

That approach is understandable. It also creates a major side effect.

Why has the United States been able to attract so many of the world’s best scientists for so long? Salaries matter. Laboratories matter. Capital matters. But one factor is often overlooked: openness.

The GAO itself acknowledged this year that America’s rise as a global scientific power depended in important ways on international talent and international collaboration. Research-security work by the National Academies has also warned that initiatives such as the China Initiative made some foreign researchers feel that the American research environment had become less welcoming, even though open scientific exchange is itself one of the sources of American technological strength.

The United States therefore faces a genuine security dilemma. If it keeps the door too open, technology may flow outward in ways that create real risks. If it closes the door too tightly, talented people may stop coming.

And talent itself is technology.

That is why research security cannot simply copy the security system of a military base. A university that treats every foreign researcher as a potential suspect might become extremely secure. It may also stop being a world-class university.

There is another dimension that cannot be ignored: domestic American politics.

The current campaign cannot be completely separated from the Trump administration’s broader conflict with elite universities. During Trump’s second term, the federal government has clashed repeatedly with Harvard and other institutions over federal funding, admissions, campus governance, and related issues. Coverage of the 30-university audit has therefore also placed it in the wider context of the administration’s continuing investigations of Harvard.

Two simple explanations are consequently inadequate.

One says that Trump is merely using “China security” as an excuse to punish liberal universities he dislikes. The other says that the campaign is nothing more than politically neutral national security enforcement.

The reality lies between them.

Research-security concerns have survived both Trump and Biden and have had durable congressional support. They are not a slogan invented in 2026. But the second Trump administration is clearly more willing to use federal funding as leverage, turning what had often been gradual and fragmented security requirements into institutional pressure with short deadlines and explicit consequences.

In other words, the underlying problem has a genuine national security basis, while the way it is being enforced is inevitably shaped by the current political environment.

That distinction matters if we want to understand what is actually happening in the United States.

No one yet knows how many projects at the 30 universities will eventually be terminated. No one knows whether SIRA will become law. But one change has already taken place: the bargain between American universities and the federal government that lasted for more than seventy years is being rewritten.

The old model looked roughly like this: government provided money; universities produced knowledge; the scientific community largely determined research agendas; results were made public whenever possible; talented people came to the United States from around the world.

The new model increasingly looks like this: government still provides money, but it also decides which foreign institutions may not enter federally funded research networks. Universities are expected to examine funding, personnel, publications, datasets, software, joint laboratories, and student-supervision relationships. International collaboration is becoming subject to national-security screening.

This does not mean that American universities have lost their freedom.

It means that the United States is moving from an era of open science to an era of selective openness.

That is also what China should pay close attention to.

This is not simply a story of “America beginning to exclude China.” The United States is gradually placing universities, semiconductors, artificial intelligence, investment, trade, data, and talent on the same national security map. In the past, U.S.-China competition was concentrated mainly in tariffs, corporations, and defense industries. It has now moved into laboratories, lists of co-authors, and relationships between doctoral students and supervisors.

Competition is moving upstream, toward the production of knowledge itself.

For the United States, the central test is whether it can cut off genuinely dangerous collaborations without destroying the openness that helped make it a scientific superpower. If security policy becomes nationality screening, if restricted-entity lists expand without limit, and if every Chinese scholar becomes a presumptive risk, the United States may protect some technologies while damaging its own innovative capacity.

Universities, however, cannot continue to treat “academic freedom” as freedom from responsibility for the sources of their funding and the institutions with which they collaborate. Accepting federal money means accepting a legitimate demand from taxpayers for transparency. Research with obvious dual-use implications cannot pretend that international politics does not exist.

So the real boundary in this debate is not whether research security is necessary. It is how precisely security should be defined and applied.

Should the standard be conduct or identity? Should restrictions target specific institutions or entire countries? Should the government require disclosure, or impose outright bans? When problems are found, should universities be allowed to correct them, or should funding be terminated immediately? Do universities have a right to appeal? Who creates the restricted lists, and how does an institution get removed from one?

The answers will determine whether the United States is building a more mature system of research security or drawing universities into an ever-expanding process of political securitization.

In 1945, America believed science was an “endless frontier.” More than eighty years later, it has not abandoned that belief. But it is now asking, with an intensity it rarely did before:

To whom should the gates of that frontier be open?

Once the Pentagon begins answering that question, the relationship between the American university and the American state is no longer what it used to be.