What to Know About the Pentagon’s Crackdown on Universities’ Foreign Research Ties
· Time
The Trump Administration ordered 30 universities to audit their foreign research partnerships or risk losing funding.
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The order, issued Monday by the Defense Department, instructs universities to review their ties to 130 foreign institutions, mainly Chinese, that “engage in activities that increase the likelihood of U.S. government-funded research and development efforts being misappropriated.” Schools that fail to terminate any “problematic” partnerships within two weeks may lose their eligibility for future federal research funding.
The order is intended to protect taxpayer-funded research from “unauthorized technology transfer, intellectual property theft and adversarial exploitation,” the Pentagon said in the announcement.
“The Department of War has zero tolerance for academic partnerships that compromise our national security,” Emil Michael, undersecretary of war for research and engineering, said.
The announcement did not identify which schools had received the order or how they were selected, but a U.S. official told the Associated Press on Tuesday that they include Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Johns Hopkins University.
The order is the latest effort to clamp down on alleged Chinese influence in the U.S., including in higher education. The Trump Administration and several lawmakers from both parties have argued that China exploits U.S.-funded research to obtain sensitive technology and intellectual property.
U.S. concerns about Chinese intellectual property theft and espionage have grown in recent years. Last year, a federal jury convicted former Corning scientist Ji Wang of stealing files containing trade secrets from a Pentagon-funded project. Prosecutors said he planned to use the technology in a Chinese business backed by government entities. In May, Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, Calif., resigned after admitting to acting as an unregistered Chinese government agent before taking office.
But some observers have warned that the crackdown unfairly politicizes academic collaboration, stigmatizes Chinese academics, and could weaken American scientific competitiveness.
The Chinese embassy in Washington said in a statement to news outlets that it opposed “the overstretching of the concept of national security and the politicisation or instrumentalisation of normal scientific, educational and academic exchanges.”
“The U.S. side should abandon the Cold War mentality and foster an open, fair and non-discriminatory environment for educational, scientific and people-to-people exchanges between China and the United States,” it added.
Here’s what to know about the raft of policies aimed at curbing institutional ties to China.
Order targets primarily Chinese institutions
The foreign institutions the U.S. seeks to blacklist were identified by the Pentagon last month. Eighty-eight of the 130 institutions are in mainland China, while the remaining institutions are in Russia and Iran. The list has been updated annually since an earlier version was first released in 2023. It was established under Section 1286 of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, which was enacted during President Donald Trump’s first term.
While some Chinese universities on the list have more explicit ties to the military, others are prominent civilian institutions with extensive international research partnerships. These include Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. The updated list also added a number of other Chinese institutions with varying links to China’s defense and security establishment, including Shandong University, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Shenyang Aerospace University, and the University of International Relations.
People familiar with Chinese academic institutions previously told TIME that Chinese Communist Party structures are embedded throughout the country’s universities, making institutional links to the government common, even though individual students or researchers may not be engaged in political or military work.
The Pentagon also instructed universities to audit collaborations with organizations associated with “rebranded Confucius Institutes.” Confucius Institutes are non-profit language and cultural programs funded by the Chinese government and hosted in universities around the world. Launched in 2004, there were at one time more than 100 Confucius Institutes operating on U.S. college campuses. But most U.S. programs closed after 2019 amid congressional scrutiny and federal funding restrictions. By late 2023, there were fewer than five active Confucius Institutes in the U.S.
Many universities, however, retained partnerships with their former Chinese partner institutions or established successor language and cultural programs under different names. Critics characterized some of these arrangements, particularly those that continued to receive Chinese funding or instructors, as “rebranded Confucius Institutes.” Of 74 former Confucius Institute hosts surveyed by the Government Accountability Office in 2023, 43 said they maintained ties to their former Chinese partner institutions. Nine reported receiving continued funding or other support for programming from those institutions, although eight of the nine said the partnerships predated their Confucius Institutes.
Crackdown on broader Chinese ties
The Trump Administration has pursued a slate of policies that build on Trump’s first-term “China Initiative.” These have included tighter scrutiny of universities’ foreign funding and research partnerships and restrictions on collaborations with blacklisted Chinese institutions. The Trump Administration has also increased vetting of Chinese student visa applicants, threatened visa revocations for some students, and renewed investigations of China-linked researchers.
Since last year, the Pentagon has prohibited funding fundamental research projects conducted in collaboration with a listed foreign institution or its employees. The policy was expanded in March to bar the use of equipment from listed entities in certain Pentagon-funded projects.
Meanwhile, China has sought to bring in more foreign talent and investment, including by seeking to attract more international students to its universities and exchange programs, and by introducing a K visa for young foreign STEM professionals.
Dozens of Chinese tenure-track scholars have left U.S. universities for China over the past year.
Days before the latest announcement, the Republican-led House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party and the House Education and Workforce Committee released a report accusing Harvard of failing to adequately screen its relationships with Chinese institutions linked to the People’s Liberation Army and China’s defense industry. The investigation said it identified more than 140 publications co-authored by Harvard-affiliated researchers and scholars at certain Chinese defense-linked civilian universities.
Harvard disputed the report’s “mischaracterizations,” and said it follows federal national security standards.
The changes also come as the U.S. seeks to maintain its lead over China in the global AI race. A 2025 report warned that major AI data centers in the U.S. were vulnerable to Chinese espionage, sabotage, and intellectual property theft.
In July, the Administration recommended redirecting potentially billions of dollars of federal research funding from universities toward individual scientists and AI-focused projects as part of an effort to counter Chinese scientific advances.
Last week, Reuters also reported that the Administration was preparing to tell 35 partner countries that participation in Pax Silica—a U.S.-led initiative to strengthen supply chains for semiconductors, critical minerals, and AI infrastructure—was conditioned on their refusal to join China’s rival AI framework. The reported demand appeared in an internal draft and has not been formally issued.