Hearings to examine transparency and trust, focusing on foreign influence in higher education.

The Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions will please come to order. Our country has the best universities in the world, and major breakthroughs in cancer research, artificial intelligence, military technology, biomedical engineering, more happens at our universities. By the way, it's sensitive and sometimes it is classified. As our higher education system leads the world, and again, it's no accident, therefore it becomes a matter of national security. The Department of War invests an average of $10 billion a year ensuring we remain at the forefront of innovation. Ultimately, though, college is about setting students up for success and they should be our priority. But that priority can be undermined when foreign adversaries attempt to exercise influence on college campuses, again, inherently threatening national security. This hearing is about foreign governments and countries' contribution to our university, but just because somebody elsewhere contributes to our university does not mean it is malicious. We cannot prejudge, but we cannot be naive. We have to look at this in a way which we attempt to understand, and if there's a theme in this conversation, it'll be about transparency. And there are many success stories of this aid helping American students and in which and helping people around the world with a collaboration which is fruitful and helping to solve complex problems. So, again, if we look at this poster, there is a lot of aid at play here. Hold it up a little bit higher, please. Almost $9 billion going down to $2 billion. This is from the Department of Education. I take no blame for breaking out England from United Kingdom. [Laughter.] So I think the Scottish say that it's United Kingdom when it's a good Scottish tennis player and it's England when it's an English tennis player, but that's their thing. On the other hand, again, we cannot be naive. And there are times when the money serves allegedly as cover to infiltrate universities to steal research and talent and to foment anti-American ideology. In 2020, the Department of Justice indicted a Harvard University chemistry chair for lying about his affiliation with China's Thousand Talents Plan, a research recruitment program run by the Chinese Communist Party to lure talented Chinese students back to China. In 2024, the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party discovered that China gained access to some of America's highly sensitive military technology through a partnership with Georgia Tech, which by the way was not disclosed. And we have seen foreign influence in other parts of campus life. In the fallout of the October 7th antisemitic attacks, the pro-Hamas National Students for Justice in Palestine caused chaos on over 275 college campuses with chants of death to America and death to Israel. Again, on college campuses, we heard death to America. I just read an interesting essay last night by Jonah Goldberg pointing out that institutions shape individuals. I just met young Marines, 16-year-olds shaped by a Marine-like experience, very positive. But he also points out that if you go to a university and you're mentored by somebody who has certain views, you will be shaped by those certain views. And views of death to America is a threat, particularly at elite universities, is a threat to our country. Now, Iran publicly praised these movements and that could be taken as an influence, as an evidence of their influence, but that's just what we know. Now, there's a difference between American college students having thoughtful dialogue, exploring ideas and beliefs, and becoming sympathizers with radical ideology in which we hear death to America. We have freedom of speech here, but let's not be naive. That's what this theme is. We need to protect college campuses and the way we protect is through transparency. Now, $9.7 billion in foreign gifts and contracts were reported last year, but that only accounts for dollars that have been reported. And there's been zero accountability. You've heard the old adage, follow the money, well that's what we would like to do. Passing the DETERRENT Act is the next step. Let's close reporting loopholes, increase accountability, and provide transparency to Congress, intelligence agencies, and the public. Louisiana, Florida, Indiana, and Alabama have passed similar laws, they work. But as I've said before, this is a national security concern and requires federal legislation. I thank President Trump for taking this threat seriously and protecting institutions, students, and research by streamlining the process to disclose foreign source gifts and contracts, the Department of Education will be better equipped to protect the U.S. from bad actors. Again, we're not prejudging. If somebody's building a medical school in the Middle East, that's a good thing. If somebody's researching better ways to handle water or to explore for minerals, that's a good thing. But if someone's attempting to influence us in a negative way or to steal information from us, that's a bad thing. And we need to know if other countries are trying to steal research or influence our campuses with an anti-American ideology. We need to know when other countries are making financial contributions, again, it may be innocent or not. Students, professors, and our country need to know. With that, we will go to our witnesses. And again, Senator Kim has introduced. So I'll begin by introducing Dr. Peter Wood. He is the president of the National Association of Scholars, a nonprofit that conducts research and advocacy focusing on academic freedom and transparency in higher ed. He previously served as a tenured associate professor of anthropology at Boston University as well as associate provost and chief of staff to the president. He received his bachelor's from Haverford College and doctorate from University of Rochester. Thank you, sir, for being here.

Thank you, Chairman Cassidy, and thank you, ranking members. I'm delighted to have this opportunity to address this committee, which is taking on really important work. Mindful of the brief time I have, I thought I would just jump right in by putting some facts on the table. The nation of Qatar, between 2001 and 2021, gave $4.7 billion to American universities. Since then, the total has gone to $6.6 billion. Of that, $2.3 billion went to Cornell University alone. Tiny Guernsey, that little island in the English Channel, gave a total of $441 million to Yale University. Now, no one thinks that Guernsey is an enemy of the United States or an adversary, but it is bizarre that a nation with 67,000 people is able to give half a billion dollars a year to one of America's elite universities. Where's the money really coming from? What is it being spent on? As with Qatar, for the most part, we don't know. We have some idea where the Qatar money has gone to. It has built a medical school in Doha. It has also given money to MIT, to Harvard, Rutgers, Stanford, UCLA, University of Chicago, University of Maine, Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, and about 25 other American colleges and universities. Why? What is Qatar getting for this? We really don't know, and that's a question worth asking. So what this committee has ahead of it is the issue of what is the problem at hand and what are the solutions. The problem at hand most obviously is that American technology and expertise has flooded across the Pacific Ocean to China. In 2014, a member of my organization called me up and said, my college president is bringing the Confucius Institute to my campus. What is that? Do you know? My answer was I didn't know, but I would find out. It took me about two years, many Freedom of Information requests, dozens of visits to college campuses, but eventually we got the idea that China had launched an agent of influence operation run by the Hanban, the propaganda agency of the Chinese Communist Party, that had bribed its way into American colleges and universities. It offered colleges not only free teachers and free textbooks, but an actual payment to host a Confucius Institute. When we started calling this out, China lined up college presidents from around the country saying, this is a wholesome exchange of ideas, we are engaged in cultural exchange here and nothing worse than that. But after we kept pouring on the data, what was really going on, China pulled the plug on the Confucius Institutes. Now there aren't any under that name, although I continue to believe that they are around by the dozens, they've just been rebranded the way DEI has been rebranded, moved to a different office, given a different head. China's influence through Confucius Institutes under another name remains. How much is China spending to buy influence in American higher education? Well, it's getting a lot for whatever it is. It gets access to America's best intellectual talent, it manages to trick a lot of these people into cooperative arrangements with Chinese counterparts, and American ideas and technology just pours out of the country, and there is very little that the country has done to stop this. So there's a money problem here, but there's also an influence problem. What do Americans actually know about China? Well, if they are engaged in universities with Confucius Institutes or their successors, they're not learning anything about the South China Sea, Tibet, the Uyghurs, the organ harvesting, the vast number of mischievous things, let's call them, that China engages in and that the American public knows very little about. The vulnerabilities of American higher education are built into their strengths. The great strength of American higher education we're told is its openness, its openness has been seized by our adversaries and exploited beautifully well to take advantage of what we are unable to bolt down as we should. Thank you.

Thank you. Next is Mr. Craig Singleton. He is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy. He has spent two decades of experience in national security and U.S.-China relations, including serving as a U.S. diplomat. He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Florida, his master's degree of from Texas A&M University, I'll forgive you for being from two SEC rivals of LSU, but we look forward to hearing from you today, sir.

Chairman Cassidy, ranking members, and distinguished members of the committee. Thank you for inviting me to testify today regarding foreign influence in American higher education. I'm pleased to offer policy insights from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a nonpartisan research institute where I serve as a senior fellow. America's higher education system remains one of our country's greatest strategic assets. U.S. universities anchor the world's most dynamic research environment. They produce breakthroughs in science, medicine, engineering, and technology that drive economic growth, strengthen national security, and reinforce the United States's global leadership in innovation. The openness, collaboration, and intellectual exchange that define American academia are enduring strengths. At the same time, those strengths have made American universities attractive targets for exploitation by foreign adversaries, especially China. Beijing and other authoritarian regimes understand that U.S. universities sit at the center of America's innovation base, talent pipeline, and advanced research ecosystem. They have sought to take advantage of that access for a range of purposes: acquiring sensitive knowledge and technology, shaping research partnerships, cultivating influence, monitoring students and dissidents, and advancing broader strategic objectives that run counter to U.S. national security interests. Addressing these challenges requires balance, but it also requires clarity. Not every foreign relationship is problematic. The United States benefits enormously from international academic collaboration. But partnerships, funding arrangements, and opaque institutional ties involving foreign countries of concern or entities linked to them warrant far greater scrutiny than they have historically received. The question is not whether American universities should remain globally engaged; they should. The question is whether the United States has adequate safeguards in place to ensure that openness is not exploited by malign actors. For many years, one of the biggest obstacles to answering that question was a lack of transparency. Policy makers, regulators, and in many cases universities themselves lacked the tools to fully understand the scale, origin, and strategic implications of foreign funding and foreign-linked partnerships. Reporting requirements were incomplete, enforcement was uneven, and public visibility was limited. Encouragingly, that picture is beginning to change. The Department of Education's new foreign funding portal represents an important step forward. Better data alone won't solve the problem, but better data make it harder to ignore. Early disclosures help illustrate the scale of foreign engagement. According to federal reporting data, China alone has contributed $6.8 billion in gifts and contracts to American universities over time. Even more concerning, the Department of Education's portal shows that universities reported roughly $400 million in transactions involving entities that appear on U.S. government watch lists or restricted entity lists. These include firms tied to export control violations, national security concerns, and China's military-civil fusion program. These figures do not necessarily imply wrongdoing by universities, but they do highlight a broader structural challenge. Universities are often expected to navigate complex national security risks without consistent federal guidance or standardized due diligence tools. Congress now has an opportunity to modernize transparency and oversight in ways that protect both national security and academic openness. In my written testimony, I outline several practical steps. First, Congress should strengthen transparency requirements governing foreign gifts and contracts under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act. Second, policy makers should permanently institutionalize and support the Department of Education's foreign funding transparency portal. Third, universities would benefit from clearer federal guidance and better information sharing to help them evaluate foreign partnerships and research collaborations. Fourth, institutions that receive federal research funding should meet much stronger research security and transparency standards. And finally, policy makers may wish to consider targeted visa screening tied to institutional affiliations with entities or individuals involved in military-civil fusion or that appear on relevant U.S. government watch lists. Taken together, these steps would modernize oversight of foreign engagement in American higher education while preserving the openness that makes our universities the best in the world. On behalf of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, I thank you again for inviting me to testify today.

Thank you, sir. And now Senator Kim will introduce Mr. Daly.

Thank you, Chairman. We'll turn to our final witness here, Robert Daly. Mr. Daly is a senior fellow for the Asia Society. He served as the former director at the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center from 2013 to 2025. He began his work in U.S.-China relations at the American Embassy in Beijing in the late '80s. He is a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations and the American Mandarin Society, a member of the Task Force on U.S.-China Policy, and leads numerous international dialogues and research projects, and he lived in China for 12 years and has interpreted for Chinese and American leaders, including Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger. I yield back.

Well, good morning, Chairman Cassidy, and thank you very much, Senator Kim. Thank you to all of the members of the committee for the opportunity to testify today. We are here to assess the state of malign foreign influence in American higher education and to ask how academia and government can continue to enhance their cooperation to protect research integrity and promote national security. We are concerned about many countries that have been now formally designated as countries of concern. I am going to focus on China, which is my area of expertise. As detailed in my written testimony, I have spent years working with universities and government agencies to make sure they understand each other's concerns about academic interaction with China and to try to ensure that they also appreciate the benefits of continuing certain types of interaction with China. Government and academia must work in tandem because American suspicion about foreign malign influence on our campuses, and especially Chinese influence, is both reasonable and necessary to protect our national security and academic integrity for the reasons that my fellow witnesses have already laid out. Everything that we know about the motives and the methods of the Chinese Communist Party indicates that they will try to exploit the vulnerabilities created by openness and internationalization of our colleges and universities. Furthermore, this U.S.-China rivalry, a comprehensive rivalry, is likely going to last for decades. So we don't have a quick fix. These threats will continue and we are going to need constant vigilance and we are going to need to constantly adapt. American security agencies began working closely with higher educational institutions to reduce these risks about a decade ago. We've been at it for a while. This cooperation was sometimes difficult, but it was necessary, and the good news, I think, for all of us is that this cooperation is also working. American universities have taken on Washington's concerns and they now work diligently and at considerable expense to anticipate and counter the actions of countries of concern. American security agencies and the Congress as well and higher educational institutes have now developed common concerns, a common vocabulary for talking about them, and habits of cooperation. And so I want to emphasize today that this has been a success story. Vigilance, yes, but it is not a cause for panic, certainly not a cause for a renewed wave of accusations. If we had in the portal for public reporting a time series that showed not only, as we just saw, the cumulative donations made to American universities, some of which go back to the '80s, but if we were able to see the donations from each country over each year, I suspect we would find that since we started working together on this, those donations have been down. This, I think, is one of the biggest silences of the portal. There's no time series there; it's all cumulative. It is also worth noting to date that there have been no convictions of university persons for conducting espionage on American campuses on behalf of China. There have been cases of program fraud, failures of disclosure, lying under oath, tax evasion, and some baffling levels of bad judgment and bad practice, all of which are extremely concerning and are indicative of genuine problems, but we haven't yet seen an espionage case. And this lack of convictions indicates to me that the problem has either been slightly overstated despite our reasonable suspicions or that perhaps we are actually managing it increasingly well. In the next phase of cooperation going forward, as academia and government work together, we have to move beyond our reasonable suspicions and formulate policies based on data. That is the only way to get an accurate picture of the threat. What has been missing from the influence debate from the beginning is an effort to weigh demonstrable harms, not the suspicions, but the demonstrable harms done to American security through foreign influence on campus against the many gains we have reaped by attracting foreign talent over the past 40 years. That measure isn't there. We need a cost-benefit analysis based on evidence to guide us going forward. Last, our ultimate concern is for American security vis-a-vis China, especially in the technology domain. And therefore our emphasis needs to be not on the already vigilant universities but on rebuilding our own scientific and industrial might. We mustn't abandon defensive measures; we should enhance them. But we need to move from defense to offense to build up our own technology and industrial systems. I think that is the American style; we're better on offense. Thank you.

Thank you, sir. I will defer to Senator Marshall.

Well, thank you, Chairman, and again, welcome to our witnesses today. I probably will focus a little bit more on the importance of intellectual property theft. I think that's my biggest concern. Already the NIH and all of our federal research is made public, that the whole world benefits from that. And as we allow foreign students into our research, specifically let's talk about China for a second, even if they don't walk out with papers, they're walking out with a lot of information in their brains. And I think a lot of that information was what didn't work. You can't always reproduce all the research, but you can say, well, we know this didn't work, this didn't work, and this didn't work, and we're working on, you know, plan D here. So, Mr. Singleton, is in your mind is there any foolproof way of keeping China from stealing our intellectual property, no matter how many policies we create?

Sure. Thank you, Senator. I think it was a 2019 Senate investigation revealed that Chinese intellectual property theft on campus robbed us of $200 to $600 billion a year in intellectual property theft. So I think it's already been quantified. The concern, and I think the House Select Committee on Countering the CCP released a report this year showing that even today, there are thousands of jointly published research reports between U.S. academics and Chinese academics from institutions affiliated with China's military. That's happening today. I think you're right to point out the restrictions and the need for restrictions, frankly, on these sorts of partnerships. And we have to ask ourselves whether DOD research funding should be allowed to flow to U.S. universities that maintain partnerships with Chinese researchers and entities that are supporting Chinese military-civil fusion. As of today, there are no restrictions on those funding streams whatsoever, and that seems like one area where we can protect our most vital and sensitive intellectual property.

Thank you. I want to probably turn to foreign giving to American universities by country. And let me say I agree with Senator Cassidy that it's a good thing to have American universities in the Middle East, and of course not just the Middle East, they're all over the world. I think it's a great way to build relationships as well. And I think it's important to point out that when we have our list of who's giving what, Qatar's funding 90 percent of that is going to fund six universities in Qatar, six United States universities in Qatar. It's not a gift to those universities. Ninety percent of that funding is for the six universities in Qatar, and we should be complimenting what they're doing. They're trying to build a knowledge-based economy. Think about this. I mean, my only criticism is that they chose Texas A&M for engineering over Kansas State University for engineering, but boy, these are the who's who. And it is costly. Cornell for medicine, and I think someone mentioned that's the largest, it is very expensive to have pre-med and medical programs as well. Virginia Commonwealth for the School of Art, A&M for engineering I mentioned, Carnegie Mellon for computer science and AI, Georgetown for international affairs, Northwestern for journalism, all universities with great histories as well. So again, I think it is important to track the money and track the influence, but I think it's a great way, and by the way, I hope these universities are making a little money on them and maybe it helps fund some undergraduate scholarships as well. So I think I'll just leave it there, Mr. Chairman, and appreciate you bringing the attention to this as well and look forward to, I believe Senator Tillis has a bill that maybe we're considering that has some good work to do as well. Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Marshall. Senator Murray.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for having this hearing on higher education, a really critical topic for a lot of us. I have to say in the context of what is happening globally right now, I just find it kind of absurd that Trump and Republicans are willing to burn billions of dollars a day on a new war that no one asked for. But I have to say when it comes to public schools, I've been having to fight tooth and nail as many people have to get this Trump administration to release billions of dollars that Congress appropriated to be delivered to our students, and it's not happening. And states like mine are having to routinely file lawsuits. And this comes from an administration that routinely claims to be returning education to the states. So I have a problem with that, and I have a problem with the fact that this president is sending off our promising young men and women and our incredibly important resources. When it comes to sending folks to college though, we have to fight to protect even Pell Grants. So it just seems that Trump has started this war in the Middle East with no plan or objective. Meanwhile, he is hitting the ground running on demolishing the Department of Education. And parents I talk to every day don't want this president sending our kids to a war that has no end. They don't want him wasting billions of their dollars on missiles and misadventures. What they do want is to make sure that their kids can get access to a good education. So if you want to put America first, that really starts by putting our kids first, and I think we are seriously off track, and I just needed to say that. And finally, Mr. Chairman, I have to say I'm pretty troubled that we're having this hearing today to add even more responsibilities to the Department of Education when we still in this committee have not had Secretary McMahon before us to answer some really serious questions about what she is doing right now, which is an illegal scheme to dismantle the Department of Education despite Congress, all of us saying on a bipartisan bill in our appropriations bill, the department does not have the authority to do this. McMahon is marching full steam ahead to dismantle the Department of Education. She said she has a group proof of concept but has given no proof about improved efficiency since she's begun to do this. And in fact, what we know is the first dismantling agreement for CTA is costing taxpayers $1 million extra dollars. So I hope we get Secretary McMahon in front of our committee soon because I think this is something we all deeply care about. Having said that, on the topic before us today, which I worked with both Senator Alexander and Burr on, Mr. Daly, let me ask you, Section 117 already requires colleges and universities to disclose significant foreign gifts and contracts to the Department of Education, and institutions have spent years building compliance systems around that process. However, the administration announced an interagency agreement shifting aspects of Section 117 oversight to the Department of State as part of its broader effort that I just referenced to dismantle the Department of Education, which has really raised concerns about confusion for institutions who are trying to comply with the law. So I wanted to ask you, how would moving Section 117 oversight away from the Department of Education make compliance more complicated for our colleges and universities?

Thank you, Senator. As you've already mentioned, I think the answer to that question, it's a moving target because we don't know what is happening at the Department of Education and what is going to remain there. When Section 117 was first passed as part of the Higher Education Act in 1986, it was the judgment of Congress that this function belonged within the Department of Education, and it is Congress's prerogative to move it. Moving it to State, I do see one small advantage of that, which is at State Department there is area knowledge, knowledge of China, knowledge of Qatar, for example, such that the people at State would be able to break down the differences between different kinds of giving from the different countries. Not all giving from China is of the same sort. Most of it does not, these aren't transfers from the Chinese Communist Party. Some of this is NGOs, some of it is corporations, much of it is from individuals, yes, all of whom are ultimately subject to the guidance of the Chinese Communist Party, but they have multiple different motives. So area knowledge, whether it is at Education or at the Department of State, I think is going to be important going forward, and I think that those distinctions need to be reflected within the portal so that not only do we need to see how giving from each country is moving over time, we need to be able to distinguish different kinds of giving, some of which is from very, very wealthy Chinese individuals who frankly want to show off to their friends that they've donated to American universities and some of which is genuinely worrisome in the ways that have been outlined and nefarious.

Well, I think, Mr. Chairman, again, we need the Secretary in front of us so we can ask these very serious questions that are occurring at the department.

We have requested for the Secretary to come before us to tell you that.

And the answer is?

This is in process. In process. So, Senator Tuberville.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Morning, gentlemen, thanks for being here. It's no secret that foreign adversaries are involved in our higher education system, whether it's funneling millions of dollars in endowments or foreign governments linked to academic programs, it's everywhere in our country. In the last few years, we closed down just in my state alone several Confucius Institutes. They don't deserve to be in anywhere in our country. The more I learned about these sheer numbers and influence that foreign adversaries have in our education system, it led me to introduce the Student Visa Integrity Act. I introduced it last summer after watching all these anti-American protests on our college campuses. My bill gives the opportunity to get a degree back to Americans who love this country and not students who are adversarial from some of these other countries. Dr. Wood, you mentioned Confucius Institutes. Now that we've closed across this country and especially my state some of these down, how can we tell that they're gone for sure? And then how can we tell that the affiliated professors have not still around and they're also not gone?

It won't be easy. You will have to rely on the truthfulness of college presidents who are known to prevaricate on these matters. I think auditing the institutions is probably the only sure way of finding out whether Chinese funding continues to flow to these influence operations.

Do you think the professors are still hanging around? And how's the best way to get rid of them?

The Hanban or the Chinese Communist Party rotates the professors in and out. So it's not that the same people will be there. In some cases they are, but in other cases new ones are coming in and going out all the time.

Thank you. Mr. Singleton, I'm glad you recognize the nation's higher education system as one of our biggest assets if we use it the right way, obviously. Our economy and our workforce is only as good as our education system. You know, I hear from students all across our state all the time about barriers that they face, whether it's getting into a class because we have too many foreign students in those classes already full, or the language barrier, which is absolutely ridiculous when professors can't even speak our language and we're trying to teach American kids. It's absolutely ridiculous. So over time, if students on foreign visas outnumber American students, what does that mean for our workforce pipeline in the future?

Thank you, Senator. It's certainly a concerning trend that we've seen. Not only are there a large number of Chinese students at some of these universities, but in some cases the U.S. government itself pays Chinese postdoctoral students to do research at our universities. And some of those students have been determined to be affiliated with not only the People's Liberation Army but entities in China that are affiliated with China's military-industrial complex. The long-term development challenges are massive. Of course, both Democrats and Republicans understand that we need to build our defense innovation base, we need to be investing in ourselves and preparing for this to control the drivers of the 21st-century industrial revolution, which are primarily technology-related. We have to find an appropriate balance here, but I think we should all agree that Defense Department funding shouldn't be going to Chinese researchers who are affiliated with entities that make bombs to kill Americans. That seems like a common-sense approach and perhaps one for legislation could be introduced that would address that challenge.

Thank you. Mr. Daly, how dangerous is it to our national security to share research and technology with the Chinese Communist Party?

Well, Craig is right that the evidence to date is that the most problematic group of Chinese scholars on American campuses is not the undergraduates or even the graduate students. It's postdoctoral fellows and researchers. But we also have to be very careful not to tar them all with the same brush. There's definitely a problem, and many of these people are also among the finest minds in their disciplines, and most of them seek if they can to stay. The data to date is that 85 to 90 percent of Chinese PhD students stay in the United States after graduating, and that's going down a little bit right now. We can talk about that as well. There's been a little bit of a reverse brain drain of people going back. But that most seek to stay in the United States. David Zweig, an American scholar in Hong Kong, has also demonstrated repeatedly that the people who stay here, become American citizens, and dedicate their talents to us are among the top scholars in their fields. And I think that we need to be very careful to keep that channel open. As I write in my testimony, since 1901, 34 percent of all U.S. Nobel Prizes have been won by people who were foreign-born. We do need this talent. We must also foster our own domestic talent to be absolutely sure, but the record of these people here has been superb and they dedicate themselves to science and to our research enterprise. So vigilance, staying on top of it, I am very happy to associate myself with almost all of Craig's comments, but we've got some of the biggest talent pools in the world currently outside their borders and they would like to come in as Americans. And I think we need to remain open to that despite the real threats and the issues that you raised.

Do you agree that they should be affluent in English?

They should have English language competence, especially if they're teaching. There's a distinction. I've been in some of those classrooms that you're talking about. So yes, if they're going to be teaching, clearly they should be fluent in English.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator Kim.

Yeah, thank you, Chairman. I actually want to just pick off where Mr. Daly left off, just talking about the importance of innovation as well as drawing in talent. Mr. Daly said in his testimony, to achieve innovation, we must continue to attract top foreign talent to our academically free and open institutions. Dr. Wood, do you agree with that statement?

Yes, I agree that we do need to continue to attract top foreign talent. Whether that top foreign talent can come from countries that are locked into an adversarial relationship with the United States seems to me to be an open question and worth further examination.

That's an interesting point you just raised because I wanted to ask you, Dr. Wood, given the concerns that you raised, widespread concerns that you raised, do you think we should as a country go as far as to consider fully cutting off academic or research ties with Chinese institutions and researchers?

Yes, I think we should consider it.

Okay. Mr. Singleton, do you agree with that statement?

Not all Chinese universities directly support China's military-civil fusion strategy. Just several dozen of several thousand.

So you're zooming in on some of the national security threats. And look, I think every single person on this committee would have concerns about national security threats and whatnot. But you know, what is before us in the Senate is a proposal that is about every single subject matter. And I guess I just wanted to ask you, Mr. Singleton, does that make sense? Do you think that there needs to be this deep level of oversight over every single subject matter, not just on national security?

I'm not familiar with that piece of legislation, but I don't think you have to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But I do think much more stringent restrictions need to be enacted here.

I think that the point that you raised, Mr. Daly, you said that there was a lack of conviction, there was a lack of any legal convictions about espionage. Can you say that one more time?

That there's clearly we have an issue on campus, but to date, and not for want of trying, we haven't yet had a conviction for espionage by persons on campuses acting on behalf of China. We have program fraud, people who aren't reporting working for Chinese talent programs, people who have been double-dipping, actually in violation of existing rules at their home American university. There have been issues of this kind, most of which occurred because, again, as I say in my testimony, we moved rather suddenly and correctly in my view, from an attitude of engagement toward China toward realizing that we were in a very broad competition. And universities and a lot of scholars who were here who had been acting under the engagement paradigm had the ground move under them. It took some time to adjust to a more rivalrous paradigm, which they did with the help of many people on this committee. And now we're in a different place. I think the universities have adjusted well.

And I think that that vigilance is important and we certainly know that there are problems that need to be addressed here. But the question is how far do we go? And I do have concerns, Dr. Wood, I do have concerns about what you said that we should even consider going as far as to fully cut off research and academic relations with different countries, especially competitors and adversaries. Because look, we can have the intentions that we want here of saying, you know, this is focused in on this way, but we have to take into account the broader picture and not look at this in a vacuum. So for instance, Dr. Wood, I wanted to ask you, did you support the China Initiative effort by the Department of Justice from 2018 to 2022 that investigated researchers here in the United States?

Yes, I did.

Yeah, look, I just want to raise my deep concern about that. As did many in the Asian American community and more broadly. You know, this is an issue that I think we have to be considering here, Mr. Chairman, as we're looking at this legislation and just again, I get our intentions and how focused it is, but the knock-on effects here on a number of different fronts. You know, first of all, I'll give you this is a slightly different example, but it has a similar type of vein. You know, I worked at the State Department. You know, I was had top secret security clearance, worked for the U.S. government. I was banned from working on issues related to Korea because I was Korean American. I was not allowed to work on anything related to the Korean Peninsula. That was deeply offensive to me as somebody who serves this country. But the suspicion because of my ethnicity. That is something that we're seeing through the, you know, that we saw firsthand through the China Initiative, through other efforts that are putting this presumption of concern upon people of Asian descent, people of descent of other countries that we are raising suspicion about. And I just wanted to raise that because the Asian American community has raised significant concerns about this. The second thing is the deep chilling effect that these types of efforts could have on our foreign students coming in. My father came to the United States as a foreign student. I'll be honest with you, with the cuts to visas right now and the shutting off of interviews, I don't think my dad would have been able to get a visa right now to come and study in the United States. And it's having a deep impact on colleges and universities who are dependent on so much of foreign students to come in and provide funding to their schools to be able to be continue to be R1 institutions or others. So I just want us to be knowledgeable about these broader knock-on effects that can cascade and very much affect not just the health of our universities and our research partnerships, but also our communities here and the signal that it sends to the diversity of different communities in America. And with that, I'll yield back.

Senator Husted.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I didn't plan to start here, but when I read and heard this discussion about to date there have been no convictions of university persons for conducting espionage on American campuses, I just did a simple search on my AI and then looked at multiple other sources to back them up. Chinese student pleads guilty for violating the U.S. Espionage Act for taking photos of using a drone to take photos of military bases. So I'm not suggesting that it's a rampant problem, but it does exist. And Mr. Daly, I just encourage you to spend the time that I just did to look and you'll see it's not just there, it's Illinois State, Ohio State, Columbia, other places have had issues with this. Again, not saying it's rampant, but to say that it doesn't exist is also not accurate. I want to just dig in here a little bit on the mutual benefit side. Because I don't look, America is a place where we want to have the best talent in the world, we want to welcome it and that's fantastic. But I did a little research on the number of Chinese students that come to America to study versus the number of American students that go to China to study. And the best data that I could find is that presently in the 24-25 academic year, there are around 265,000 Chinese students studying in America and less than 10,000 American students studying in China. I get there's a population difference between the two nations and that can contribute to the numbers, but that doesn't seem like there's much mutual benefit. And I saw you, Mr. Daly, acknowledge that, so I'll ask you that question. Is this really benefiting America when you have this desperate difference?

I think that it's benefiting America both in the pitiably low number of Americans who go to China and in most of the American the Chinese students who come to the United States. But you're absolutely right that it's nothing like reciprocal. In fact, we're talking about two different very different things. Chinese students come to America because they know we have the best higher education system in the world and they want to get that education. Most of the Americans, and I suspect the number you gave is still high, are going to China for language study or for short-term cultural tourism. They're not seeking degrees from Chinese universities because they're not really rivals of American degrees.

I want to give the others a chance to address this. Mr. Singleton, thought on that?

I think we can all agree that not all Chinese students are spies. Unfortunately, all Chinese nationals are subject to China's national security laws, which mandate that all Chinese nationals cooperate whether they like it or not with Chinese intelligence services, which is increasingly a concern. I think the drop, one of the reasons that we've seen a drop in U.S. students going to China is it's increasingly unsafe. The U.S. government, both during the Biden administration and the Trump administration, has outlined the concerns, the physical security concerns and the surveillance concerns to U.S. citizens studying in China. And increasingly there's no amount of reciprocity between the two. The Chinese tightly control which American students can study at Chinese universities and joint partnerships in China. And so I think those are some of the just the realities that the Chinese Communist Party doesn't want American students to go to China.

I'm going to share some data. This is something I found stunning. It was a pre-COVID number, so the number's not the same. One university that I talked with had more Chinese nationals on their campus studying than they did Black students. And we seem to be and why? They gave me the answer, it's because they pay full tuition. There's a financial benefit because the money is driving the reason that many of these students are coming to the campuses. It's not a benefit to the United States, it's a financial benefit to the institution. That's why the Confucius Institutes existed. Thankfully, we got rid of them all in Ohio institutions. But isn't this really just about the money?

Well, a lot of these students, their tuition is paid for by the Chinese party-state. These are state-directed initiatives, particularly in STEM fields, to have Chinese students and researchers come to the United States to study. We don't have any controls or due diligence on any of those researchers today. And so that seems to be a core imperative here as well.

And they're leaving here with the best the majors, you see the majors, and they're engineering technology, they're leaving and then they're going back and they're helping the Chinese government as they're required to, as you said, to compete against America. And I'm trying to figure out how this is benefiting America. While I get we want to have people here from other countries that ultimately come to America, but doesn't seem like the China relationship is all that beneficial to us.

We need to enhance our visa screening and processing for so many of these students because the ones that are here because they're part of state-directed programs, those requirements for the free tuition paid for by the Chinese government is that they go back to China and then work on this research there. There's a cause and effect there and that's where the additional scrutiny for sure.

I'm out of time. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you. By the way, I'm watching body language and I see oftentimes agreement among the three of you on something said, occasional disagreement, but I am struck that there is. So just to say. Senator Kaine.

Thanks to the panel, thanks to the chair for holding this important hearing. When I was born in 1958, one out of 100 Virginians had been born in another country and we were bottom quarter per capita income. And today one out of eight Virginians was born in another country and we're top quarter per capita income. And the last time I checked, only one other state had moved in that time from bottom quarter to top quarter and it was North Dakota and they discovered oil. We didn't discover anything except if you try to attract talent, talent will grow and the institutions and companies that want to be around talent will come. And so I think this is a discussion, Mr. Chair, where there's a lot of agreement, but it's about trying to find that balance. How do we not shut off our traditional role as this talent magnet by having policies toward international students or researchers that are too punitive? And I worry that we're striking the balance the wrong way. In academic year 2023-24, international students contributed about $44 billion to the American economy. And the point is it's not just about the money. The money paid by foreign students helps keeps tuition low for in-state students at many of our universities. They are viewed as kind of a cost center and it's not just a benefit to them, it actually benefits in-state students with lower tuition. So how do you find the balance? This administration has canceled billions of dollars in federal research, making many of our researchers vulnerable to being recruited by universities in other countries. Not necessarily China, but Canada and the UK and universities in Europe. We're losing researchers because of cuts to research funding. Last spring the administration shocked international students enrolled on our campuses through sudden visa revocations. And so as a result, we're seeing a very sharp decline in foreign students enrolling in American universities. Just in one year, the difference between fall 2024 and fall 2025, there was a 17 percent drop in enrollment of foreign students at U.S. universities. And many of my universities in Virginia see this sharp decline not only in undergraduate programs, but graduate programs as well, and it does affect their finances and it affects their ability to hold tuition low for in-state students. I really worry about the long-term consequences of the United States seeming more and more hostile to foreign students. There's an economic reality, you mentioned the Nobel winners and the CEOs who come for our universities and stay and create great economic opportunities. There's also a bit of a diplomatic reality, and we see this in the military too, the training programs that we do for foreign military leaders. They go back to their country as maybe a mid-level officer and in 10 years they're a minister of defense and in 20 years they might be president, and they have this experience, a positive experience of America from the training they've gotten at the National Defense University, the Army War College, or some of our universities. So how do we find, I mean, this is really a question to all of you, how do we find the balance of protecting security in the way you want to, but continuing to maintain the position of the United States as the magnet for the most talented people in the world? That's the way our nation stays young at 250 by continuing to attract talented people. How do we do that? Mr. Daly, start with you and I hope to hear from the others as well.

Well, I think we've done it very well as I said over the past 10 years by hearings and discussions like this, by bringing academics, issue experts together with Congress and the national security agencies to discuss these issues. We have to remain very vigilant, but we also have to recognize, and there's no choice about this, that while we want our innovation system, our science and technology, our military abilities to be number one in the world, in fact, the knowledge generation system is global. There's nothing we can do about that. And so we have to engage with other countries, including China, which yes, has stolen a great deal and which is also increasingly innovative, and we have to be realistic about that. In 2016, the Nature Index, they said the top 10, world's top 10 academic institutions, nine were American, one was Chinese. In 2024, eight of the world's top 10 by peer-driven review measure, eight were Chinese and two were American. So it's a global enterprise. We have to bring people in from all over the world, and yes, that's a vulnerability. And so the answer is working closely like this as we have been for a decade. We've got a lot more to offer than China in the long run, and I think there'll be vulnerabilities and there will be failures, but we can prevail in this.

I'm out of time, but I'm just assuming Dr. Wood and Mr. Singleton, you agree that this is sort of a balance issue. We don't want to see our position as the global talent magnet. And so getting this security right is really important, but we have to do it in ways that continue to make the most talented people in the world want to come to the United States and hopefully expand our opportunities here for American citizens. Is that fair?

May I just add that the largest percentage of international students studying in the United States come from India. Nobody to my knowledge has raised questions that Indian students coming to the United States pose a security risk. There are many other nations in the world who send their students to study in the United States with no security concerns whatsoever. This is not a matter of checking people off by ethnicity, that's a civil rights violation. We are concerned about people who themselves might be perfectly innocent, but come from a nation that puts pressure on their families, that even threatens them with death if they do not cooperate with the state interest. That's a situation that we cannot tolerate as a nation, and our security concerns here in this one particular instance have to override our concerns for intellectual openness. As for the high standing of Chinese universities, a lot of that comes out of paper mills. They are generating papers by the tens of thousands, most of which are just utterly worthless. The intellectual vacuity of a lot of the Chinese publications exists solely for the purpose of getting them elevated in the international rankings. I'll stop there.

I yield back. Thank you.

Senator Banks.

Mr. Singleton, I was just in the hallway a minute ago, and this happens from time to time, the really wacky left-wing radical group Code Pink loves to chase us around the hallway. I find it humorous when they do. I don't really even know what they stand for. They obviously, from the shouting and the back and forth with them, they apparently hate Israel, they love abortion, I don't think they like America either. But what are their ties to the Chinese Communist Party?

Thank you, sir. It's an area that's a little outside of my expertise, but there are some very known documented ties between Code Pink and Chinese Communist Party affiliated entities and institutions. I believe one of them is called the Singham Network. It's again not an area of my specific expertise, and I have other colleagues at the foundation who track it closely, but that flow of money and the disruptive effects that it has here are quite alarming and ultimately, I think, probably worthy of a lot more interest, pursuit, and scrutiny from Congress.

What do they do on college campuses? I'm curious. Code Pink, I mean, they apparently don't have jobs, they hang out in the halls of the Capitol building and chase congressmen and senators around of their opposing viewpoint. They don't like to have conversations either, I mean, they just want to be disruptive. So what's their interest on college campuses?

I'm a professor myself and I haven't yet encountered them, though maybe after this testimony I will. I think in many respects it seems as though a lot of their tactics mirror those of former Confucius Institutes and Chinese Students and Scholars Associations, which are Chinese funded, Chinese government funded and directed entities on U.S. college campuses. Some of that includes monitoring students and stifling dissent. For example, if there's going to be a public speaker on campus that wants to talk about human rights in China, they'll organize protests to be disruptive. Ultimately it undermines academic integrity, but I think at least on the Chinese Students and Scholars front, Congress has options there. They should be subject to FARA registration. We should be strongly thinking about whether U.S. universities that host these associations should be receiving certain types of funding. But I think a lot more work needs to be done on CSSAs that hasn't been done.

Switching gears a little bit, under Section 117 of the Higher Education Act, universities only have to disclose foreign donations that exceed or contracts or gifts that exceed a quarter of a million dollars, $250,000. Do you believe that threshold is still appropriate in today's geopolitical environment?

Absolutely not. Transparency strengthens trust. The DETERRENT Act, for example, doesn't do anything about restricting academic collaboration, it's only about clear and consistent financial disclosure down to the dollar. I remember going to a university, University of Florida, I had an amazing experience in education there. I remember two months after I graduated, I received a bill because I had had a Gatorade on my last day of school and I owed $2.20 or something like that to the cafeteria. Every dollar at multi-billion dollar institutions and enterprises is tracked. These checks were cashed. The information exists somewhere. Why don't we just have broad, beyond China, every check that comes in, have it be available? It's not hard anymore because every university uses sophisticated accounting software that accounts for this. All we're saying is that the transparency actually, I think, removes the ambiguity and it actually strengthens trust for universities.

So report all of it. Why not report all of it for everybody? It'd be easy to do that, right?

All of the funders, all of the cut-throughs and intermediaries that Peter rightly pointed out, put it all out there. It's agnostic against country.

It used to be really hard to work with the Department of Education where these reports would be submitted. It used to be really hard to get them, but is it easier today to find reports of foreign gifts online? I mean, is it totally transparent or what more can we do to fix that?

It used to be extremely difficult. For example, during the Biden administration, they didn't report any of the donor data for four years. So it was sort of a black hole for four years. The current Department of Education is investing heavily in this new portal where again, in tranches as schools contribute information, we should have a much better sense of the exact donor names, where the money is coming from. But we have to also go further and say, well, what's the money for? Again, when you cut a big check or you sign a research partnership, there's paper, it exists. It wouldn't be difficult for all of that to be publicly available and it should be.

I used to be struck too by the, maybe this has changed or improved, but at least a few years ago, the federal Department of Education hardly had any security clearances of their top, the secretary, undersecretaries, I mean, they should all have security clearances so they're read in on why much of this matters, right? Maybe that's been improved, I don't know.

No, you're absolutely right. It's a deficiency. This system is entirely fragmented. And because of sort of stovepipe outdated clearance processes, this information isn't shared. It's not even shared with universities. They might not even know that they're partnering with entities that support, for example, China's nuclear weapons program, which exists. I think it's pretty alarming and concerning. Some states, including Florida, have taken strong steps in this regard, but a lot more needs to be done.

Thank you. My time is expired.

Senator Hickenlooper.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And thank all of you for being here and for engaging in this. You're probably not aware of this, but I am a recovering scientist. I have a master's in earth and environmental science, studied volcanic rocks in south-central Montana. Like many young people, I found it irresistible to be able to go out and study and learn and be in some of the most beautiful landscapes on earth. But then I grew to love the laboratory as well and the pursuits. I'm not sure how I ended up in the Senate, a long trajectory I won't bore you with, but it is, I think I'm the last scientist, if you define that as someone who's had their research peer-reviewed and published in journals, I'm the last senator to actually be a scientist. Excuse me. [Laughter.] With the exception of the chair. But he's a doctor, that's I don't think that's really the same. I know that we share the bipartisan goal of promoting research and security and strengthening our STEM pipeline with the brightest minds. And obviously that includes people from all backgrounds, and so much of research is published and put out there and shared on an international level. These different backgrounds, as you've all said in different ways, aren't bound by international borders. But according to the National Science Board's latest report, over half of our doctorates in computer science, math, and engineering at this point are foreign-born. And I think it's part of that that makes it so concerning things like there was a recent report that came out of NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, that they were considering expelling 500 researchers from working on cutting-edge research at NIST because they are non-U.S. citizens. And what was so surprising, this wasn't questions of Russians or Chinese, but they included Canadians in this. I know we've had some complex relationships with Canada recently, but I think our scientific communities are still relatively allied. So, Mr. Daly, why don't I start with you and just ask how do you think targeted attacks like these on international researchers working at our universities and federal labs is going to affect enrollment in the STEM fields?

The NIST case is of particular concern. As you said, it's the National Institute of Standards and Technology. A major part of our technology competition with China, one of the major reasons that we worry about Huawei, we worry a lot about its other leading companies, is not just that they're selling 5G systems internationally, which is a huge concern. But that because they're able to deliver these systems to countries in the global south quickly, cheaply, and that are good enough, they also lead in setting global telecom standards which shape the subsequent competition. NIST is our biggest, it's our bulwark of defense against that. We had been the previous leaders in global standards for that reason. And so the standards piece, it's not just the new gizmos, important as they are. It's the global standards that set markets, it's what designers are going to design to. And so I'm particularly worried about that. NIST built the cybersecurity framework, the AI risk management framework. All of this is now under threat because of that.

Great, I agree. Mr. Singleton, your perception on that?

Sure. China is a special case. And so I think Dr. Wood hit the nail on the head here when we're talking about separating China and the risk posed by Chinese military-civil fusion into a separate category of risk. Because when we talk about global standards, we're actually only talking about two countries, the United States standard and the Chinese standard. Again, a special category of both global applicability across technologies. We want to be the leaders there and we want to do that with partners and friends. But again, I think the reason that we focus so much on China is because they are the very clear foil to our desire...

Great. Thank you. Dr. Wood, you want to have anything to add?

I have nothing to add to that.

I understand. I'm out of time. So as I do think NIST has unique power, we don't often recognize it, but that convening power to establish what are the global standards has ramifications far beyond what most people ever consider. So appreciate you guys bringing that up. And as one of two scientists left in the United States Senate, I'll yield the floor back to the chair, to the other scientist. [Laughter.] I'm yielding back to the other scientist in the United States Senate.

Unfortunately, I'm yielding to a Florida Gator who will be asking all her questions of another Florida Gator.

Yes. So excited you finally got on board inviting a genius from the University of Florida. They proudly educated Gator. I have made it my mission as one of the newest senators to be the first, to get the most Go Gators on the official record at hearing. I think I'm up to close to 10 by now. Thank you and welcome. And thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing to examine a really concerning truth that many of our universities have been infiltrated by foreign interests. And the hearing where we are specifically talking about malign foreign influence on our universities, I think is incredibly important. I've heard it come up a lot, and I know a lot of people are familiar with the Confucius Institutes, which kind of took embedded in universities really under our noses before people started waking up and figuring out what was going on, that they were in fact a vehicle for CCP influence and propaganda operations in the United States. And as Mr. Singleton said, I'm so proud of my state. We lead in many ways. This is one of them. When I was Attorney General in Florida, we outlawed these institutes from our state. And many other states followed suit. And I am hoping the few that are remaining, they wake up and really dig in and see what's going on. We also prohibited our universities from taking any kind of money or research personnel from countries of concern like China, Iran, and at the time, Venezuela. So important to stay on top of these things. One of the things I think our state does well is we're very proactive in making sure we are rooting out this kind of influence. But besides organizations like the Confucius Institute, foreign government influence in our universities is gaining traction through these large obscene gifts or grants. And recent statements from the Department of Education show that during the last administration, there was almost this obfuscation or push to prohibit disclosure or not go after when the universities didn't disclose that information to the public. And I think it's concerning because public trust in our institutions has really been declining since the China-born COVID pandemic. And the last thing anyone wants for our storied universities is to become pawns of foreign adversaries. That's the last thing any of us want. And I also agree with the notion that students that want to come and learn, obviously we need to, that has historically been a, we have offered that opportunity and we shouldn't just cut that off without really examining specifically if there is malign influence in our university. And Dr. Wood, you talked a lot about the extraordinary funding of our top research institutions where they take money from the CCP specifically. You said UCLA receives $129 million, Yale receives $410 million, Harvard receives $630 million. By the way, again, this is illegal in the state of Florida. No serious person can see those numbers and not understand that these universities can be influenced specifically understanding that unlike in America, Chinese, they in their universities, they understand they fully enmesh their universities into the People's Liberation Army. I think there's highly concerns that some of those coming over here that are being embedded in research, that information gets spirited away to CCP agents directly into the Chinese military industrial complex. And Mr. Singleton, you said that the CCP is in fact paying for students to come over and be embedded in our universities. So I want to go back to you, Mr. Wood, momentarily. Did you know that, you know, we kind of pushed back on some of the Confucius Institutes, but did you know that in China they passed two laws that require all nationals, not just their students, but all nationals to cooperate with the CCP and provide information on demand?

Yes, I'm aware of that.

And you were kind of singling out some other nations that send students here that you think we shouldn't necessarily prohibit those visas. But do you think it's a problem when a foreign adversary, especially one that has been orchestrating ways to infiltrate, and I could tick off for you: Chinese student, Chinese student, Chinese student in America that has been caught stealing information, flying drones over our military bases over and over and over again, knowing that the laws are on the books in China that requires them to report back, and we've even had disclosures where they have been pushing them to provide information and report back and they have. Does that concern you that we are still allowing this without further legislation preventing that?

It absolutely does. I think you framed this correctly by saying that the issue here is public trust. Americans at large understand that China is stealing our lunch. The only people who don't seem to understand that are the college presidents and trustees who see the money coming in and shrug and say, okay, that's good for us. I'm concerned, yes, that we are in a situation where the Chinese students are subject to state pressure to cooperate with their government, even if they don't want to, they will. But they also are being regimented by the Chinese Students and Scholars Association, by the remnants of the Confucius Institutes, and a whole galaxy of other Chinese organized efforts to make sure that Chinese influence in America, not just on campuses, but in elections and everywhere else where they can get a reach, is proceeding pretty much unhindered.

You know, I think, and Mr. Singleton said some of these, this information, we could be actually helping China develop their nuclear program. That should put fear in every single one of us on this dais. I've proposed a Stop CCP Visas Act as long as these laws are outstanding in China to require cooperation by the students that they send and pay for to come here. But if we don't get smarter and wake up and start examining who we're inviting into this country, we are promoting our own demise ultimately. So thank you very much for being here, and I will turn it over at this time to Senator Alsobrooks.

Thank you so much, and thank you to our witnesses for being here today. You know, while I agree that it is important to stamp out dangerous sources of foreign influence in our higher education system, I think it's important that we also address how cuts to research funding can increase foreign influence on the global stage and undermine U.S. competitiveness. The NIH drives economic growth, it fosters biotechnology and develops life-saving treatments, yet last year, President Trump and Secretary Kennedy's reckless research cuts directly caused our state's preeminent higher education research institution to receive 40 percent fewer awards, representing a decline of around half of its research funding. Our state's public institutions are projected to lose $70 to $150 million annually because of this administration. And if you include both public and private institutions, Maryland is down 82 percent in the number of awards and 85 percent in the value of awards over the past year. So Mr. Daly, my first question is for you. You've expressed that you believe we are now in a new Cold War with China. And I would like to know, how do cuts to research at our institutions impact our ability to compete with China and other adversaries in this new Cold War?

It's clearly extremely negative. We've been very focused recently on the fact that China has a chokehold on us in critical minerals. They also have a chokehold in medical precursors. No China, no ibuprofen for Americans. They are now widely acknowledged in the expert community, although I think that we haven't paid enough attention to it in Congress, to be the leaders in biopharmaceutical research. It is expected over the next 10 or 20 years that most of the major new therapies, most of the major new medicines, will be coming out of China because we are no longer keeping pace and we are under-resourcing what had been the world's strongest medical and discovery institutions. And so it's a major concern, and it also constitutes another chokehold potentially for China. We're keeping their electric vehicles out. What if they come up with a major therapy or another cure that can save American lives? Will we keep that out? They're increasingly innovative, and we are not yet falling behind, but the balance is shifting a bit.

So now how does it, we've also seen the politicization of research dollars by this administration, and I wonder how you believe that politicizing research dollars emboldens our rivals?

The universities are still the engine of our innovation system. They produce new knowledge on their own, and most of the major CEOs and scientists who work as entrepreneurs and have new discoveries are products of our educational institutions. About 90 percent of all American R&D doesn't happen on campuses. It happens in national laboratories, it happens in private corporations. I wondered when you talked about IP theft, Craig, if that was just from universities or if that was from across total. Most of it probably not from universities. So we need to talk about the role of corporations here too. Our goal is to compete with China. Right? And Confucius Institutes are almost all gone. They were language teaching institutes. China's going to have as many nuclear warheads as we do by 2035. They're developing hypersonic glide reentry vehicles that we can't stop. Our concern needs to shift to our real national strengths that matter in the competition with China. The universities are important, vigilance is necessary, but I'm afraid there's a lack of proportionality.

Now this also regarding talent. So when it comes to attracting the best and brightest minds in the search for cures and new technologies, cuts to NIH and NSF research ultimately reduces slots for trained researchers and weakens public and private institutions' capacity to train the next generation of researchers. One poll found that more than 45 percent of responding scientists said that they were considering leaving the country following the disruption to science prompted by the Trump administration. So how does catalyzing a talent brain drain challenge our ability to attract leading minds away from our adversaries and our rivals, and how is China working to aggressively recruit top scientists, including those of Chinese descent leaving the United States?

I think I think everybody today has advocated for balance, recognizing the real vulnerabilities and the need to continue to attract people. It has to be said that the people leaving, and those numbers are growing, there's push because they don't feel safe or welcomed here. But there's also pull. China has tripled its number of universities and is giving more and more money to R&D, and they will, you know, they go back and they get brand new laboratories. So we need to think about China here not only as a threat to be defended against, but as I said, we have to go on offense and provide research dollars and facilities to match those of China, both to develop our own native talent and to attract the best foreign talent.

Thank you. I yield.

Thank you Senator Markey.

Thank you. Thank you Madam Chairman. No one here wants corruption in higher education. No one wants our colleges and universities to be beholden to other countries. But it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that the Trump administration is weaponizing good faith compliance with Section 117 reporting to continue its war on higher education. This administration's focus on "foreign influence" in education is just another distraction from the corrupt wheeling and dealing by our fraudster in chief in the Oval Office. If we want to talk about malign foreign influence, we need to look no further than 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Right before his second inauguration, Trump's crypto company accepted a half a billion dollars from the United Arab Emirates. Then just six months later, in May of 2025, another UAE backed firm financed a deal with $2 billion of Trump's cryptocurrency. And just a few weeks later, Trump greenlighted the UAE's purchase of 500,000 AI chips. Just a coincidence, right? Doesn't stop there. Last May, Trump accepted a $400 million Boeing luxury liner from Qatar to use as Air Force One, a deal approved by Attorney General Pam Bondi, a former lobbyist for the Qataris. But is it just a coincidence that three days later, Qatar was the first foreign entity allowed to purchase new American counter drone systems? I don't think so. Don't worry. The Saudis are in on it too. Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law, accepted a $2 billion Saudi investment in his private equity firm. The Trump administration simultaneously continues to cozy up to the Saudis including advancing a plan to give nuclear weapon wannabe Saudi Arabia nuclear technology. Dangerous. We can also talk about China. Just last week, Chinese crypto billionaire Justin Sun, who bought more than $90 million in Trump crypto, had his SEC fraud case dropped. If we want to promote "transparency" and trust, let's start with the malign foreign influence of this White House. Poor Jimmy Carter. He just he had to give up his peanut farm. Now the American people are getting peanuts from this administration while gas prices surge, healthcare costs are spiking, and we are sucked into another war in the Middle East. So I'll be the first to work with the Republicans on this committee if there is deep seated malign foreign influence that is unaddressed in our colleges and universities. But our colleges and universities are our greatest geopolitical asset. Over a million international students study every year at American institutions. And we're seeing China and Europe now poach scientists and researchers because of this administration's foolish attacks on higher education. That is our greatest asset. Last month, the Boston Globe warned, "with federal support for scientific research now unpredictable in the United States, a brain drain to China may be possible in the coming years." So Mr. Daly, is an administration that accepts billions of investments in Trump crypto companies from foreign governments and makes sweetheart deals and guts research funding leading, is it leading to a brain drain and is that a national security risk for our country long term?

We see some evidence of a brain drain. Thank you for the question. I think I'll continue to work with universities and all of you in the security agencies to get the balance on China right. That's the focus of my work. But yes, I do worry about a reverse brain drain.

Yeah. Because if there are bad actors, thank you, I want to work on that as well, seeking undue influence, our colleges and universities, we should root it out. But dismantling the Department of Education, naming the head of the World Wrestling Federation to be the head of the Department of Education, that's not going to help and neither will cutting research grants putting scientists overseas for better opportunities. If we truly want to put America first, then let's start by cleaning up the corruption in this White House. Thank you Mr. Chairman.

Thank you Senator Markey. So my advantage is I get to listen to everybody and and so let me just kind of start there. Dr. Wood starts off by saying that some of the money coming in may be rebranded. Now we don't know that, but there's a you have to be careful about that. The Department of Education says that as much as a third of foreign contributions are not reported. Now there's a stretching there. Now Mr. Daly, you suggest that the previous legislation and the kind of last 10 years have solved the problem, but let me start with you. If one third of the money coming in is not reported, which granted could have all been a bunch of gifts left in 250,000, but probably not. And if Dr. Wood is correct that half a billion dollars is coming through Guernsey, which is a island notorious for money laundering, so it's easy to imagine dollars are put there and funneled here. This hearing is about transparency. Frankly, it's supposed to be about transparency, not where the student originates from. It's about transparency. So so I say this because I respect all three of you, you've done a great job. One, do you agree that as much as one third of the donations may not be transparently reported and assuming that Dr. Wood is correct that half a billion is coming from Guernsey, which is again as we said a conduit for people who don't want their identities known. Thoughts about that?

Well I can't confirm any of those statistics. I can say that having visited a great many public and private major research universities to discuss this, I would be surprised if a third currently currently is unreported. All I see on universities is vigilance, again at tremendous expense and a disposition now, again this is shifted, a disposition now to assume that at least for projects are coming from China and related to STEM, that the answer may well be no. The message is received.

So in the conversation you're kind of veered towards China, but really the conversation was about a lot of things and the largest single donor is Qatar. By the way, Qatar paid for pharmacy building at Xavier University after Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana. And so I want to say that that we can't bring black or white here, we've got to accept that there is nuance. And so that's where I go back to transparency. So so I just I just want to point this out that it's not so much about China even though that's your expertise, it's about kind of transparency.

Well here I think that Craig is right that we can do a better job with 117 and for all of the reasons that have been mentioned and I like Craig, I think that it's a good idea to lower the reporting requirements from 250,000 to 50,000 or in some cases lower. But what is the use of this portal? Everything is lumped together, these are cumulative numbers that do not paint a an accurate or a useful picture of what is happening now. It would not be at all difficult to line up bars on the portal that show donations by year broken down by country. And again I would like to know whether that would show that our work at least vis-a-vis China

I'm told it's there but it's difficult to ascertain, so just to say that.

I couldn't I couldn't find it. I got spreadsheets where everything was lumped together that give seemed to give the impression that all foreign donations are malign, which is not true, that all donations from China come from the Chinese Communist Party, which is also not true. There are no distinctions made and there's really no time series and we need that to judge the scale of the threat and whether our work is actually effective or not. I'd be careful of those cumulative

Mr. Singleton I see you nodding your head yes, you would agree with that?

So the Department of Education has made clear that the portal will be continuously updated. We're seeing the first version and I agree they have to ingest decades of data from different spreadsheets and sources and attempt to make sense of it.

Yeah but but I guess more to the point that that just because it's coming from mainland China or from Qatar or from England or the United Kingdom in and of itself doesn't mean anything, rather as is the source of it and the purpose of it.

Well you can't manage risks you can't see. So the challenge here is that transparency protects universities, policymakers, and students alike, which is why we don't know what we don't know here. The use of cutouts and intermediaries is very well known. It's particularly well known in the case of China. We should understand what the money buys. So it's beyond just the disclosure of what the check amount was, we should have a very clear eyed view of what the money buys and currently that's not required by law and most universities do not publicly report that.

So the transparency I think the the agreement between the two of you is that yes report the amount of money but also tell us what the money buys.

Exactly, it should be two.

Right. Go back to a medical school in Doha. The medical school in Doha will be providing educational opportunity for those who otherwise may not receive.

Absolutely, information is the is the ultimate goal here. Then we can effectively evaluate which ones are benign or make sense or advance US national security and which ones don't.

Dr. Wood that that maybe the way to kind of to build the bridge between witnesses, would you agree with that assessment?

I'm not sure. I think that this goes beyond knowing what the source and the purpose is, you need to figure out how it's actually applied. We all know money is fungible. You drop a money bomb on a college, some of it will go to a particular purpose, some of it will be siphoned off into overhead, that overhead money will be used for other purposes. You really have to know where the money is actually going and what it's doing on campus. I think Qatar since we've talked about that spends some of its money in very wholesome ways, but when it funds Al Jazeera and trains Al Jazeera at Northwestern University, that's not quite so wholesome. We also know

So so let me stop you there. So the degree that okay here's a bucket of dollars coming from X country. And this is funding a way to go after critical minerals in a way that benefits the US. And this is going to Al Jazeera. I think what I heard from the first two is that if that's clearly known, now your point is I accept that some of it's going for overhead and some of it's fungible, but theoretically if you knew that we got $5 million and $2 million went for overhead and $3 million went for this program, that would give you insight into that?

I think it would give us an ability to make more prudent judgments as to whether it's worth having the money given that Al Jazeera's going to get a portion of it. But I think that there is a lot more to this. We are in a situation where the foreign funding comes in a very mixed picture from some countries, Qatar's an example of that, China is not. The money that we get from China is almost all used to some degree for a mischievous purpose. So transparency is a broad term, it has to be driven down to a lot of detail.

Let me give an example from Mr. Daly. I'm thinking Mr. Daly is saying there might be a Chinese billionaire who decides to fund a chair of English at a university and wink-wink his daughter then gets accepted. That would be relatively benign I presume, except for denying entrance perhaps if there's a limited number of people to be accepted.

Well, I see a complication there. There is a Chinese billionaire, Singham is the guy. He's the one who funds Code Pink. I see his minions in New York City on the subway with their anti-Semitic signs all the time. The Chinese billionaire who's funding something at Columbia University so that his progeny get favorable treatment, you might think is one thing and Chinese malign influence is something else, but they're really not. If it's coming from China, it has an ulterior purpose.

Let me stop you there because I'm not out of time because I'm the very last one, I can take as much time as I want, but you know, still at some point it has to end. Mr. Daly, you just heard Dr. Wood's kind of prescription. Respond to that please.

Influence and mischief are pretty vague terms. We have and again, there is a problem as we've all said. And to correct it and to respond to Senator Husted who's no longer here, I had said that we haven't had a conviction for espionage on American campuses. The issue he raises about the photographs near military bases is real.

M.D. Anderson is an academic institution and there was something at M.D. Anderson. I'll just point that out because in principle that was the same thing. It wasn't Texas A&M but it was M.D. Anderson.

Sure, so there's obviously Chinese espionage. They'll hoover up everything they can get by any means possible. But we've talked a lot today about influence and donations. I have not yet heard, and correct me if I'm wrong, any tying of a specific donation to a specific illegal activity on campus.

Now the Confucius Institutes were there to very much put a flavor in the interpretation of Sino-American relations and Taiwanese and...

So I advised two presidents of major American universities to get rid of their Confucius Institutes and I was part of the team at the National Academies that wrote the final report on this. And yes, there was a big problem with Confucius Institutes, but it wasn't an espionage problem. These were not hotbeds of espionage, they were hotbeds of mediocre Chinese language training. The problem was that once they had those, in my experience many universities were hesitant because they felt they had this Chinese institute to take other actions that China wouldn't like. There was a second-order problem of thinking that we had a Chinese partner on campus. I think that that is a big issue. Again, I advised to...

Let me ask, let me ask. I was once told and I'll direct this to you Mr. Singleton, even though China seems to be your direction. It was once told me that if an Ivy League school gets $500 million for a center for Middle Eastern studies, that influences the college faculty room and indeed going back to after October the 7th, where did the anti-Semitic and anti-American rhetoric come from? You buy a lot of influence when you hire a lot of faculty members. Mr. Singleton, any comments on that?

Not only do you buy faculty members, in many of these cases the host government nation, China or Qatar, is in charge of curricula development.

Is that true?

Yes. For Qatar Foundation International, they determine the curricula. At Confucius Institutes...

Wait, wait, wait. You're talking about an American institute of higher education, prestigious, who gets the dollars, but they would cede authorship of their curriculum to another?

That's correct. It's the same model that was employed in Confucius Institutes because the Chinese Communist Party through Hanban, as Dr. Wood outlined, controlled teacher selection, teacher training, and curricula. It's the same model. So they can in fact control what students are learning on campus through these models. We have to do a lot more to uncover the extent of these Qatari networks and to understand how they're influencing higher education. We already have a precedent though from the Chinese Communist Party and Confucius Institutes.

So let me finish with this because obviously transparency is key. I was obviously we have conflict with Iran right now. And I'm driving to New Orleans from Baton Rouge to take a flight up here and I pass a store that's run by an Iranian-American and he's got a big billboard with an Iranian flag saying thank you President Trump. A lot of people who come here from those other countries come here from those other countries because they don't want those other countries. They love their country but they've been squashed. And and we see the protest, no, the celebrations of the death of the Ayatollah as an example of people from Iran who were chafing under the yoke of a terrible leadership. I suspect that is true of every autocratic government in the world. People want freedom and they come here. So obviously we can't paint a broad brush. If somebody comes from a country which is adversarial with us, they are therefore guilty of being an accomplice to that adversarial government. The question is, you know, is there transparency in that? Do we have transparency in the people who come here as research assistants so that we get those brains that are born elsewhere and they come here and benefit us but they get freedom? Dr. Wood, I'll start with you and I'll finish, that'll be my last question.

I'm not quite sure I get the question.

So is it possible to have this, we're talking about transparency for those scientists and educators and business people who come here from elsewhere, be it China, be it Qatar, Iran, Russia, etcetera, who actually are fleeing a government? They want our freedom and they end up becoming our great American citizens. Is there a way to adequately vet there?

Well, we need to be prudent in every case when we grant a visa to somebody that we're not granting a visa to a re-immigrant from some other country who is making use of our procedures to slip in, but generally speaking, most of the people who want to come here are coming here for legitimate purposes and need to be treated with respect as they pursue their God-given freedoms. No objection to that whatsoever. But there is an element here of being wise stewards of our own freedom and not allowing it to be seized by those who want to undermine it, and they are here too. I think the Trump administration is doing a reasonably good job of trying to vet the people who are already here under visas but are using those visas to spread anti-Semitic propaganda, anti-American activities, or to engage in intellectual property theft.

You agree with that sir?

I think our goal should be to retain as much top talent as possible. I think it's Xi Jinping's worst nightmare, the idea that his top researchers would stay in the United States and contribute here and embrace liberty and democracy. I think that's a big concern for them. As a former U.S. diplomat, I would tell you that the adjudication of visas is incredibly difficult. It's impossible within that 30 to 45 second interview to actually determine whether this person represents a national security threat. We haven't built up the training for consular officers worldwide, the security databases that they need to adjudicate these decisions. And so that's one of the core reasons why so many of these problematic researchers, particularly those associated with Chinese talent programs like the Thousand Talents Program, slipped through the system. It's absolutely possible to enhance vetting. I think the case is very specific to China because it's a party-state directed initiative to steal our intellectual capital and to operate on our college campuses because as we've all outlined, those are the centers of our innovation growth.

We've done an increasingly good job on research integrity over the past 10 years. We can continue to do a better job through increasing transparency in the ways that we've described. But we also need to keep our eyes on the main issue of U.S.-China competition. I'm a lot more worried about the fact that China will have the same number of nuclear warheads that we have in 2035. I'm more worried about that than the fact that a Confucius Institute that was kicked off American college campuses may now be offering Chinese language classes in a local elementary school. That's not where we need our focus when we think about U.S.-China innovation competition.

Thank you all. For any Senator wishing to ask additional questions, questions for the record are due 5:00 p.m. Thursday, March 26. Thank you for being here. The committee stands adjourned.