"Agency drops attempt to mitigate risk in favor of outright prohibition on working with most Chinese research institutions"
"The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has decided to ban collaborations between every U.S. scientist it funds and nearly all Chinese research institutions and their employees. The new policy abandons NSF’s earlier attempt to balance the potential risks and benefits of such collaborations. But it puts the agency in step with actions taken earlier this year by the much larger Department of Defense (DOD) and with congressional Republicans, who assert that any interactions with China threaten national security.
The new policy, posted on Wednesday and still being digested by university administrators, relies on lists of so-called restricted entities maintained by DOD and other federal agencies. The lists contain the names of hundreds of leading Chinese universities, national laboratories, and other research institutions. Any interactions with “the employees of such restricted entities” is taboo, the NSF policy notes. There are a handful of notable omissions, however, including Tsinghua University, which last week announced it had hired away the 2025 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Omar Yaghi, from the University of California, Berkeley.
Two years ago, NSF’s chief of research security described how the agency wanted to preserve some collaborations with China while mitigating the possibility of economic or military espionage of vital U.S. technologies. “We cannot continue to lead the world in science and innovation if we are fixated on achieving zero risk related to research security,” explained Rebecca Keiser, now NSF’s chief of staff, in unveiling a new metric, called Trusted Research Using Safeguards and Transparency (TRUST), to “assess grant proposals for potential national security risks.”"
