Lawmakers on Capitol Hill are considering expanding a ban on preventing all foreign-born nationals from adversarial nations from working in the Department of Energy’s (DoE) 17 national labs, citing risks of espionage.
During a Feb. 20 hearing of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, legislators and witnesses agreed on the need for increased cybersecurity protections to counter DoE staffers who may be conducting espionage and gaining access to sensitive information on technological advancements critical to U.S. national security.
“From the Manhattan Project to cutting edge AI [artificial intelligence] research, DoE’s national labs have pushed the boundaries of innovation and strengthened our national security, but for those very same reasons, they’ve also become a prime target for espionage,” committee Chairman Mike Lee, R-Utah, in opening statements.
“For years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has worked to infiltrate our national labs, targeting top scientists and siphoning off American research to fuel China’s military ambitions,” he said.
“Through programs … the CCP systematically recruited elite scientists, nationals of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) who were trained in the West, built their careers in American labs and worked with American funding to develop American technology, and then the CCP lured them back to China,” Lee continued, adding that PRC nationals took information from DoE labs to build advanced military technology in China.
A top consideration of the hearing centered around tightening security around sensitive information on technologically advanced weapons that DoE researches in its labs.
Paul Dabbar, the former undersecretary for science at the DoE and co-founder of Bohr Quantum Technology, called for the expansion of a ban that prevents adversarial nation nationals from working in the DoE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) labs.
Provisions set to take effect in April as part of the latest National Defense Authorization Act prevent citizens of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea from accessing non-public areas of DoE’s national security labs. No such provisions prevent access to other labs.
“We must also remember that all PRC citizens are required by the Chinese National Security Law to hand over all information when directed by the Chinese state,” said Dabbar. “While the current DoE orders on the DOE website provide a framework for security and counterintelligence, they provide too much flexibility and discretion for interpretation by political careers and lab employees.”
Dabbar recommended that DoE implement stricter controls on hiring, visits, and meetings involving nationals from high-risk countries at laboratories by requiring sole authorization from lab under secretaries without delegation, and by establishing a list of allowable waivers for committee oversight.
Anna Puglisi, visiting fellow from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, proposed a comprehensive national-level strategy including the creation of a “pre-check” system to streamline collaborations with researchers who adhere to clear security standards.
Other security risks may stem from budget cuts, shared Geraldine Richmond, former undersecretary for science and innovation at DoE and presidential chair in science and professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon. She warned that that rigorous and time consuming background checks required for classified work, combined with sudden budget cuts, could make personnel more vulnerable to foreign recruitment.
“When we make these cuts … what are the chances that we’ve increased the risk of someone being hired by China to come over and share what they’ve been doing,” said Richmond. “I too have been recruited, I got a letter not too long ago that was like for one hour’s work … I don’t have a mortgage to pay, but there are other people that do.”
Richmond also noted that with the ban set to go into effect on April 15 at NNSA labs, nearly 1,000 employees will be laid off to comply with it, posing the risk of former works being “picked up by our adversaries.”
Other recommendations made by witnesses include developing a comprehensive security program that includes cybersecurity and both internal and external monitoring to track information sharing within DoE.
