Dialogue without data is a waste of time. That’s what members of a new U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine panel
looking into the threat posed by other countries trying to steal
federally funded research yesterday warned a panel of U.S. government
watchdogs.
Members of the National Science, Technology, and Security
Roundtable—formed last year to promote discussions among federal
officials, academic leaders, and national security experts—complained
that presentations from a trio of major research agencies lacked the
baseline data needed to determine the scope of the problem and what the
research community can do to minimize risks.
“I hope you can sense our frustration,” Maria Zuber, a co-chair of
the roundtable and vice president for research at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, said at the end of a 2-hour online session.
“It’s impossible for us to gain an understanding of the challenge we
face with the information we are being given.”
Yesterday’s meeting, the third hosted by the roundtable, featured
presentations from officials at the National Science Foundation (NSF),
the Department of Energy (DOE), and the parent agency of the National
Institutes of Health (NIH) who investigate all manner of waste, fraud,
and abuse of federal funds. Their workloads have risen sharply in the
past few years, they told the panel. And they said the rise has been
driven by investigations of U.S. scientists alleged to have failed to
disclose their ties to China’s foreign talent recruitment programs.
For example, NSF’s Inspector General Allison Lerner said allegations
of foreign influence now make up more than 50% of the office’s overall
portfolio. That compares with 7% in 2017, she said, before NSF took on
its first case. Her 16-person investigations staff feels “overwhelmed,”
she added. But Lerner repeatedly declined to say how many investigations
her office is now conducting or how many involve foreign influence and
emphasized that “our work remains invisible” until the U.S. government
announces it has filed criminal or civil charges against an individual.
Her analysis didn’t satisfy roundtable co-chair John Gannon, a former
senior government intelligence official. “Fifty percent of what?” he
asked Lerner. “Is it a few bad apples or a major trend?”
Gannon had a similar response to a presentation by DOE’s head of
investigations, Lewe Sessions. Sessions said his office has 35 active
cases involving grantees who allegedly have undisclosed ties to foreign
talent programs, including 24 researchers at U.S. universities. That
represents a 200% increase “over previous years,” he noted. But Sessions
couldn’t provide a more specific timeframe for the rise or characterize
what share of his office’s total workload is taken up by such cases.
“What’s the overall population” of researchers involved? Gannon asked
Sessions. “Without a baseline, I can’t grasp the scale of the problem.”
In an attempt to demonstrate the seriousness of the threat, Lerner
offered an anonymous case study involving an undisclosed agreement
between an NSF grantee and an institution affiliated with the Chinese
government. The agreement, in Mandarin, contained provisions requiring
the scientist to hire certain individuals, set targets for the number of
publications and patents stemming from the research, and even described
what topics should be pursued.
That agreement was news to NSF, she said, and represented deviations
from accepted research practices that invalidated the terms of a grant
that NSF had given the researcher. Lerner said the example demonstrated
the need for university officials to track down and read such contracts
signed by faculty members to ensure they don’t violate university or
federal policies regarding conflicts of time commitments and ethical
behavior.
But roundtable member Edward Bruce Held, a retired CIA agent and
former head of DOE’s nuclear weapons labs, had a more basic question
that went unanswered: “Is there any reason to believe that this contract
is the norm?... I understand that such language is unacceptable, but
does the [Chinese government] do this for a lot of people, or a just a
few?”
The lack of baseline data also makes it hard for scientists to know
whether recent steps taken to address the issue—such as having funding
agencies clarify disclosure rules for scientists and universities and
spend more time vetting international collaborations—are paying off,
says Zuber, a planetary scientist and co-chair of the President’s
Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. “Federal agencies and
universities have been raising their game, but are we seeing any
benefit?” Zuber asked. “If we want our faculty to do extra things and
it’s not helping, then we have some serious explaining to do to our
colleagues.”
Zuber noted that panel members understood that the investigators were
“constrained” in how much information that they could release. “But
we’re not going away,” she said. “We’ll keep asking these questions.”
