Cloture Motion

Floor Speech

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Mr. PORTMAN. Mr. President, I would like to talk about a couple of topics.

First, I thank my colleagues on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee for very recently approving legislation to rename the NASA Plum Brook Station in Sandusky, OH, after Ohio's own and a true American hero--the late Neil Armstrong. I now, of course, urge that this legislation be taken up by the full Senate and that we get it passed. There is an identical bill in the House. We hope to join both bills so that it may be sent to the President for his signature very soon.

The NASA Plum Brook Station is a state-of-the-art testing facility. It is near Sandusky, OH, and is a terrific facility that is doing a lot of the testing right now for both NASA and some private sector companies. It is part of the NASA Glenn complex that is headquartered in Cleveland, OH.

It is an impressive operation for a lot of reasons, but the one that is most exciting right now is their work on the Artemis Project. This is, of course, NASA's plan to put astronauts back on the Moon by 2024, including having the first woman go to the Moon. This mission will also lay the groundwork for future expeditions to the next great leap in spaceflight--that, of course, being a manned mission to Mars. It is exciting stuff.

At Plum Brook, they are already testing critical components of the rocket engines that are scheduled to carry Artemis astronauts into space starting next year. Very soon, they are going to be testing the spacecraft itself. We hope it will arrive at Plum Brook within the next few weeks where it will undergo about 4 months of testing.

This past summer, I and my colleague, Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, introduced this legislation to rename the facility after Neil Armstrong, and we did so on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, from which, of course, Neil Armstrong became world famous for being the first person to walk on the surface of the Moon.

Ultimately, Neil Armstrong was a test pilot. We think of him as an astronaut. Some know that he was also a fighter pilot and that he was a veteran of the Korean conflict. He was just an amazing individual-- humble, smart. He was a very patriotic individual. How appropriate and perfect that as a test pilot, which he was during his whole post- fighter pilot career until his time as an astronaut, Plum Brook be named after him.

By the way, Neil's family agrees with that, as does NASA, and as do others we have talked to. So we are hoping that this will be a fitting way to honor a man who, for all of his accomplishments, saw himself, first and foremost, as a patriot who pushed the boundaries of flight. Therefore, the test facility is very dear to them.

I talked to him about this test facility. After one of my visits there, I went to see him at his home and told him about the progress they were making. At that time, they were trying to revamp some of the facilities there. He was really excited about it. He was a very modest man and did not want things named after him. He viewed his service to his country as the reward. That is all he ever wanted in life. That makes it all the more fitting that we, in fact, do name this after him. It is a great model for young people and, certainly, for those who are interested in avionics and spacecraft and in being astronauts. His example is one we should all look up to.

When this comes to the Senate floor for a vote, I hope all of my colleagues will support it, and I hope that it will happen very soon. Thousand Talents Plan

Mr. President, there was a very troubling report that was issued this week by the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. This is a tough subject. In this report, it details for the very first time how taxpayers' dollars have been used, really, over the past 20 years to fund scientific research that has then been misappropriated by one of our global competitors--China--to fuel its own economy and its own military growth.

What do I mean by that? What happened?

Every year, Federal grant-making agencies, like the National Institutes of Health--the NIH--or the Department of Energy's National Labs or the National Science Foundation, give out taxpayers' dollars for research--actually, about $150 billion a year.

This is a good thing for us as a country. It leads to new breakthroughs in science and technology, healthcare, weapons systems, and so on. Through research grants, this money goes primarily to universities and to other research institutions across the United States. This investment has been very helpful in making the United States the world leader in scientific innovation. Again, it has resulted in some amazing breakthroughs.

Our U.S. research is built on some principles here in this country. One is transparency. Another is collaboration. Others are integrity, peer review, and a merit-based system. In fact, the open and collaborative nature of the research that is done here in the United States is one of the reasons we attract some of the best and brightest scientists and researchers from all around the world. That is a good thing. Yet, without proper protections, this research is vulnerable to theft by other countries, and that is exactly what has happened.

The Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which I chair, along with Ranking Member Tom Carper, conducted an 8-month investigation into how American taxpayer-funded research has been taken by China-- effectively stolen--to assist its own economy and its own military. China has been very open about its goals to surpass the United States as the world leader in science and technology by the middle of this century.

An important part of this effort is what China calls its talent recruitment programs. Through talent recruitment programs, China has strategically and systematically acquired knowledge and intellectual property from researchers and scientists in the United States in both the public and private sectors.

In the course of our investigation, the FBI shared with us that China plans to spend more than $2 trillion between 2008 and 2020 toward improving its human capital, which includes recruiting and developing researchers and scientists.

The Thousand Talents Plan, which was the focus of our investigation, is now in its 11th year of operation, and it is probably China's most prominent talent recruitment program. However, there are about 200 or more other talent recruitment programs as well.

Launched in 2008, China designed the Thousand Talents Plan to recruit 2,000 high-quality, overseas experts and to get their knowledge and their expertise and their research. By 2017, China had exceeded that initial goal by recruiting more than 7,000 of what they call ``high-end professionals,'' including many from American research institutions.

Some of the U.S.-based researchers, of course, also receive taxpayer- funded Federal grant money we talked about earlier to do the same research right here in the United States. In exchange for spending part of every year working in Chinese institutions, the Thousand Talents Plan recruits are rewarded with generous salaries and research budgets, sometimes even exceeding their pay at the American research institutions where, in practice, they are working. These researchers also often get access to what is called a shadow lab in science. In other words, they provide them not just with funding, but they also say: We will provide you lab space in China.

At our hearing yesterday, the Department of Energy witness testified that China offered some of his researchers hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars to join a talent recruitment program.

For a researcher here, the Thousand Talents Plan might seem like a good opportunity, but it certainly is not a good opportunity for the United States, especially because embedded in the language of some of these contracts these researchers sign are very troubling provisions that prevent these recruits from disclosing their participation in the Thousand Talents Plan even though disclosing foreign payments is required by U.S. regulations. Not only is this dishonest, but it is also a clear violation of the American regulations that require researchers who apply for these grants we are talking about--this $150 billion of taxpayer money--to disclose any funding they are receiving from a foreign source. In effect, what is happening with the Thousand Talents Plan is that it is incentivizing these program members to lie on grant applications to U.S. grant-funding agencies to avoid disclosing their funding from Chinese institutions.

What is worse, in many of these contracts, researchers are often required to transfer to China the technological breakthroughs--the research--that are being developed in American labs with American grant money. There are a lot of examples we found in our 8-month study. Let me talk about a couple quickly.

In one, we learned that a Thousand Talents Plan recruit at the Department of Energy's National Labs used the intellectual property created during his work in a National Lab to file for a U.S. patent under the name of a Chinese company, effectively stealing the federally funded research and claiming it for China.

Another Thousand Talents Plan member illegally downloaded more than 30,000 files from a National Lab--this is connected with Department of Energy funding--without authorization right before returning to China.

Once China has it, some of this research could be used to threaten the national security of the United States. As an example, the State Department witness testified at our hearing yesterday that ``the Chinese Communist Party has declared the Chinese university system to be on the front line of military-civilian fusion efforts for technological acquisition for weapons research and the expansion of key scientific and engineering talent to drive Chinese innovation.'' That is pretty obvious. That is what all of our witnesses, in essence, said.

This is not a new problem. We found out through our investigation that the Federal Government should have known about this issue for almost two decades but has yet to do anything substantial to stop it. It is unacceptable that we have allowed this to go on as long as we have.

These talent programs are a win-win for China and a lose-lose for the United States. First, the Chinese Government and their research entities are getting research that is paid for by us. Second, it is not used by us. That research is used in China to improve their own economic and military status.

So why is it taking so long for us to do anything about this problem? I think there are a couple of reasons.

First, a lot of the U.S. research community didn't fully understand the Thousand Talents Plan and the threat it poses. Even though this one program is more than a decade old at this point, it wasn't until last year that the FBI began organizing a unified Federal response to the threat it has been posing to our universities and research institutions. We have been slow to focus on this issue, and therefore it has continued.

I appreciated the FBI's candor at the hearing yesterday, by the way, when the FBI Assistant Director testified that he wished the FBI had ``taken more rapid and comprehensive action in the past.'' I do too.

Second, I think one reason this hasn't been stopped is that the coordination between the grant-making agencies is almost as bad as the coordination with the Federal law enforcement folks, meaning that they aren't talking to each other about problems they have had, about particular instances regarding some of the research that has been taken.

As I said, we are talking about more than $150 billion of taxpayer money every year that goes to these agencies, but once these funds are in the agencies' hands, we found no evidence of a unified and coordinated tracking and monitoring process to ensure that the money did not go toward the Thousand Talents Plan participants or other programs. The National Science Foundation, for instance, doesn't seem to have anyone who handles grant oversight in this regard. These research entities need to share information on these issues.

But other organizations are at fault too. We found that the State Department is on the frontlines due to its responsibilities to vet visa applications for visiting students and scholars, but it very rarely denies visas under that process.

Quite frankly, the research community here in the United States bears some responsibility too. There has been a collective failure by our universities and our research institutions to vet researchers for these conflicts of interest with other countries. Again, this is made worse by the fact that many of these researchers are receiving taxpayer funds to conduct their research here.

It is going to take a comprehensive strategy across the Federal Government to better protect our research against this threat. Our report makes a number of recommendations that, combined, will go a long way toward strengthening the security of our research networks, while preserving the shared culture of transparency and fairness.

Of course we want to continue to be the top place in the world for research, and that means that we have to be able to share and have transparency and openness, but it also means that we need to do a much better job of protecting this information from being misused.

We, of course, need to do better at getting the word out to universities, research institutions, and the general public about this threat being posed by the Thousand Talents Plan and other foreign talent recruitment plans. This means better coordination between law enforcement, the intelligence community, and grant-making agencies so that the government is on the same page on this threat.

We also need to change the research culture to preserve its openness and innovative spirit while making sure foreign researchers are properly vetted by the sponsoring organizations.

NIH, NSF, and other grant-making institutions need to standardize how they find conflicts of interest in grant applications. They don't do that now.

Members of the research community need to develop best practices for American researchers to follow so that they can determine whether receiving funds from a foreign country would compromise our principles of research integrity and threaten our national security.

Finally, we need to help the State Department do a better job in its visa vetting process for foreign researchers. We need to do a better job of determining potential conflicts of interest before individuals who may not have the best interests of the United States at heart start working at our research institutions and using our taxpayer dollars.

In the coming months, I will introduce bipartisan legislation that will help address some of these challenges. I look forward to working with Senator Carper, the ranking member on the subcommittee, and other colleagues to get those initiatives to the President's desk.

Let me conclude by saying that we don't want to exclude China from contributing to scientific innovation--not at all. Advancements in the fields of robotics, medicine, energy, weapons systems, and more are things that are very important, and many of these can benefit the entire globe. But we want to have fair and transparent processes in place as we conduct this research, and our taxpayers don't want to be the ones to pick up the tab as China misappropriates our research to build up its own economy and a military designed to rival ours.

My hope is that this report is the start of a productive dialogue with China and here in Congress on how we can better build a more secure research system that continues to reward those who come to our shores to discover new breakthroughs in science, while keeping China and other nation state competitors from taking that research for their own purposes.

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